The Performance of Productivity

Knowledge work is full of tools meticulously designed to make us more “productive,” yet the ability to sink into deep, uninterrupted work has become a rare luxury. The enemy isn’t the work, it’s the manufactured hum of digital chatter that surrounds it.

Pings. Banners. Little red dots. These are not calls to urgent action. They’re distractions engineered to exploit a primal Fear of Missing Out: the nagging anxiety that we might miss a career-defining moment that almost never arrives. Most of the time, it’s not a fire - it’s theater. Occupational noise dressed up as urgency. My only defense has been ruthless: almost everything is switched off.

The casualty of this constant, performative busyness is deep work itself. We’re losing the ability to hold a single, complex thought in our minds without it being shattered by a dozen trivial interruptions. Flow, the state where we create our best work, requires sustained attention. But we’ve been sold a suite of tools that claim to connect us, while in practice, they keep us anxious, distracted, and shallow.

The cruel irony? The highest-value work we do is the thing our tools are designed to prevent.