We've all seen it. The colleague who sends emails at 11pm. The team member who floods the Slack channel with updates. The sales rep who logs 100 calls a day but never closes a deal.
It has a name: productivity theater. And it's getting worse.
As layoffs have become routine, AI anxiety has crept into nearly every industry, and workplace surveillance tools have grown more sophisticated, more workers are doubling down on appearing productive rather than actually being productive. The pressure to prove your worth — visibly, measurably, constantly — is reshaping how people work. Not always for the better.
The Parking Lot Problem
The impulse isn't new. Managers have always rewarded visible effort over actual outcomes — the boss who scans the parking lot at 6pm to see whose cars are still there, silently noting who's "dedicated." The metric is easy. It's just wrong.
Today's version looks different but works the same way. It's the timestamp on your morning email. The number of meetings you attend. The sheer volume of outreach your automation tool can fire off in minutes.
The form changes. The dysfunction doesn't.
Speed Isn't Strategy
In sales, especially, automation has made it dangerously easy to confuse volume with value. Tools can blast thousands of emails in minutes, stuff CRMs with activity, and make dashboards look incredible. And yet — are those messages actually landing? Are they reaching the right people? Are they starting real conversations?
Often, no. High-volum,e busy work can dupe managers in the short term, but the results tell a different story. The numbers never come.
The deeper problem is that focusing on activity metrics — dials made, emails sent, hours logged — pulls attention away from the questions that actually drive results: Who's the real decision-maker here? What problem are they trying to solve? How does our product fit?
From Activity to Outcomes
The fix isn't to work less. It's to work toward different goals.
There's a meaningful difference between "send 1,000 emails to this demographic" and "generate three new customers through this campaign." Both involve effort. Only one keeps you honest about whether that effort is working.
Shifting to an outcome mindset is harder than it sounds. Activity feels productive. Checking boxes feels good. But those feelings can mask the fact that nothing meaningful is moving forward.
The Human Cost
Behind all of this is a genuinely exhausted workforce. Years of rolling layoffs, an unpredictable job market, and the looming question of AI have left many workers in a state of low-grade anxiety — logging on when they're sick, padding their hours, performing productivity as a kind of job security insurance.
It's understandable. It's also unsustainable.
The workers and managers navigating this well seem to share one thing in common: a commitment to measuring what matters, not just what's easy to count. That means resisting the pull of vanity metrics and asking harder questions about whether the work being done is actually moving the needle.
Because at the end of the day, leaving your car in the parking lot never closed a deal.