The ache starts in the right wrist first. A low, dull throb that radiates up the forearm, a physical receipt for a day spent not moving. It’s the kind of soreness that doesn’t come from building something, but from documenting something. From translating a spoken conversation into a written one, then translating that written one into a bulleted summary for people who will never read it.

My screen is still glowing. Nine application windows are open, each one a testament to a fractured day. Slack. Email. Zoom. Asana. Google Docs. Each one is a stage, and I’ve been performing on all of them since 8:59 AM. The performance is called “Work.” The applause is a thumbs-up emoji. The currency is visibility. The product, however, is vapor.

Making More Smoke, Not Preventing Fires

I used to be a zealot for this stuff. Seriously. I was the guy who argued that a meeting wasn’t real until the minutes were circulated. I championed the mandatory “key takeaways” summary in every project channel. I believed, with the earnestness of a fresh convert, that over-communication was the only antidote to misalignment. If we just talked about everything, constantly, how could we possibly fail? It took me years to realize I wasn’t preventing fires; I was just making more smoke. I was so focused on documenting the location of the fire that I never picked up the hose.

My friend Reese V. is an online reputation manager. Her entire career is built on perception, which makes her the unwitting master of this particular theater. We were talking last week, her voice a flat line over the phone. She’d spent her entire day in what she called the “echo chamber cascade.” It started with a two-hour “alignment call” with a new client. Then came the one-hour internal debrief to discuss the alignment call. This was followed by her spending ninety minutes writing a detailed summary of the debrief, which was itself a summary of the first call. That summary was then posted to a Slack channel of 19 people, sparking a flurry of comments and questions that took another hour to manage. At 6 PM, her manager messaged her: “Great work today. You really own this.”

Own what? She hadn’t written a press release, she hadn’t pitched a journalist, she hadn’t optimized a single search result. She had produced a document about a conversation about a meeting. Her day was a carbon copy of a carbon copy. She did nothing, and she was exhausted from it.

The Hall of Mirrors

We are living in a hall of mirrors, mistaking the reflection of work for the work itself.

It’s strange how the body keeps score. I went to the mailbox today. I found myself counting the steps from my desk to the street. Forty-nine. I didn’t do it on purpose, it was just this subconscious need to measure something finite. A task with a clear beginning, a middle, and an end. I opened the little metal door, took out the envelopes, closed it. Done. The finality was so satisfying it was almost comical. When was the last time a task at work felt like that? So much of my paid time is spent in a state of perpetual continuation, a long, run-on sentence that never finds its period.

Reese told me about a client crisis that perfectly illustrates this. A Brazilian tech company she represents had posted a promotional video. It was a good video, but the English subtitles were a disaster. A key phrase was mistranslated into something unintentionally offensive. The internet, being the internet, noticed immediately. The company’s internal response was a textbook example of productivity theater. They convened an emergency committee. They had 9 meetings over two days. Memos were written. Threat-level assessments were color-coded. A 29-page post-mortem document was commissioned before the crisis was even over. Meanwhile, the video was still up, racking up views and vitriolic comments.

Reese just watched the chaos, dumbfounded. The entire company was paralyzed, spending all its energy *discussing* the problem instead of solving it. The client’s marketing lead in São Paulo was frantic, telling Reese they were struggling with their local team’s ability to quickly address the English-speaking audience. He told her they just needed a tool to gerar legenda em video so his own team could correct the file themselves, bypassing the committee entirely. The whole firestorm, which cost them an estimated $99,000 in negative brand association, was about a single sentence. A sentence that was debated by 39 people but corrected by one person who finally decided to stop talking and just *do* the thing.

I’ve started to see this pattern everywhere. The belief that process is a substitute for action. We’ve become professional talkers, expert summarizers, and novice doers. We’re so terrified of someone being “out of the loop” that we’ve created a loop of pure information transfer with no output. The work is no longer the task; the work is ensuring everyone knows the task is being discussed.

The shift for me was subtle. It was the growing realization that my best days were the ones with no meetings. The days I could shut down Slack, put on my headphones, and wrestle with a problem for three uninterrupted hours. On those days, I’d end with a tangible result-a finished draft, a working piece of code, a finalized budget. The ache in my wrist was still there, but it felt different. It was the soreness of creation, not curation.

This isn’t an argument for less communication. It’s an argument for better communication. For intentionality. A meeting summary is valuable if it enables someone to make a decision without having been there. It’s worthless if it’s just a performative artifact meant to prove the meeting happened. A Slack channel is a powerful tool for quick collaboration. It’s a soul-draining vortex of distraction when it’s used as a running commentary on everyone’s consciousness.

Rewarding Outcomes, Not Activity

We need to stop rewarding the appearance of work and start rewarding the work itself. We need to measure outcomes, not activity. Who cares if you were in 19 calls this week if the project is still stalled? Who cares if you wrote a beautiful, comprehensive summary of a brainstorm if none of the ideas ever leave the document?

Reese is changing her approach. She now declines any meeting without a clear agenda and a stated outcome. She sends one weekly summary email, not one after every call. She’s automating the grunt work-the transcriptions, the note-taking-so she can focus on the strategic part of her job, the part that a machine can’t do. The part that requires actual thought. Some of her colleagues think she’s disengaged. Her results, however, have never been better.