Insights
The Productivity Theatre Trap
I used to end every week proud of how much I got done.
Then I started asking a different question: did any of it matter?
Smartsheet just surveyed 500 UK businesses and found the average team loses 10 full work weeks a year to busy work. Not unclear priorities. Not bad strategy. Pure, undiluted busywork that moves nothing forward.
And here’s the part that should terrify you: most of those teams think they’re crushing it.
The Productivity Theatre trap
That’s the Productivity Theatre trap. We confuse output with impact because output is easy to count. Emails sent. Decks delivered. Tasks checked off. Reports filed.
Impact? Impact requires you to stop and ask uncomfortable questions:
- Did this change anyone’s decision?
- Did this move revenue?
- Did this make a customer’s life better?
- Or did it just make me look busy?
ActivTrak’s 2025 State of the Workplace found that after AI adoption, time spent in every single work category increased — email up 104%, chat up 145%. Not one category went down. We gave people jet engines and they’re using them to run the hamster wheel faster.
Meanwhile, focus efficiency hit a three-year low at 60%.
More output
More output. Less depth. Zero additional impact.
AI was supposed to be the great liberator. Instead, most companies are using it to produce more of what nobody needed in the first place.
The organizations getting this right aren’t asking “how do we produce more?” They’re asking “what should we stop producing entirely?”
Output is a vanity metric
Output is a vanity metric. Impact is the only one that pays rent.