It’s Sunday. Before the deluge of the coming week, ask a quiet, honest question: with last week’s packed calendar, overflowing inbox, and relentless pings: were you busy, or were you effective?

The two are not the same.

A perspective forged through years of building and fixing systems suggests many organizations (despite good intentions) optimize for Productivity Theater. It is the performance of work: the late-night email flurry that moves no decision; the back-to-back meetings with no owner, agenda, or outcome; the meticulous reports that no one reads or uses. The optics are strong. The impact is thin.

This isn’t a personal failing; it’s a systemic one. When success is measured by inputs (hours, tickets, meetings) instead of outcomes (decisions made, risks retired, revenue protected, cost avoided), rational people optimize for activity. The bill comes due as burnout and the quiet erosion of the very work that creates value: deep thinking, deliberate prioritization, and connecting disparate ideas into clear action.

What Productivity Theater Looks Like

You can hear it in the last-minute hustle that generates updates but not movement. You can see it in standing meetings without decision rights or artifacts. You can feel it in the ritual reporting that tracks activity rather than change and in the tool thrash that masquerades as “alignment.” If you felt busy yet somehow behind, you likely spent time both in the audience and on the stage.

Why We Perform It

Incentives shape behavior: what gets celebrated gets repeated. When speed of response beats quality of result, speed wins. Ambiguity compounds the problem; unclear outcomes drive people to check the boxes they can control. And visibility feels safer than quiet, thoughtful work that others may not understand, so we reach for motion instead of impact.

Escaping the trap requires shifting from inputs to outputs, and designing a personal workflow that makes impact visible.

A Better Operating Model

Trade to-do lists for impact statements. Instead of “submit the report,” write “enable leadership to decide on Project X with confidence.” A task is activity; an outcome is change.

Conduct a weekly process audit. Ask, “If I stopped doing this, would anyone with the power to fire me notice a negative result?” If the answer is no, pause it for a week and observe what happens.

Schedule thinking time as a deliverable. Put 2 to 3 blocks on your calendar and label them with the problem they serve (“synthesize Q3 pipeline risks into three decisions”). Protect them like client meetings.

Default to asynchronous first. Replace status meetings with a concise, one-page update that ends in an explicit question or decision request. Invite comments; meet only if needed.

Own every meeting you keep. Include an owner, an agenda, and a decision to be made. End with a short artifact that records the decision, owner, and date.

Keep an impact log. At day’s end, capture the two or three outcomes you moved forward, not the tasks you completed. Review on Friday to harvest wins and gaps.

A Week to Try

Monday: spend fifteen minutes writing two impact statements for the week. If those two outcomes happen, the week is a success. Identify one meeting to cancel, compress, or convert to async and send the note. Block one ninety-minute thinking session before noon midweek.

Midweek: publish a one-page decision memo. Offer just enough context to explain what changed, list the viable options with trade-offs, recommend one choice with rationale and risks, and end with the precise decision needed and by when.

Friday: run a ten-minute impact review. Note the outcomes achieved and the decisions moved. Call out any recurring activity that changed nothing and add it to next week’s audit. Convert one lesson learned into a small checklist or snippet you can reuse.

Signs You’re Escaping the Theater

Meetings get fewer and shorter while artifacts get clearer. Decisions are documented rather than rediscovered. You can answer “what changed this week?” in two sentences. Your calendar shows large blocks named after problems, not only thirty-minute shards.

If You Lead

Define “done” in outcomes: write one-sentence change statements such as “by October 31, onboarding time drops from twelve days to four.” Shift recognition from heroics to design by celebrating prevented incidents, simplified processes, and deleted work. Publish lightweight decision logs so teams stop re-litigating past choices. Limit work in progress so fewer streams move faster.

None of this is loud. That’s the point. The work that moves the needle is usually quiet: careful prioritization, courageous deletion of the non-essential, and sustained attention on the few problems that matter.

Let this week be about quiet impact, not loud activity.

For more discussion on strategic productivity, please connect with me on LinkedIn.