The Expiration Date of Effort

I’m watching the Slack channel scroll, the digital equivalent of standing in front of a busted pipe and mistaking the frantic spray for actual flow. Three different conversations about ‘circling back’ on the exact same item. Four people typing simultaneously in a thread that could have been resolved with a single, brutal decision.

We confuse velocity with direction. We equate the heat generated by friction with momentum. And we reward it. God, do we reward it. Look at any middle manager’s schedule. It’s a trophy cabinet of meetings, a testament to how essential they are, how utterly incapable the machine is of running without their presence in twenty-one concurrent virtual rooms.

The Calculus of Survival

I used to be infuriated by it. Now I just feel deeply tired for the people involved. Because the theater isn’t malicious. It’s a survival mechanism. If leadership fails to provide a clear, objective measure of value-a quantifiable result-then the individuals, who still desperately need validation, will invent one. That invented measure is visibility. The proof that you were trying.

If the system doesn’t reward actually moving the massive, heavy stone up the hill, it will reward the person who loudly pushes a small, decorative pebble around the base of the hill for forty-one hours a week. It’s safer, more visible, and less likely to attract the painful scrutiny that failure in a high-stakes, real project inevitably brings.

Hayden’s Perfect Negative Correlation

Consider Hayden M.-C. Hayden is one of our seed analysts-the people who actually stare into the data stream and try to find the earliest signals of adoption and decay. Hayden sees this clearly. He once sent me a chart detailing the correlation between internal meeting hours and successful product feature releases. It was a perfectly flat line. No, wait, that’s not right. It was a slightly negative correlation, with a p-value ending in a 1. Meaning, the more time we spent talking about the project, the less likely it was to succeed. He was looking at 11 separate features that year, and the pattern held true across almost all of them.

Correlation: Meeting Hours vs. Feature Success (Simulated Data Points)

I remember pulling Hayden aside to ask him why, if he saw this correlation so clearly, he still accepted invitations to every single internal sync. Hayden just blinked, adjusted his glasses, and said, “I accept them because declining the invitation requires 51 minutes of justification and negotiation, while accepting only requires 1 click. My time is spent minimizing friction, not maximizing efficiency, sir.”

The Reaffirmation of Effort

I had a moment of profound hypocrisy last quarter. I had been preaching about focusing on outcomes, telling teams to ignore the noise. Then, an external project slipped. It was a crucial component of our strategic partnership, necessary for the next phase of growth at

AlphaCorp AI. The head of that team came to me, exhausted, and instead of asking about the metrics, I asked him, “Did you put in the hours? Did you work through the weekend?” I didn’t care about the result in that moment; I cared about the effort. Because effort justifies delay. Effort cushions failure. I had inadvertently reaffirmed the value system I was trying to dismantle.

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It’s a subtle shift, but it’s critical: we move from valuing the impact to valuing the display of effort. This is often an unspoken defense against poor planning. When the plan is shaky, the execution needs to be theatrically robust to mask the underlying flaws.

How do you break this cycle? You cannot shame people out of Productivity Theater; you have to dismantle the stage. You have to change what earns applause. You have to make the uncomfortable transition from managing activity to managing accountability.

Dismantling the Stage

This means reducing the volume of noise by

71%. It means replacing status meetings with asynchronous updates that require actual, quantifiable progress reports-not bullet points about what they are going to do next, but concrete data on what was achieved since the last update. If the update doesn’t contain a number ending in 1-the completion of Task 1, the delivery of 1 component, the reduction of complexity by 1 point-then the update is just stage smoke.

We need to stop praising the person who sends 101 emails a day and start praising the person who quietly ships the feature that generates $1,001,001 in revenue. The irony is that the true producers often look the least busy. They have fewer meetings because they are filtering inputs and optimizing attention.

Defining Success Clearly

We need to define success so clearly that performance is rendered unnecessary. If the mountain top is visible, and the path is clear, people will walk the path. If the mountain top is obscured by fog and the paths are guarded by bureaucratic dragons, they will stand still and wave their arms frantically, ensuring everyone sees how hard they are fighting the fog.

If the answer is ‘none,’ then you are paying your team to perform, not to produce. And performing takes energy. It drains the focus they need to actually solve the problem. It is the most expensive type of zero-sum game.