If you show me a calendar that looks like a game of Tetris played by a color-blind person, I don’t see a high performer. I see a catastrophe. I see someone who has lost control of their time and, more importantly, their ability to produce anything of actual value.
Being “busy” is the ultimate hiding spot. It’s the easiest way to feel like you’re winning while you’re actually just spinning your wheels in the mud. We’ve turned responsiveness into a personality trait, and it’s killing our careers. If you’re answering every Slack message in thirty seconds, you aren’t a team player; you’re a distraction-addict who can’t handle the silence of real thought.
The Tuesday I realized I was a fraud
Back in 2018, I was working as a project coordinator for a small logistics firm in Chicago. My desk was a mess of Post-it notes, I had three monitors going, and I felt like a god. I was the person everyone came to. I was “in the loop.” I remember sitting in my car at 6:00 PM on a rainy Tuesday, staring at the steering wheel, and realizing I couldn’t name a single thing I had actually built or solved that day. I had sent 142 emails. I had attended four meetings that could have been a single bullet point. I had managed to be busy for ten hours without doing a single minute of real work.
It was embarrassing. I felt like a hollow shell of a professional. I was essentially a human router, just moving information from one place to another without adding any value. Busyness is like a weighted blanket for a mediocre career; it makes you feel safe while you’re doing nothing.
Anyway, I quit that job six months later because I couldn’t stand the person I was becoming. But I digress. The point is, shallow work—those low-value, logistical tasks that keep you busy but don’t move the needle—is a trap we set for ourselves because deep work is actually hard and lonely.
Why I think the “4-hour rule” is total nonsense
I know people will disagree with me here, and Cal Newport is obviously a genius, but I think the idea that most people can do four hours of deep work a day is a flat-out lie. I’ve tried. I’ve tracked it using a physical stopwatch on my desk for three months straight. My average “actual” deep work time? 52 minutes. On a great day? Maybe 90 minutes.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. We lie to ourselves about how much we can actually focus. Most people who claim they do four hours of deep work are actually just doing two hours of work and two hours of “thinking about work” while staring at a Google Doc. Real deep work—the kind that makes your brain feel hot and tired—is exhausting. If you can do one solid hour of it, you’ve already won the day. Most people do zero.
Shallow work is what keeps you employed. Deep work is what gets you promoted.
The Slack-shaped hole in your productivity
I’m going to say something that would probably get me fired from a lot of tech companies: I think Slack is a net negative for the human race. I specifically hate the “Huddle” feature. It is the digital equivalent of someone poking you in the ribs while you’re trying to read.
I refuse to use Notion for the same reason. People spend more time making their Notion pages look pretty with icons and headers than they do actually working. It’s glorified scrapbooking for adults who are afraid of a blank white page. I know everyone loves it, but I find it bloated and performative. There, I said it. Give me a plain text file any day.
A Slack notification is a digital pebble thrown at your window. If you let people throw pebbles at your window all day, you’ll never get any sleep. And you’ll certainly never write anything worth reading or code anything worth shipping.
Total cowardice.
The actual math of a focused hour
I ran a little experiment last year. I tracked my “Time to First Distraction” (TFD) for 14 work days. I used a simple spreadsheet to log every time I checked my phone or opened a tab that wasn’t related to the task at hand.
- Average TFD: 11 minutes.
- Longest streak: 34 minutes (I had to turn my router off to achieve this).
- Shortest streak: 2 minutes (someone sent a meme of a cat).
When you look at the data, it’s horrifying. If you’re switching tasks every 11 minutes, you are never actually entering a flow state. You’re just living in the shallows. You’re basically a professional goldfish. We think we’re multitasking, but we’re really just suffering from continuous partial attention. It’s a career-killer because it prevents you from ever becoming truly “rare and valuable,” which is the only real job security that exists anymore.
I’ve bought the same $120 mechanical keyboard four times because the tactile click helps me stay in the zone. I don’t care if something better exists; that specific sound is the only thing that keeps me from clicking over to Twitter when a sentence gets hard to write.
Stop being so accessible
The most successful people I know are actually quite annoying to work with. They don’t answer emails quickly. They decline meetings without a “valid” excuse. They are often “offline” during the middle of the day. At first, I thought they were just arrogant. Now I realize they’re just protective.
If you are accessible to everyone, you are useful to no one. You become a commodity. And commodities are easily replaced. If your job is just to be a fast responder, a script can do your job better than you can. You have to carve out space where you are unreachable.
I still struggle with this every single day. Yesterday, I spent forty-five minutes looking for a specific font for a project that nobody is even going to see until next month. I was being “busy” because the actual task—writing a difficult proposal—felt too heavy. I’m not perfect at this. I’m just tired of pretending that being overwhelmed is a badge of honor.
Do you actually have too much work, or are you just afraid of what happens when you turn off the noise and have to actually think?
Stop checking your email. Close the tab.