Being busy isn’t the same as being valuable.
For years, corporate culture has rewarded a peculiar kind of success: looking busy. Workers learned to turn productivity into performance — replying first on Slack, sending lengthy weekly recap emails, and filling calendars with color-coded meetings that made activity impossible to miss.
But there’s a problem: looking productive and creating value are not the same thing.
Leaders treated sheer volume as a proxy for value. For awhile, it worked. In fact, just three years ago, Slack’s 2023 State of Work report reported that 27 percent of executives traditionally rely on visibility and activity metrics to measure an employee’s productivity.
Generative AI has already blown up that model.
When software can instantly read a 40-message thread,
When software can instantly read a 40-message thread, summarize it, and draft a polite, corporate-approved reply in three seconds, being “visibly busy” is no longer a flex. More often, it’s now a bright red flag that you are spending your days doing automatable work.
Refreshed leadership advice from CEO Stephanie Mehta
If your core assets as an employee include “fast response times” and “calendar management,” you can assume that an algorithm is already interviewing for your job.
These skills are table stakes. The executives who survive the next wave of corporate restructuring will be the ones who are completely invisible in the Slack channel, but undeniably tied to the P&L.
Here is how to strip away the illusion of activity and shift your professional metric from task volume to actual impact.
Source: www.inc.com
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