The Art of Looking Busy While Doing Absolutely Nothing

There’s a particular kind of workplace fatigue that doesn’t come from doing too much work. It comes from watching someone else do none, and then having to explain to yourself why you’re still annoyed about it.

Someone posted about this recently online and it hit a nerve, judging by the response. The scenario will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an office for more than about six months. A colleague who is perpetually, visibly, performatively slammed. Every question requires a meeting. Every meeting gets rescheduled. Every rescheduled meeting becomes a 45-minute tour through unrelated anecdotes before the original question gets quietly abandoned. And yet somehow this person radiates the energy of someone holding the whole operation together by sheer force of personal sacrifice.

It’s a masterclass, honestly. I say that without admiration, but I can’t pretend it isn’t impressive in its own way.

I’ve worked with a version of this person. I suspect most people have. In my case it was someone who had elevated calendar blocking into an art form. Every request got triaged into “let’s find time to discuss,” which then required chasing, which then required a follow-up meeting to recap the first meeting that hadn’t happened yet. Meanwhile the actual deliverable sat quietly decomposing. The trick, I eventually realised, was that the process was the product. The appearance of engaged busyness was the whole contribution.

A lot of the responses to that post took the view that you can’t really blame the person. That working your wage, doing the minimum, refusing to overextend yourself in a system that won’t reward you for it anyway, is a rational response to a fundamentally irrational environment. And I get that. I genuinely do. Workplaces do punish loyalty and reward performance theatre, often at the same time. If the game is broken, optimising for optics over output starts to look less like laziness and more like adaptation.

But there’s a version of that argument that stops being reasonable and starts being convenient. Because the cost of this particular adaptation doesn’t fall on the organisation in the abstract. It falls on the specific people sitting next to you. The ones who now have to coordinate the meeting you insisted on, chase the confirmation you ignored, and then pick up the work you quietly sidestepped. The solidarity angle falls apart when the only person actually working their wage is the one left holding the slack.

What really gets under my skin, and this is the bit the online discussion kept circling back to, is the confidence of it. The total absence of embarrassment. The meetings that generate more meetings. The Bluetooth earpiece guy someone described, wandering the office in 2013 tech, camera off in every call, producing nothing and somehow impeding everyone else. The person who nitpicks other people’s work in a shared Teams channel so the manager sees it, apparently unaware that the manager thinks they’re being completely ridiculous too.

There’s a management failure buried in all of this. These people don’t survive in a vacuum. They survive because the systems that are supposed to surface performance are the same systems they’ve learned to game. Measuring activity instead of output. Valuing visibility over substance. Treating a full calendar as evidence of importance.

I don’t have a clean answer to it. I’ve watched good managers try to address it and get worn down. I’ve watched mediocre managers actively reward it because it makes the team look productive on a dashboard somewhere. Sometimes escalating does nothing except confirm that the problem goes higher up than you thought.

What I do know is that the most useful advice from that thread was also the most boring: email, explicit, everyone CC’d, paper trail intact. Not glamorous. Not satisfying. But it at least makes the dynamic visible in a way that’s hard to retroactively blur. If the meeting culture is the weapon, don’t play in the meeting culture.

The rest of it I’m still working out. The tension between “this person has figured out how to survive a broken system” and “this person is making my Tuesday genuinely worse” doesn’t resolve neatly. Both things are true. It’s exhausting on both counts.