There’s a version of procrastination that looks exactly like discipline, and as much as I don’t want to admit it, I’ve been doing it for months.
Writing the chapter in Luminaries this summer sparked something I wasn’t expecting; it’s made me want to dig even deeper into the wisdom that was left behind. So, like all good planners, I built an outline. I should tell you, I love to plan, to organize, to define structure. I should have been a project manager in another life. I can build the structure of something all day long, feel genuinely productive, and go to bed satisfied that I moved the work forward. So I built the outline, and then I revised it, and then I revised it again, and I am now somewhere around version 387 and I tell myself that every single version is better than the last. Is it, though??
The next step is writing. And that’s the part that scares me. My brain works fast (meaning I can sometimes be a little impulsive) and the writing forces it to slow down, sit with an idea, and say something true about it. The outlining lets me keep moving. The writing would make me stop. So I keep refining.
I’ve started calling this performative productivity. It looks like discipline. It feels like progress. But what it actually is, is protecting me from the thing that actually scares me and requires courage.
What Performative Productivity Costs
I know you’ve felt this. The afternoon where you were genuinely busy and everything you did was “good work” and you still went home knowing you hadn’t done the thing that really mattered. The day where your calendar was full and your output mattered, yet something still felt hollow about it.
The organizational cost is measurable. A 2023 Visier survey found that 43% of employees spend more than 10 hours a week on “productivity theater” — work that looks like output but isn’t moving anything forward. That’s more than a quarter of the workweek, and most organizations are funding it without knowing it.
A leader I work with had been cleaning her office for weeks. She was also spending hours on cleaning emails that were months old. When I was finally able to ask what all the activity was actually protecting her from, the avoidance went three layers deep. The office cleaning was avoidance of the email and the email was avoidance for divorce paperwork she couldn’t face. Each layer felt like productive work. None of it was. Another leader spends hours before every meeting preparing for what her boss might need, without ever having asked him. She calls it being thorough. It is protection from a question she doesn’t have the confidence to ask.
Organizations see the output and reward it. Nobody asks what the productivity is protecting someone from.
What Else Goes Quiet
When you use productive work to avoid the thing that scares you, you don’t get to choose which feelings go quiet. The fear goes quiet, which is the whole point. But so does the excitement, the creativity, and the part of you that actually wants to do the work.
The outlining that protects me from the fear of writing is also keeping me from the energy I need to write. The preparation that protects a leader from a hard question also cuts her off from the clarity she’d gain by asking it. Performative productivity doesn’t just cost you time. It costs you access to the very capacity you need for the work that matters.
That capacity — the drive behind what you produce — and the feeling you’re avoiding are running on the same fuel. In 1948, Air Force leaders wrote: “Psychic energy cannot be abolished. Energy must be explored, converted into action, or remain within an individual until some motive sets it off.” The feeling you avoid doesn’t disappear. It finds the most reasonable-looking activity in your day and moves in, and you stay too busy to notice what you’ve lost.
One Thing to Try This Week
You already know which activity on your calendar is performative productivity. You’ve known for a while. The question you haven’t asked yourself yet is: what would I have to feel if I stopped doing it? If the answer comes immediately, sit with it for sixty seconds before you go back to work.
The most productive thing you did today might be protecting you from the thing you most need to feel.
