On Tuesday, October 14th of last year, I sat at my desk for exactly nine hours and forty-two minutes. I know this because I was using one of those depressing time-tracking apps that’s supposed to make you feel ‘optimized.’ By the time I closed my laptop, my eyes were stinging, my neck felt like it was made of rusted gears, and I felt completely drained. But when I looked at my to-do list, the three things that actually mattered—the big proposal, the strategy doc, and the code review—hadn’t been touched. Not a single word written. Not a single line of code reviewed.
Instead, I had ‘cleared’ 114 emails. I had ‘participated’ in six Slack threads. I had attended four meetings that could have been summarized in a three-sentence bulleted list. I was exhausted, but I hadn’t actually done anything. I was just busy.
Being busy is the ultimate hiding place for people who are scared of doing real work. Busy is a shield for the lazy. I know that sounds harsh, and I know people will disagree, but I’ve lived it. It’s much easier to spend your day batting away notifications like a caffeinated kitten than it is to sit down and do the hard, agonizing work of thinking. We’ve turned ‘responsiveness’ into a professional virtue, but all we’re really doing is mortgaging our long-term career growth for the short-term hit of a cleared inbox.
The day I worked ten hours and did nothing
Let’s talk about what actually happened that Tuesday. It wasn’t just a bad day; it was a symptom of a systemic failure in how we define ‘work.’ I used to think that as long as I was sitting in my chair and my screen was on, I was earning my paycheck. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. I thought that activity equaled productivity. It’s a lie we tell ourselves so we don’t have to face the fact that we’re drifting.
I remember sitting in a glass-walled conference room at 2:00 PM that day. The sun was hitting the table at a weird angle, making it hard to see the slides. We were talking about ‘synergizing our cross-departmental communication workflows.’ I looked around the room and realized every single person was on their laptop. We weren’t collaborating. We were just all being ‘busy’ in the same room. We were performing the ritual of work without any of the substance. It felt like theater. Total theater.
Shallow work is like eating a giant bag of gas station popcorn—you’re full, but you’re malnourished. You spend your energy on things that have zero ‘tail’—meaning they provide no value the moment after they are completed. An email is gone the second you send it. A Slack message is buried in ten minutes. But a deep piece of work? That lives on. That builds your reputation. That actually moves the needle on your salary.
The “Responsiveness” trap is killing your salary
Here is my genuinely uncomfortable take: If you are known for being the person who replies to Slack messages in under thirty seconds, you are probably replaceable. You aren’t being paid to be a human router for information; you’re being paid to provide a specific skill or insight that others can’t. If you spend your day routing, you aren’t building the skill.
I’ve started to realize that the people I admire most—the ones making the big moves and getting the promotions that actually matter—are often ‘bad’ at their jobs in the traditional sense. They don’t reply quickly. They miss the ‘optional’ huddles. They are frequently ‘Away’ on Teams. At first, I thought they were just arrogant. Now I realize they’re just protective. They know that shallow work is the single greatest threat to professional growth because it robs you of the time required to become an expert.
Deep work is a bit like skin diving; you have to commit to the pressure or you’ll never see the reef. If you just splash around on the surface, you’re just getting wet.
I used to think that being ‘available’ made me a team player. I was wrong. I was completely wrong. Being available made me a bottleneck because I never had the uninterrupted time to actually finish the things the team needed from me. I was ‘helpful’ in the micro-sense and a ‘disaster’ in the macro-sense.
I tracked my brain for 21 days and it was embarrassing
I decided to get scientific about my own failure. For three weeks (21 working days), I kept a physical tally counter on my desk. Every time I switched tasks—from a document to an email, from a spreadsheet to a Slack ping, even just ‘checking’ my phone—I clicked the counter.
- Average clicks per hour: 14.
- Highest clicks in a single hour: 42 (this was during a ‘quiet’ afternoon).
- Total ‘deep’ sessions (over 60 mins of focus): 3. In three weeks.
The math is horrifying. There’s this concept called ‘attention residue.’ When you switch from Task A to Task B, your brain doesn’t just instantly pivot. A part of your processing power is still stuck on Task A. If you’re switching 14 times an hour, you are essentially working with the cognitive capacity of a toddler. I was trying to do high-level strategy with about 20% of my brain available. No wonder the work I produced was mediocre. No wonder I felt like a fraud.
I know some people claim they are ‘natural multitaskers.’ I’ll be blunt: you’re lying to yourself. You aren’t multitasking; you’re just rapidly degrading your ability to think clearly. I refuse to work with anyone who brags about multitasking. It’s like bragging about how well you can drive while wearing a blindfold.
Why I’ve started being “rude” to my coworkers
This is the part where I might lose some of you. To reclaim my time for deep work, I’ve had to start being what most corporate cultures would call ‘rude.’ I’ve stopped apologizing for not being in Slack. I’ve started declining meetings that don’t have a clear agenda or a specific reason for my presence. And I’ve developed a visceral, almost irrational hatred for Microsoft Teams.
I refuse to use Microsoft Teams properly. It is the most bloated, soul-crushing piece of software ever conceived. The notification sound alone triggers a fight-or-flight response in my nervous system. I’ve uninstalled it from my phone, and on my laptop, it stays closed for six hours a day. If something is truly on fire, someone will call my actual phone number. Guess how many times that has happened in the last six months? Twice. Both times, it could have waited until the next day anyway.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that you have to build a moat around your focus. People will try to climb over it. They will throw ‘quick questions’ over the walls like flaming arrows. You have to let them burn. Most ‘urgent’ things are just other people’s poor planning disguised as your emergency. If you don’t value your time, why should they?
It’s not a hack, it’s a habit
I’m not going to give you a ‘comprehensive guide’ because those are usually written by people who don’t actually do the work. I’ll just tell you what’s working for me lately, even though I still screw it up about twice a week. I aim for four hours of deep work a day. Not eight. Eight is impossible. If I get four hours of real, concentrated thought done before 1:00 PM, I’ve won the day. The rest of the afternoon can be for the garbage—the emails, the admin, the ‘synergy’ meetings.
I’ve also started doing this weird thing where I leave my phone in another room. It sounds simple, but the first time I did it, I felt actual physical anxiety. Like I was missing a limb. That’s how deep the ‘shallow’ addiction goes. We are addicted to the pings because they make us feel important. They make us feel like we’re at the center of things. But the center of things is usually a very loud, very empty place.
I’m still not great at this. Yesterday, I spent forty-five minutes looking at vintage watches on eBay when I was supposed to be writing a project post-mortem. I’m human. But the difference is that I now know that those forty-five minutes were a theft. I’m stealing from my future self every time I choose the easy ‘busy’ task over the hard ‘deep’ task.
Is it possible to have a successful career in 2024 without being ‘always on’? I honestly don’t know the answer to that. Maybe the ‘shallow’ people will eventually win by sheer volume of noise. But I’d rather bet on the person who can sit in a room for four hours and solve a problem that nobody else can even define.
Go turn off your notifications. Seriously.