Explained: The rise of fake productivity at work; how employees are ‘task-masking' to look busy

Time of India

15 hours ago

If your calendar looks like a Mumbai local at rush hour and Teams pings like a Diwali bazaar, you're not alone; that bustle may not be real productivity. But it may not be real productivity.
A new workplace habit is spreading: Fake productivity, the theatre of looking busy while sidestepping high-impact work. One recent clue: A Workhuman poll found more than a third of UK employees (36%) admit to 'pretend productivity', driven by pressure to appear constantly active and to protect work–life balance. In parallel, leaders are wrestling with 'productivity paranoia': Microsoft's Work Trend Index reports 85% of managers say hybrid work makes it hard to trust productivity, even as employees themselves report feeling productive—an optics paradox tailor-made for performative busyness.
The conditions are ideal for what social and workplace commentators now call task-masking—performative micro-tasks (reply-all, calendar clutter, meeting hopscotch) that signal effort without moving outcomes. Media analyses link the behaviour to return-to-office pressures and the surveillance vibe of 'bossware,' which nudge people to show activity over achievement. Meanwhile, collaboration load has ballooned: Microsoft shows people attend roughly three times more Teams meetings than in February 2020, while investigative summaries of Atlassian's
State of Teams
suggest tens of billions of work hours are lost yearly to pings, low-value meetings and duplicated effort.
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Add the cognitive drain of video calls—Stanford's validated Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue scale has tied specific design factors (mirror anxiety, close-up eye contact) to depleted energy—and you get a recipe for surface-level work that 'looks' productive but isn't.
This is not simply a moral failing; it is a systems problem. Always-on messaging fuels telepressure—the compulsive urge to respond—which research in the
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology
connects to poorer sleep, higher burnout and worse work–life balance.
People learn to survive the signal-choked day by doing visible tasks that keep the Slack dot green.
The result: energy burns on the appearance of work, outcomes lag, and trust erodes. Understanding why task-masking thrives—and how to replace it with outcome-first habits—is now a core career skill.
What exactly is 'task-masking' (and how is it different from simple busyness)?
Task-masking is performative busyness: Behaviours that
signal
industriousness (typing loudly, darting between meetings, carrying a laptop everywhere) while avoiding deep, outcome-bearing work.
The label has spread through Gen-Z-heavy social feeds and newsrooms. Analysts describe it as a productivity theatre tuned for the open-plan and the activity dashboard.
The underlying prevalence is plausible given Workhuman's finding that 36% of UK workers confess to 'pretend productivity,' often to escape burnout or unrealistic expectations.
The psychology and systems that fuel fake productivity
Fake productivity doesn't emerge in a vacuum—it's shaped by systems that reward responsiveness, visibility and performative hustle.
At the centre is telepressure: the compulsive need to answer messages instantly, regardless of urgency. Multiple studies in occupational psychology link this behaviour to poor sleep, elevated burnout and fractured work–life boundaries. But the pressure isn't confined to pings and emails.
According to Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index, employees now attend nearly three times as many Teams meetings as they did before the pandemic.
That explosion in meeting load may aim to increase coordination, but it comes at the cost of cognitive fragmentation and depleted focus time. The problem is compounded by the medium itself. Stanford's research on Zoom fatigue finds that constant video calls introduce non-verbal stressors—close-up eye contact, mirror anxiety, and reduced mobility—that accelerate exhaustion across the day.
Layered on top is the rise of digital presenteeism—the compulsion to appear online and 'active' even when unwell or mentally drained.
According to the CIPD & Simplyhealth Health and Wellbeing at Work survey (2022), 81% of UK organisations reported presenteeism among remote workers, compared to 65% in physical workplaces. The numbers expose a system where visibility trumps well-being—and where looking busy matters more than being effective.
Together, these factors fuel task-masking: a survival strategy in a workplace architecture built for appearances.
Why Gen Z is over-indexed on task-masking
Gen Z did not invent pretend work, but they are operating in a post-pandemic labour market where visibility is often misread as value. Return-to-office rules, legacy KPIs and leader distrust make 'being seen' a protective strategy. Coverage of task-masking consistently spotlights younger workers navigating visibility politics while fearing job loss or AI displacement.
At the same time, values have shifted: Deloitte's 2025 global survey finds Gen Z prioritises
well-being, balance and learning
; they will comply with optics if outcomes and boundaries are unclear, but they are quick to disengage from rituals that feel meaningless.
Several surveys show that many Gen Z workers resist full-time office returns, increasing the temptation to 'signal' productivity when present rather than to refactor the work itself.
Task-masking and quiet quitting: Cousins, not twins
Quiet quitting is disengagement to the contractual minimum; task-masking is disengagement disguised as hustle. According to Gallup's
State of the Global Workplace 2024
report, only 21% of employees worldwide were actively engaged at work.
The majority were either disengaged or quietly quitting, creating ideal conditions for fake productivity to flourish. In such environments, workers are more likely to adopt surface-level behaviours that signal busyness, such as excessive meetings or constant online presence, rather than contributing to meaningful outcomes. When trust is low and objectives are fuzzy, people hedge: They keep the lights blinking, attend everything, and avoid risk.
In that sense, task-masking can be the
performative arm
of quiet quitting—a way to stay safe while mentally stepping back.
How managers create (or crush)
faux productivity
Leaders can unintentionally train teams to optimise for optics: Obsessing over green dots, input metrics and time online. Microsoft's 2022–2025 data calls this 'productivity paranoia,' visible when managers track activity rather than outcomes and calendars swell to compensate. A related body of research, Atlassian's
State of Teams
report, highlights the enormous time sink caused by pings, meetings, and duplicated effort.
It estimates that billions of work hours are lost annually to ineffective collaboration. The fix is not more dashboards; it is clarity (what is the outcome, who owns it), cadence (fewer, sharper meetings) and evidence (show progress with artefacts, not attendance).
Bottom line
Fake productivity isn't laziness—it's a symptom of misaligned systems. In today's workplace, visibility has become a proxy for value. When calendars are packed and Slack is never silent, activity becomes the performance, not the means to an end.
Employees aren't defying work; they're adapting to cultures where being seen outweighs producing results. Task-masking emerges as the rational response to environments that reward optics over output.
Quiet quitting and fake productivity aren't opposites—they're parallel forms of disengagement. One retreats quietly, the other performs loudly. Both thrive when trust is low, goals are vague, and measurement skews toward motion instead of meaning. In this landscape, the green dot—the little status indicator once meant to show availability—has evolved into a badge of allegiance, a digital placeholder for presence.
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