AI is here—can we finally rethink our tired beliefs about work?

Fast Company

28-05-2025

For decades, we've been caught in the busyness trap, confusing being overscheduled and highly in demand with creating value.
A recent report by technology company Visier coined the term ' productivity theater' to describe the performative tasks that employees engage in to look busy. They report that 43% of workers spend over 10 hours a week trying to look productive rather than engaging in value-creating work.
This isn't occurring because employees are lazy or trying to cheat the system. They are acting rationally in response to the signals that are all around them. They see colleagues proudly wearing their busyness badge of honor. They receive emails at all hours of the day and night, contributing to a sense of needing to be 'always on.' They get a text five minutes after someone sends an email asking, 'Did you get my email?' They hear co-workers boasting that 'multitasking is a survival strategy' for keeping up with their work.
It is utter madness.
Meanwhile, AI tools are rapidly taking on the administrative tasks—drafting and filtering email, quickly summarizing lengthy or complex reports, sending meeting recaps, scheduling—that easily consume hours a week. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's quickly to come. Unfortunately, the temptation will be to fill this growing blank space with more noise.
What if, instead, organizations prepared to take full advantage of the extra time and capacity afforded by these new tools? The key is providing knowledge workers with the direction and empowerment to make good choices about how to invest their time.
Start by clarifying how each function creates value for the enterprise overall, and which performance attributes are most important in delivering it. For example, in a professional services firm, the client-facing roles need to be proactive as well as expert in the issues that impact clients. Marketing teams need to serve as a knowledgeable bridge between customer needs and product design teams. Procurement and supply chain teams need to be well-informed negotiators. In each case, the best use of worker time varies based on role.
Once the team has clarity on what it's optimizing for, they can engage in an exercise to design the ideal allocation of work each week. What percentage of time should be optimally spent engaging with customers, reading up on industry reports, or collaborating with other functions? Comparing that ideal versus members' actual calendars usually produces some abashed insights into how big the gap is.
From here, the team can be relentless about eliminating low-value work. In their book, The Friction Project, Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao suggest creating a RidicuList—a ledger of everything ridiculous that workers have to deal with in service of getting their job done—and be merciless in eliminating the items on the list.
An easy place to look is recurring meetings. In our experience, they often start out valuable and lose momentum over time. If your calendar is full of them, it's time for a trim. You can also invest in establishing collaborative norms for the team—shared expectations for how to use each collaboration medium, expected response times to communication, and where and how documents are stored. This eliminates frequent guesswork and dramatically cuts down the effort required to even get started on the work.
The goal is to claw back a meaningful amount of time each week that can be reinvested in things that improve the human performance of the system. Things such as building relationships with clients and colleagues, learning a new skill or experimenting with an AI tool, or taking the time to think through strategy or generate innovative solutions. Make a list of the things you should be doing with your thinking time specific to your role so that when you have it, you put it to good use. Believe it or not, sitting still and thinking is real work.
That's the block we must overcome: our beliefs about what constitutes work. It's not looking busy. It's engaging with the tough questions, leaning into the future, and challenging ourselves to rise above the status quo.