Employee gets buried in busywork when boss sees their clean desk, going forward they pretend to be busy with decoy files and folders: 'I learned my lesson'
Working in modern workplaces can be exceptionally exhausting. Constant distractions due to open-plan offices tear employees away from their work. At the same time, success is attached to social and political status with heavy reliance on the "optics" of busyness rather than employees' actual effectiveness in completing their tasks.
The reality is that we all work differently, and forcing all staff to work to what you think is the "appearance" of hard work will result in a performative culture where that appearance is more important than actual productivity… That is what this worker faced when their boss buried them under a mountain of pointless paperwork just because the worker liked to work in a highly organized and focused way, keeping clutter from creeping in and unbalancing their process.
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One of the things that changed the way I look at cognitively demanding work like committing words to a page was Cal Newport's “Deep Work,” which explores the way we work in the modern workplace, with all the distractions and things vying for our attention close at hand and how these things do nothing but fragment and disrupt our focus, making it harder for us to complete the work we're trying to focus on. To perform cognitively demanding tasks at a high level, we need to be able to escape from these distractions and enter into a state of deep and unbroken focus—thus Cal Newport's term for it: “deep work."
So, while “multi-tasking” might be an important skill—at least according to every job posting and resume in the 21st century. There are certain tasks that are disadvantageous and inadvisable to complete while “multi-tasking.” Meaning that this boss, like so many others really isn't being the leader they think they are by forcing their workers to work the way they want them to.
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