You're Being Rewarded for Looking Busy, Not Getting Results

You shipped a major feature that saved the company thousands of hours. Your manager barely noticed. But your coworker who posts daily updates in three different Slack channels just got promoted.

Something is broken in how we measure work, and it’s making the best workers miserable.

Modern work has become a performance where being seen matters more than what you accomplish - and it’s rewarding the wrong people while burning out the right ones.

The Problem

You do your best work in long, uninterrupted blocks. You go deep on complex problems. You create things that actually matter. But when performance reviews come around, you watch someone who spent half their time in meetings and the other half sending status updates get recognized while your contributions get a generic “good job.”

The math doesn’t add up until you realize what’s actually being measured. Your company says it values impact, but it rewards visibility. Your manager says focus is important, but promotes the person who’s always available, always responding, always performing productivity in public.

You’re not imagining this disconnect. The shift to remote and hybrid work has made the problem worse. When managers can’t see you at your desk, they substitute presence for productivity. When executives can’t walk the floor, they look at digital breadcrumbs. The person who appears to be working gets credit over the person who actually is working.

So you face an impossible choice: do the deep work that moves things forward, or do the visible work that moves your career forward. Most people try to do both and burn out trying.

Why this happens to remote workers

Research suggests that visibility bias intensifies in distributed teams because managers lack informal observation. In an office, they might notice you’re the person everyone goes to for help, or that you’re quietly fixing critical issues. Remote, they see what shows up in channels and meetings.

This creates what some researchers call “performative productivity” - work designed to be seen rather than to create value. Many people find themselves optimizing for appearances: sending messages during “active hours,” scheduling meetings to fill their calendar, creating updates about updates.

The incentive structure is clear. The person who takes three hours to thoughtfully solve a problem has three hours of silence on Slack. The person who half-solves it in twenty minutes and posts about it looks more productive. Depth becomes invisible while surface-level activity gets amplified.

For knowledge workers specifically, this is devastating because the most valuable work is often the least visible. Writing code, analyzing data, crafting strategy, designing systems - these require long stretches of uninterrupted focus. But that focus looks like absence to a manager scanning for signs of productivity.

What Most People Try

The knee-jerk response is to play the game. Start over-communicating. Post more updates. Be more visible in meetings. Show up in threads even when you have nothing to add. Essentially, add a second job - the job of appearing to work - on top of your actual job.

Some people make this work. They become skilled at managing up, at creating the impression of constant productivity. They learn to write progress updates that sound impressive regardless of actual progress. They master the art of the strategic Slack emoji reaction.

But for most people, this approach leads to fragmentation and exhaustion. You’re context-switching between real work and visible work. Every notification pulls you out of flow to prove you’re paying attention. Every meeting is a performance of engagement whether or not you have anything to contribute.

The quality of your actual work suffers. You’re doing the shallow work that shows up in metrics while the deep work that drives real impact gets squeezed into evenings and weekends. You tell yourself it’s temporary, that once you get promoted you can go back to doing real work. But the higher you go, the more the game demands visibility.

Others try to opt out entirely. They focus purely on outcomes and ignore the visibility game. They believe good work speaks for itself. They stay heads-down, produce excellent results, and wait for recognition.

This rarely works either. Their contributions get attributed to more visible team members. Their ideas get adopted without credit. During performance reviews, managers struggle to remember what they did because nothing stood out in the day-to-day. They watch less competent but more visible colleagues advance while they stagnate.

The frustration is real. You’re doing the work that actually matters, but the system rewards the work that’s merely noticed. And adapting to this reality feels like selling out - becoming the kind of worker you used to roll your eyes at.

What Actually Helps

1. Create artifacts of your deep work, then make them visible strategically

The solution isn’t to abandon deep work or fake visibility. It’s to create genuine evidence of impact and strategically surface it. Think of this as translating your invisible work into visible outcomes.

When you finish a deep work session, create something tangible. Not a status update about what you’re doing, but a shareable artifact of what you’ve done. This could be a brief document summarizing your analysis, a demo of the feature you built, a diagram explaining the system you designed, or a short video walking through your solution.

The key is that these artifacts serve two purposes. First, they capture your thinking in a way that adds value to the team. Someone else can actually use your document or learn from your demo. Second, they make your deep work legible to people who weren’t there when you did it.

Many people find success with a simple practice: end each deep work block by spending ten minutes creating something shareable. Not a progress report, but the actual output in a consumable form. Then share it in the right channel with brief context.

This isn’t performance theater. You’re genuinely helping your team understand your work while making your contributions visible. The person who ships code and posts a quick loom explaining the architecture is both doing deep work and making it visible. The person who analyzes data and shares a one-page summary of insights is creating real value and getting credit for it.

Start this week: Pick your next deep work session. When you finish, spend ten minutes creating one shareable artifact. It doesn’t need to be polished. It just needs to exist and be visible to the people who evaluate your work.

2. Batch your visibility work into deliberate time blocks

The problem isn’t visibility itself - it’s the constant context-switching it demands. The solution is to quarantine your visibility work so it doesn’t contaminate your deep work.

Set specific times for what you might call “presence work” - responding to messages, updating stakeholders, attending meetings, being available. Make these blocks generous enough that you can actually be present and responsive during them. Then protect your deep work blocks completely.

This means turning off notifications during focus time. It means setting your status to clearly communicate when you’re available and when you’re not. It means training your team and manager that you have predictable windows for responsiveness.

Research suggests that batching communication doesn’t hurt collaboration when expectations are clear. If people know you check Slack at 10am and 3pm and respond thoroughly then, they don’t mind waiting. What frustrates people is unpredictable responsiveness - sometimes instant, sometimes hours later.

The specific schedule matters less than the consistency. Some people do morning visibility blocks and afternoon deep work. Others prefer deep work early and visibility later. The key is that both modes get dedicated, protected time rather than bleeding into each other all day.

Many people find it helpful to communicate their schedule explicitly. A simple Slack status like “Deep work until 2pm - will respond this afternoon” sets expectations and gives you permission to actually focus. It also signals to your manager that you’re being intentional about your time, not just ignoring people.

Your visibility work becomes higher quality too. Instead of distracted partial responses throughout the day, you can give thoughtful, complete replies during your designated times. You show up better in both modes because you’re not trying to do both simultaneously.

3. Document your impact in terms managers can understand

The uncomfortable truth is that your manager probably doesn’t understand the full value of what you do. They’re not stupid - they’re just removed from the details of your work and overwhelmed with their own responsibilities. If you want credit for deep work, you need to translate its value into language that resonates.

This doesn’t mean dumbing down your work. It means connecting what you did to outcomes the business cares about. Instead of “refactored the authentication system,” try “reduced login errors by 40 percent, which decreased support tickets by roughly 15 per week.” Instead of “analyzed user behavior data,” try “identified that 60 percent of churn happens at onboarding, suggesting we focus improvements there.”

The pattern is: translate technical work into business impact, deep work into measurable outcomes, complexity into clarity. Many people find it useful to keep a running document of their work described this way. When something ships, add one line about what it was and why it mattered in business terms.

This serves multiple purposes. During performance reviews, you have concrete evidence of impact ready to go. During one-on-ones, you can share recent wins in language your manager can repeat to their manager. During promotion discussions, you can make a clear case for advancement based on demonstrated results.

The key is doing this translation yourself rather than hoping your manager will do it for you. They won’t. They don’t have the context or the time. If you want your deep work to count, make it count in terms they measure.

Start building this habit now: Create a simple document. Each week, add 2-3 lines about what you shipped and why it mattered. Use numbers when possible. Focus on outcomes, not activities. In six months, you’ll have a compelling case for your next raise or promotion.

The Takeaway

The system rewards visibility, but that doesn’t mean you have to choose between doing good work and getting recognized for it. Create tangible artifacts of your deep work and share them strategically. Batch your visibility efforts so they don’t destroy your focus. Translate your impact into language managers understand. You can do meaningful work and make sure it counts without burning out trying to be constantly visible.