Everyone you work with is busier than ever, yet very little is produced.
Surveys show employees spend an average of 7.5 hours per week in scheduled meetings and nearly 9 hours in unscheduled coordination like impromptu calls or Slack threads. Many of us are still at work in the late hours or on weekends.
We all start with the same hope: work together, ship fast, build something great. But most teams end up in the same place. Our teams spend more time coordinating the work than actually doing it.
We feel this daily: the constant interruptions, the back-to-back Zoom calls, the hours lost just recovering from context switches. Workers are interrupted every three minutes, losing as much as 2.1 hours a day to distractions and the recovery time they create.
AI has accelerated this already overloaded system. While LLMs give us immense possibilities for creative exploration, we’re actually drowning in more busywork. More AI code to review. More bugs to fix. More meeting notes to sift through.
This ultimately leads to one place: burnout. 50% of knowledge workers struggle with burnout and 70% of those are considering leaving their job.
How did we get here
It’s easy to confuse ‘busyness’ for actual work.
Statistics can’t capture knowledge work. Building something meaningful is hard to measure.
When did your designer ‘create’ that flow? When did the engineering team solve that difficult problem? The work that leads up to these moments is real, but often invisible. It can seem like a strike of inspiration, but only happens when a team of skilled people have time to focus deeply on what they’re doing.
So companies use ‘busyness’ (e.g. how many Slack messages you replied to, or how often you were at your desk) as a placeholder.
The logistics of work is inevitable. It’s an inherent part of any complex projects being worked on by multiple people. But our tools do nothing to minimise busywork. In fact they actually optimise for it.
Chat apps like Slack have crippled any sense of focus. Instant messaging has forced an ‘always-on’ culture which expects instant replies to scattered messages. Endless back and forth prevents us from really shutting off and focusing on work, which is the only way it gets done properly.
What we did differently
When my co-founder and I founded Cushion, we wanted to work differently. We’d seen pointless processes drain energy at previous startups. We wanted something different: a slower, more focused way of communicating built on trust and an understanding that deep, difficult work drives our company forward.
We ditched instant communication like Slack (and email) and have had around 3 meetings in the entire lifespan of the company. Instead of Slack threads, we write full posts around a single topic. Or we record a video walking through our ideas.
Writing a fully-formed post instead of endless back-and-forth or scheduling meetings allowed us to see the communication as ‘part of the work’. Instead of the tax we pay to get work done, writing up what we’ve done became part of solving the problem.
We built our entire product around this way of thinking.
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We could focus for 3-4 hour blocks
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Responses became thoughtful, not reactive
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All that writing became documentation by default
This takes more effort to work this way. We sometimes need to fall back on instant chat when something is on fire. But we deliberately force ourselves to take the longer path because we know it’ll be worth it in the long run.
We’ve started to ship more, we’re able to get higher quality output, and we’re less stressed even with countless tasks to think about.
Try a different approach
Moving your entire company to a new way of working is unrealistic for most. But if any of this resonates, here are some easier experiments that have worked for teams we know.
Start with one. See what happens.
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Try a meeting audit together. Look at your calendar as a team. For each recurring meeting, ask: “Is this actually moving work forward?” You might be surprised what everyone’s willing to let go of.
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Experiment with focus blocks. What if everyone protected 3 hours a day for deep work? No meetings scheduled, no expectation of responses. Try it for a week. See if the work gets better.
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Change how you think about responsiveness. When someone takes 4 hours to reply because they were deep in work, that’s a good thing. Notice out loud when someone does this.
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Try one high-fidelity update. Instead of daily stand-ups, have everyone write a weekly update—what shipped, what’s stuck, what’s next.
We all want to ship better work. But most of us fell into the same busywork trap through reasonable decisions with unintended consequences.
The hard part isn’t recognising the problem. We already feel it. The hard part is not accepting this as ‘the way things are’.
Working async and slower breaks from the norm. But it’s ultimately more productive, and most importantly, more meaningful.