Latest / The Burnout Podcast with Fexingo: Workplace Exhaustion, Recovery, and Sustainable Careers / The Performance Tax of Visible Work
Transcript
- Lucas: I want to talk about something that feels like a quiet epidemic in modern offices, especially among high performers. It’s not just working long hours; it’s doing work that looks impressive but actually contributes very little to real outcomes. We call this visible work. Luna: Right, the kind of task where you spend four hours perfecting a slide deck that gets skimmed for thirty seconds? That drains you faster than actual problem solving. Lucas: Exactly. And here is the trap: because it is visible, it feels important. You get immediate feedback, praise, or at least acknowledgment. So your brain rewards you for spending time on it, even if the underlying value is near zero. It becomes a habit loop. Luna: But does leadership really want that? Or are they just confused by the noise? Lucas: That is the million dollar question. Most leaders claim they hate performative busyness. But structurally, many organizations reward visibility over substance. If I have to guess, I would say most managers confuse activity with progress because they cannot see the deep work happening behind closed doors. Luna: So we are rewarding the people who make the loudest sounds while ignoring the ones building the foundation. Lucas: Precisely. Let us look at a concrete example. A few years ago, McKinsey, the consulting giant, made a public shift regarding their deliverables. They started discouraging dense, multi-page slide decks in favor of shorter, more direct memos. Why? Because consultants were spending weeks crafting beautiful presentations that clients rarely read deeply. Luna: Wait, did that change stick? Consulting firms live and die by those slides. Lucas: It was a significant cultural signal. They realized the energy cost of creating those decks was pulling talent away from actual client problem solving. The visual polish became a tax on cognitive bandwidth. The partners saw that junior associates were exhausted not by thinking, but by formatting. Luna: That makes sense. If you are an associate, you feel pressure to prove you are working hard. The deck is proof. Lucas: Yes, and that brings us to the core issue. Visible work is often a proxy for effort. In environments where output is hard to measure, we measure input and appearance. The thicker the report, the harder you worked. It is a lazy metric, but a persistent one. Luna: So how do you break that proxy without looking lazy? Lucas: You have to reframe what success looks like to your stakeholders. This is tricky. You cannot just stop doing the visible work overnight. You have to demonstrate that your reduced visibility correlates with higher impact. It requires confidence and clear communication. Luna: Which means you need data to back up your intuition. Otherwise, you just look like you are coasting. Lucas: Exactly. If you cut the meeting by half an hour, you need to show that the decision was made faster or better. If you shorten the report, you need to highlight that the key insight was still delivered. You trade volume for velocity. Luna: Velocity over volume. I like that. It shifts the focus from duration to outcome. Lucas: Let me pause here for a moment. Before we dive into the tactics, I want to mention something quick. If we've helped you think through a career move or decision, please consider supporting us directly. We deliberately don't run ads on these. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it keeps the content clean and focused on what matters to you, without the interruptions. Lucas: Thanks for that. Now, back to the tactic. One way to reduce visible work is to audit your calendar. Look at the last month. Identify every meeting, email chain, or document that was created solely to inform someone of something they already knew or could have guessed. Luna: That list is usually longer than I care to admit. Especially the weekly status updates. Lucas: Status updates are the king of visible waste. If you are sending a weekly email listing what you did, ask yourself: does my manager actually read this? Do they act on it? Or is it just ritualistic compliance? Luna: Sometimes it is compliance. Sometimes it is self-protection. If I don't send it, I might look inactive. Lucas: That fear is real. Proximity bias and recency bias punish silence. But you can mitigate that risk without daily emails. Try switching to a monthly summary or a shared dashboard. Make the data passive so they can pull it when needed, rather than pushing it when you feel anxious. Luna: Passive data pulls. That shifts the burden from me producing to them consuming only when necessary. Lucas: Right. It respects their time too. Most leaders are drowning in notifications. Giving them less noise is often a gift. You become the person who provides clarity, not clutter. Luna: Clarity over clutter. That is a strong brand for any professional. But what about the creative projects? The brainstorming sessions? Lucas: Good point. Creative work also suffers from visible performance. We often equate participation with contribution. If you speak up in a brainstorming session, you look engaged. But sometimes the best contribution is silent reflection followed by a single, precise insight later. Luna: So you resist the urge to fill the silence? That feels counterintuitive in high-energy teams. Lucas: It is. But high-performing teams often reward depth over breadth. If you can hold space for others to think, and then offer a synthesized view, you stand out more than the person who talks the most. It requires patience, though. Patience is rare. Luna: Patience is definitely rare. Especially when everyone else is jumping in to fill the void. Lucas: Another area is documentation. How much time do you spend writing documentation that no one will ever read? We all know the truth. The wiki page you spent three days on is likely viewed twice a year, if that. Luna: Ouch. That hurts. I have a folder of guides that are basically digital ghosts. Lucas: Ghosts. I love that term. Digital ghosts. The solution there is modular documentation. Write just enough to solve the next immediate problem. Do not write the encyclopedia. Write the cheat sheet. Update it only when it breaks. Luna: Just-in-time documentation instead of just-in-case. That changes the whole approach. Lucas: It does. It treats knowledge as a living asset, not a static monument. Monuments take forever to build and nobody visits them. Living assets evolve and provide value continuously. Luna: I am going to try that on my current project guide. It has been sitting there for six months, gathering dust. Lucas: Do it. Delete half of it. Keep the actionable parts. The rest can be archived or linked to if someone asks. Trust that you will remember the details when you need them, or that you can find them again quickly. Luna: Trust is the key word here. Trusting yourself, and trusting your team to adapt. Lucas: Exactly. And let us touch on one final layer: the emotional labor of visible work. Pretending to be excited about a process you know is inefficient takes energy. It creates cynicism. Luna: Cynicism is exhausting. It makes you disengage entirely, which is worse than being tired. Lucas: Yes. Disengagement is the end stage of burnout. By cutting visible work, you protect your engagement. You save your enthusiasm for the problems that actually matter. That is sustainable. Luna: Sustainable enthusiasm. That is the goal. Not just surviving the week, but enjoying the work itself. Lucas: If you can enjoy the work, the visibility stops being a source of anxiety and starts being a source of pride. You show up because you built something good, not because you had to fill a quota. Luna: I think that shift in mindset is what separates the burned-out performer from the steady professional. Lucas: Absolutely. It is about aligning your daily actions with your long-term values. When you drop the performative weight, you move lighter. And honestly, moving lightly is how you last in this game. Luna: Moving lightly. I will carry that phrase forward. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: My pleasure. Let us see how light we can actually get this week.