The little green light winks. It’s a silent, digital overseer, demanding your activity, your presence, your allegiance to the pixelated square. Twelve faces, eleven of them somewhere else entirely, caught in the muted glow of their own screens. One person speaks, their voice a distant hum, while eight pairs of eyes subtly dance across email interfaces and chat windows. Only three, perhaps, are truly listening, caught in the inertia of genuine engagement. This isn’t collaboration; it’s an elaborate, exhausting performance. And for every person trapped in this silent ballet of performative work, there’s a gnawing sense of guilt and inadequacy that eats away at real productivity, transforming our calendars into elaborate stages for what I call ‘Productivity Theater’.

I’m not naive. Some meetings are necessary, vital conduits for information flow, decision-making, genuine brainstorming. I’ve been in rooms, physical and virtual, where ideas crackled, where problems dissolved, where progress felt tangible. But those moments, increasingly, feel like rare gems buried under a mountain of performative fluff. It started, subtly, during the first years of remote work, when the fear of being perceived as idle became a louder drumbeat than the actual call to accomplish something. We started filling our days, not with tasks, but with ‘visibility.’

The Illusion of Collaboration

This isn’t about being anti-meeting. It’s about being anti-waste, anti-illusion. I’ve deleted so many angry emails in the last few years, emails railing against the endless march of ‘sync-ups’ and ‘deep dives’ that, upon closer inspection, were shallower than a puddle. My own irritation isn’t just a personal quirk; it’s colored by the profound frustration of seeing genuinely brilliant people, like Aria B.-L., caught in this current. Aria is an archaeological illustrator, and her work requires an almost surgical precision, a quiet contemplation to render the faint lines on an ancient shard into something comprehensible. She can spend a focused 41 minutes meticulously detailing a ceramic fragment, bringing its forgotten story to life. But her calendar for any given week will have 11 meetings, sometimes 141 minutes of her time dedicated to calls where her actual contribution is negligible, her presence merely a number on a participant list.

I remember talking to her about a specific project she was illustrating – a complex tapestry of Minoan artifacts, where a single misdrawn line could change the historical interpretation. She had less than 21 days to complete 11 detailed plates. Yet, her days were constantly interrupted by what her team called ‘progress updates’ or ‘stakeholder alignment sessions.’ She’d spend 31 minutes preparing for a meeting, 51 minutes in the meeting, and another 11 minutes just recalibrating her focus afterward. That’s nearly two hours for something that could have been an email, or a 1-minute quick chat. The company leadership, in their desire for ‘transparency’ and ‘collaboration,’ had inadvertently created a system where the act of appearing collaborative was rewarded more than the act of creating. They celebrated meeting attendance as a metric of engagement, not output. It’s a subtle yet devastating shift, because it fundamentally misunderstands what makes work meaningful.

We’re not just wasting time; we’re eroding the very soul of meaningful contribution.

The Economic and Emotional Toll

Think about the cost. Not just the hourly wage for 12 people sitting on a call that could cost a small company $1,710 for a single hour, but the emotional cost. The feeling of not getting real work done. The constant, nagging sensation that you’re falling behind, even as your calendar is meticulously booked from 9:01 AM to 5:01 PM. This isn’t productivity; it’s performative busy-ness. It’s teaching us that the optics of contribution are more valuable than actual contribution, leading to mass cynicism and burnout. And when the line blurs between doing work and *showing* work, the deep satisfaction that comes from creating something tangible, from solving a complex problem, starts to fade.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to corporate offices or Zoom rooms. It seeps into every corner of our professional lives, creating a pervasive sense of inadequacy. People start to believe they are truly unproductive, when in reality, the system they’re operating within is designed to incentivize the wrong things. The constant pressure to appear busy, to perform work rather than do it, is an exhausting charade that leaves many feeling isolated and ineffective, pushing them towards resources like Therapy Near Me to cope with the profound disquiet and anxiety that festers when purpose is replaced by performance. This isn’t a minor inconvenience; it’s a significant mental load, a persistent hum of dread that underlies our days.

A Personal Rebellion

I’ve found myself doing it too, I have to admit. There was a time, not long ago, when I was struggling with a complex strategic document. It needed focused, uninterrupted thought. But the instinct, so ingrained, was to schedule a ‘working session’ with 3-4 other people. Not because I needed their input for every line, but because it *looked* like I was collaborating, like I was moving things forward. I deleted that meeting invite 1 minute before sending it. Instead, I put on noise-cancelling headphones for 241 minutes and just *wrote*. The document came together with a clarity and speed that would have been impossible with an audience, even a passive one. It was a small, personal rebellion against the very machine I was criticizing.

Redefining Purpose

Perhaps the solution isn’t to eradicate all meetings, which would be an absurd and impractical proposal. Instead, it’s about redefining their purpose. It’s about cultivating environments where genuine contribution is not just valued, but *visible*, without the need for elaborate theatrical displays. It’s about leaders modeling deep work, protecting focused time, and asking themselves a simple, profound question before scheduling any gathering: What is the singular, essential outcome we expect from this time together, and is a meeting truly the most efficient path to achieve it? If the answer isn’t unequivocally clear and compelling, then maybe, just maybe, that green light should stay dark for a while, allowing for the quiet, unobserved alchemy of actual work to happen.