Meta-work will kill your company
Outcome-based management can save it.
Like so many of us, I often start my workday overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks that could possibly get accomplished.
I’ve tried most of the survival tactics. First, there was the to-do list app—slick and intuitive. Next was the calendar app, designed to make me feel in control of my time. Then there was the giant whiteboard that now dominates a corner of my office, silently bearing witness to the failed promise of visual organization.
Despite all these attempts, nothing seemed to stick.
But, as I stepped back from the minutia, I discovered the great tension between managing the rituals of organization and getting meaningful things done.
This eureka moment isn’t just mine of course.
Cal Newport, writing in the New Yorker, observed the larger structural forces at play in today’s knowledge economy, noting that most professional tasks require collaboration—meaning the simple act of creating a marketing plan for a new product, for example, triggers a cascade of meetings, emails, and status updates. He describes this as the “overhead spiral,” where you spend more time talking about the work than actually doing it, an experience that breeds frustration and, eventually, burnout:
When you’re tackling too many such projects concurrently, however, the combined impact of all of the corresponding meetings and messages can take over most of your schedule, creating an overhead spiral of sorts in which you spend significantly more time talking about work than actually getting it done—a form of wheel-spinning freneticism that amplifies frustration and, ultimately, leads to burnout.
This phenomenon—this endless orbit circling the work—is what I’ve come to think of as meta-work. And, like the background hum of an office air conditioning, it goes unnoticed until it becomes deafening. Gradually, then suddenly.1 It’s the silent killer of productivity.
Meta-work doesn’t burst through the door. It slips in quietly, wearing the mask of productivity.
You might not even notice it at first—a single email, a quick check-in to make sure everyone’s aligned. Soon, a meeting follows, because, after all, it’s easier to hash things out in real-time. From there, the wheels turn faster. You’re updating the project management tool, sending off a few follow-up messages, and, before you know it, hopping onto another call to “sync up.”
You’ve been busy; the team has been busy. But has any work that matters really moved forward?
It’s in these moments that meta-work reveals itself. You, like so many others, may well be part of the staggering 83.13% of employees who spend a third of their work week in meetings that add little to no value.
Meta-work encourages the performative over the substantive. And visibility becomes the unspoken OKR.
When every interaction is trackable—via Slack, Zoom, project management tooling, etc.—employees feel compelled to showcase their busyness at all times. We’ve moved from an era of clocking in and clocking out to an era where your digital footprint—the constant pings, the quick replies, the late-night emails—becomes the modern version of punching the clock.
It’s no longer enough to be efficient or to deliver quality work on time. You need to be in the chat, on the call, in the document—your presence needs to be felt, or you risk becoming invisible in the deluge of noise.
The psychological toll of this performative culture is hard to ignore. Workers are left feeling drained, not because of the work itself, but because of the constant need to maintain the appearance of busyness.
Rani Molla writes about this phenomenon of “productivity theater”:
"In addition to their regular working hours, office workers said they spend an average of 67 extra minutes online each day (5.5 hours a week) simply making sure they’re visibly working online, according to a recent survey from software companies Qatalog and GitLab."
The irony, of course, is that the more we perform, the less we actually achieve. Tasks pile up, not because we’re slacking off, but because we’re too busy proving we’re working to get any real work done.
This system rewards noise, not results. This fundamentally distorts what work should be: a means of creating value, solving problems, and driving progress.
What’s the fix to this vicious cycle?
We need to move away from the obsession with visibility and refocus on tangible outcomes.
"Outside of sales, most leaders don’t evaluate their people based on the outcomes they deliver. Instead, they focus on their inputs—hours worked, marketing campaigns sent, recruiting calls made, or other activities that demonstrate effort but don’t guarantee success. In fact, relying on inputs to measure performance can be counterproductive. Sometimes employees use face-time to cover for a lack of actual results—and leaders can overlook an underperformer who is always working, because they are mistaking busyness for productivity."
Reduce unnecessary meetings, trust employees to manage their work autonomously, and value results over appearances.
Of course, easier said than done.
But this is what leadership is for. And leaders need to set clear professional outcomes, help employees dedicate their time toward hitting those outcomes, and evaluate their performance based on results.
This is what Glazer calls outcome-based management. And by focusing on outcomes, we can escape the gravitational pull of meta-work and return to what really matters: getting real, meaningful work done.
And maybe even using the whiteboard for its intended purpose.2
With apologies to Ernest Hemingway.
But I’ll still leave some extra room for anonymous love notes.