The clock on the bottom right of my screen just clicked over to 3:17 PM. I’ve just finished a report that took me nearly 7 hours of concentrated effort, the kind of deep, brain-burning work that leaves your eyes feeling like they’ve been rubbed with sandpaper. I lean back, stretching my spine until it makes a satisfying series of clicks, and I walk away from the desk for a moment. I just need to breathe. I need to look at something that isn’t a cluster of 37 blue-and-white cells in a spreadsheet. I walk to the mailbox-exactly 177 steps, I counted them because that’s what my brain does when it’s trying to restart-and by the time I return, the little circle next to my name on Microsoft Teams has turned from a vibrant, virtuous green to a cowardly, idling yellow. Within 47 seconds, a notification pings on my phone. ‘Everything okay?’ my manager asks. No context. No ‘great job on that report.’ Just a digital check of my pulse because my icon stopped performing.

I’ve often thought about how absurd this would look in any other context. Imagine a chef being judged not by the taste of the soufflé, but by how many minutes they spent holding a whisk, even if they were just waving it at the ceiling. Or a surgeon being reprimanded because they took a 17-minute break between life-saving operations and their ‘active’ light went out in the hospital directory.

The Erosion of Trust

We are obsessed with the proxy of work rather than the work itself. This isn’t just a minor annoyance; it’s an erosion of the professional currency we call trust. When a manager prioritizes the green light over the output, they aren’t just micromanaging; they are admitting a profound failure in their own skill set. They are saying, ‘I don’t actually know what you do well enough to tell if you’ve done it, so I’ll just check if you’re sitting in the chair I bought for you.’

It’s the digital equivalent of the factory floor supervisor walking the line with a stopwatch, except now the factory is in our living rooms and the stopwatch is a piece of code that doesn’t understand the difference between a breakthrough and a bathroom break.

I’ve made the mistake of trying to play the game. I once bought one of those mouse-jiggler devices for $27, thinking it would buy me the freedom to think without the anxiety of the yellow dot. I felt like a criminal, or worse, a fraud. I sat on my sofa, 7 feet away from my desk, watching my cursor move in tiny, robotic circles. I was ‘present’ to the system, but I was entirely absent to my own creative process. I spent the whole time worrying if the jiggle pattern looked too artificial.

The Leaking Showers Metaphor

We’ve reached a point where the superficial appearance of activity is more important than the structural integrity of the output. It reminds me of the way people handle home maintenance. You see a damp patch on the wall, and your instinct is to paint over it. It looks ‘clean’ for 17 days, but the rot is still there, eating the timber. You haven’t fixed the problem; you’ve just managed the aesthetic.

In the world of home repair, the professionals at Leaking Showers Sealed understand this better than anyone. They don’t just put a fresh layer of silicone over a crack and call it a day because they know the water is still moving where you can’t see it. They focus on the actual seal, the structural reality that keeps the house from falling apart. Corporate management needs a similar philosophy. We need to stop looking at the ‘paint’-the green icons and the instant replies-and start looking at the seals. Is the project sound? Is the client happy? Is the employee burning out at 4:37 PM every Tuesday?

The Cost of Being Watched

There’s a psychological cost to this constant surveillance that we haven’t fully tallied. When you know you are being watched by a machine, you stop taking risks. You stop doing the ‘invisible’ work-the reading, the thinking, the staring out the window that leads to the big idea-because those things don’t trigger the green light. You become a series of short, shallow bursts of activity. You answer 107 emails with one-word replies instead of spending 47 minutes crafting a strategy that makes the emails unnecessary. We are incentivizing the trivial because the trivial is easy to track.

Ruby M.-C. often talks about the ‘performative peace’ in the prison wings. Sometimes, when the inmates know a high-level inspection is coming, everything becomes unnaturally still. It looks like perfect order, but the tension is actually at its highest. It’s a fake peace. That’s what our Slack channels look like at 10:07 AM on a Wednesday. Everyone is ‘Active.’ Everyone is typing. But underneath that surface, there is a frantic, anxious energy that has nothing to do with excellence and everything to do with survival. We are teaching people that being seen is more important than being useful.

The Shortcut for Leadership

And let’s be honest about why this is happening. It’s a failure of imagination. It is much harder to define ‘good work’ than it is to define ‘logged-in time.’ To define good work, a manager has to actually understand the work. They have to know the difference between a difficult task that takes 7 hours and an easy task that takes 17 minutes. Most managers are spread so thin, or are so far removed from the actual labor, that they use the ‘Green Dot’ as a crutch. It’s a shortcut for leadership. But shortcuts always lead to a dead end eventually. You can’t build a sustainable culture on the foundation of a digital lie.

It shouldn’t be a radical act to go for a walk in the middle of the afternoon. It shouldn’t be a confession of guilt to not reply to a message within 107 seconds. We need to reclaim the right to be ‘Away’ so that when we are ‘Present,’ we are actually there, not just keeping a ghost in the machine active. The next time you see that little green dot, ask yourself: is that a person working, or is it just a light left on in an empty room?