Some employees are guilty of coffee badging or jiggling their mouses to look active while working remotely. But even when staffers are being productive on the job, there are a few tasks that could be considered “fake” work—at least according to Slack cofounder and former CEO Stewart Butterfield.
“Here’s my grand theory: Hyper-realistic worklike activity goes along with this other concept called known valuable work to do,” Butterfield said on Lenny’s Podcast last year. “Hyper-realistic worklike activity is superficially identical to work…But this is actually a fake bit of work, and it’s so subtle.”
