Why people pass off non-work as work

One day, a team member shared a five-page document with me. I read through it. It was absolutely worthless. It didn’t help us understand the problem, make a decision, or move anything forward.

I (barely) suppressed the instinct to reply, “What a load of bullshit,” and spent some time trying to understand why it had happened.

Why do people pass off non-work as work? Is it a person issue? Or an organization issue?

I suspect most of us do it at least some of the time, in different forms. The same person can do useful work on one task and go through the motions on another, or behave differently in different organizations. Laziness alone didn’t seem enough to explain it. So I started looking at the forms this takes, and why.

The common forms

Form	What happens	Example
Fake work	Claiming effort or progress that hasn’t happened.	Staying visibly online while doing personal things; reporting a task as underway when it hasn’t been started.
Busywork theater	Making activity visible because visibility earns credit.	Attending unnecessary meetings, sending excessive updates, or staying late to signal commitment.
Productive avoidance	Doing legitimate, easier work to postpone the harder task.	Polishing a proposal instead of sending it to a buyer; reorganizing a project tracker instead of resolving a disagreement that is holding up the project.
Manufactured necessity	Creating or preserving work that makes someone seem needed.	Maintaining reports nobody uses or adding approvals that require their involvement.
The activity trap	Sincerely treating effort or output as evidence of contribution.	Producing a detailed document without asking what it will help anyone understand, decide, or do.

These describe behaviors, rather than fixed types of people. The same person can fall into different forms at different times.

Someone knowingly claiming progress that hasn’t happened has a different problem from someone sincerely mistaking a document for a contribution. Here’s why I think these things happen.

1. Real contribution is hard to see

In knowledge work, effort, activity, and results don’t line up neatly.

Someone can spend three hours thinking and resolve a problem that has held up a team for weeks. Someone else can spend three days making slides and contribute nothing to the business. But for a manager trying to judge their work, the slides are easier to inspect than the thinking.

Assessing contribution requires understanding the work: what was difficult, which decisions mattered, and what improved because of someone’s involvement. Managers may lack the time, context, or expertise to judge that well.

So they reach for visible signs: responsiveness, documents, meetings, hours, and completed tasks. These provide information, but they don’t establish value on their own.

When nobody checks whether the activity actually helped, visible activity becomes sufficient evidence that someone is doing their job.

2. People respond to what gets rewarded

Once visible activity becomes the primary basis for judgment, people adapt to it.

Employees learn what a company values by watching who gets praised, trusted, and promoted.

Consider someone who finishes a task quickly and well. If their manager assumes it must have been easy, while praising a colleague who struggled visibly for days, the lesson is clear: visible struggle earns more credit than quiet competence.

The same problem appears when companies celebrate firefighting while overlooking prevention. The person who resolves a crisis has a story to tell. The person whose preparation prevented one has a normal Tuesday.

People repeat behaviors that make them feel successful and secure. If visible activity is what gets rewarded, even your strong performers may start spending more time looking busy. Or they feel overlooked and leave.

3. Important work is uncomfortable, so we put it off

Some work exposes us to rejection, conflict, or the possibility that our judgment is wrong.

Sending the pitch deck to an investor, calling a dissatisfied customer, or releasing a feature puts you in a position to hear something you might not like. And there’s always something else you could do first: refine the deck, analyze the customer’s dissatisfaction, or make a few more tweaks to the product. Each sounds reasonable. Each can also help you postpone the uncomfortable step.

This is especially difficult to catch because people can persuade themselves that the easier activity is necessary. They don’t experience the day as avoidance. They experience it as effort, often substantial effort.

4. Ambiguity gives people room to rationalize

When priorities and standards are unclear, almost any plausible activity can count as progress.

Someone asked to explore AI could spend weeks testing tools and produce a polished presentation without identifying a business problem worth solving. They have followed a reasonable interpretation of the request. The company may still have gained very little.

Ambiguity also lets people choose the version of the job they find most comfortable. Someone who likes analysis finds more to analyze. Someone who likes building starts producing things. Their preferred activity supplies its own justification.

Managers contribute to this when they give vague instructions and later judge people against expectations they never explained.

Employees contribute when they recognize the ambiguity but keep going rather than seek clarity.

“Take ownership” has to include establishing what the work is meant to accomplish.

5. There can be little upside to finishing sooner

Some workplaces make efficiency personally expensive.

A person who completes work early receives more assignments without greater recognition, compensation, or control over their workload. Someone who appears fully occupied is left alone.

People may respond by stretching tasks, concealing spare capacity, or avoiding improvements that would reveal how little time a process actually needs. Being busy becomes a form of protection.

If you want people to tell you they have time available, they need to know that won’t backfire. They still owe you an honest account of their work. But you should notice when you’re giving them a reason to hide it.

6. People want to feel needed

Stopping unnecessary work can mean admitting that part of your job isn’t needed.

Say you spend a day every week preparing a report. You realize nobody uses it. Stopping would save time, but it also raises a question you might not want to answer: “What am I contributing, then?”

Managers do this too. Removing an approval means accepting that the team can make the decision without them.

So people find reasons to keep the work going. “We might need it later.” “You don’t understand why it matters.” “We’ve already put so much into it.” They may believe these reasons themselves.

The work continues because stopping it threatens how useful or important someone feels.

Where to draw the line

Work can look useful and contribute nothing, but it can also look useless and contribute a lot. A weekly sync might seem like everyone repeating themselves, while actually keeping a team with different information aligned. Thinking, learning, or an experiment that fails can also be valuable without producing an obvious result.

So looking at the activity alone isn’t enough. You need to understand what it was meant to do and whether there’s still a good reason to keep doing it.

Evaluating the work

Reflection question	What it helps establish
What was this activity meant to accomplish?	Whether it had a purpose beyond producing an output or filling time.
Why did we expect it to help?	Whether the approach was reasonable given what we knew, even if it failed.
What should someone understand or do differently because of this?	Whether the work provides useful knowledge or direction. For maintenance and prevention, ask what it keeps working or prevents from going wrong.
Given what we know now, why should it continue?	Whether the next investment of time is justified by more than habit or effort already spent.

Different causes require different responses. Deception requires accountability. Ambiguity requires clarification. Avoidance requires confronting the step being postponed.

Sometimes the explanation is simpler: the person doesn’t want to do the work. They understand what’s needed, have the ability and support to do it, and repeatedly choose to avoid it or misrepresent their contribution. If clear expectations and direct feedback haven’t changed the pattern, it may be time to let them go.

Managers owe people clear priorities and sensible incentives. People owe the work an honest attempt, including the willingness to question what they spend their time on.