July 29, 2026
you are not doing too little
real talk
okay so real talk.
Somebody built an app to track something we were already tracking on a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet worked. Everybody used it. Nobody asked for a change. Now there is an app that needs to be fed and checked and maintained, and when something looks wrong you spend twenty minutes figuring out who forgot to update it, which takes longer than just opening the original sheet.
The app was supposed to make things easier. Now the job is keeping the app going.
Thoreau had this line, in the 1800s, from a cabin with no wifi: "men have become the tools of their tools." The train did not free the person who bought the ticket. He gave the railroad his money and his legs going soft and his ability to just go somewhere without paying first. The railroad called him a passenger like that was something to be grateful for.
There is something specific about this moment that did not exist a few years ago. Building an app used to require actual resources: a developer, a budget, months. That friction stopped most bad ideas from becoming real. AI dissolved the friction almost overnight. Now you can have an app by afternoon, a tracker by end of day, a dashboard for a process that did not need a dashboard by Friday. The cost of building fell to almost nothing.
Maintaining did not fall. Maintaining is still what it always was: someone entering the data, someone checking it, someone debugging it when it breaks, someone updating it when anything changes. AI lowered the cost of creation to near zero. It did not touch the cost of upkeep. And the person who wanted the app for this and the app for that, the one generating new ideas in every meeting, is never the one keeping any of it running. They are already in the next meeting about the next app. They appear very busy. That appearance is the product.
Here is what this actually looks like in practice.
A deal gets announced to a partner as signed and final before the internal agreement actually reflects that. The correction has to come on the same thread, in front of the same people. An award gets posted publicly before anyone checked whether posting it was allowed, and the organisation that issued it has to follow up twice asking for it to come down. A spreadsheet that works gets replaced by an app that takes more steps to use, because the app looks like a product and a spreadsheet does not. Someone's work gets summarised and forwarded upward by a person who added nothing to it. A meeting becomes a place to assign tasks in front of outside people who have nothing to do with those tasks.
Each of these looks reasonable from close up. A manager sharing output. A leader announcing something early out of enthusiasm. A tool built for visibility. But the consistent variable across all of it is the same: what does this look like from above. The outcome is secondary to the appearance of the outcome.
And the cost, the correcting, the explaining, the maintaining, the absorbing, lands on whoever is doing the actual work. Not the people being seen doing work. The people doing it.
This is management by perception. It is not a personality flaw in any one person. It is a culture, and cultures are self-reinforcing, because the people who get rewarded inside them are the people who learned what the culture actually rewards.
Hannah Arendt wrote, in the 1950s, about the difference between labor and work. Labor is what you do to maintain life. It is cyclical and it disappears as soon as it is done: the meal you cook, the report you file, the email you answer. Work is what you make that lasts, the thing that remains after you leave. Most of what happens in an office is labor in her sense. It keeps things running. It does not build anything permanent.
The labor is fine. The labor is honest. Where it gets strange is when we confuse it for the work, and then confuse the work for the self.
The quote that goes around occasionally: your job is not your identity, your job is just how you pay for your life. I used to read this as something people say when they need to be okay with being stuck somewhere. A consolation sentence.
But I think it is more precise than it sounds. Because the alternative, making the job the self, is where the midnight messages come from. The person sending messages at 11pm on a Sunday has not made a productivity decision. They have made an identity decision. The work is who they are. Which means the work has to be constantly visible, constantly performed, constantly proven. You cannot stop performing the thing that you are.
And a manager who has built their sense of self on being the person who announces wins and creates momentum will announce the win before the deal is signed. Not out of dishonesty. Out of identity. The story of who they are requires the win to already be there.
This is also why the apps get built. The dashboards, the trackers, the systems that track the systems. When the job is identity, doing the job and being seen doing it become the same thing. The proof of work becomes the work.
Max Weber wrote that capitalism needed workers who found moral meaning in their labor, so over time it sold work as a calling. A vocation. Something you are, not something you do. That idea is less than two hundred years old. Before it, most people worked to live. The living was the point.
We absorbed the new idea so completely we forgot it was an idea.
Which makes the perception problem so specifically disorienting. You are not just doing the wrong work. You are supposed to find yourself in work that is not being evaluated honestly. You are supposed to care about something that keeps measuring something other than the thing you care about.
Everything looks the same now, by the way.
Every email, every pitch, every idea someone puts into words. You can feel it before you have read ten of them. AI trained on everything produces the average of everything, and the average is smooth and legible and reaches nobody because the person reading it already knows how it ends.
A voice is specific. It belongs to a person. You cannot train a model on everybody and expect it to sound like somebody. And every time you use the tool to skip the thinking, you feed the thing that is slowly making everyone sound identical. One big average with nobody home inside it.
I get the other side. Tracking things tells you what is working. Documentation matters. Some bookkeeping is just real and there is no getting around it.
But there is a point where the ratio tips. Where reporting on the work takes up the space where the work was supposed to happen, and you are very busy and nothing is moving, and nobody notices because everyone is equally busy entering things into the system.
The ideas that go nowhere. Being asked to build something nobody needed. Seeing what the actual job should look like and spending most of your time somewhere else instead. Having work forwarded upward with someone else's name on it.
If all of that produces friction, the friction is the point. It means you still have a sense of what real work feels like.
Most people who lose that sense do not notice it going. They start optimising for what gets rewarded, and after a while they genuinely cannot tell the difference between work that moves something and work that looks like it does. The performing and the doing start to feel the same. That is the real cost of this culture, not the wasted hours. The fact that you eventually stop being able to tell.
The job is maintenance. It funds the life. The life is where you actually live.
You are not doing too little. Hold onto that.