Pretend work rarely starts as a deliberate choice. It slips into a company when expectations are vague, goals are fuzzy and everyone feels pressure to look useful. Slack stays active, calendars are full, documents multiply and the workday feels painfully busy. Yet much of that activity does not move the business forward, and over time it quietly damages both career growth and mental health. At its core, pretend work is any task you do mainly to signal effort rather than to create real value. It shows up when you reply instantly to every message so nobody questions your commitment. It appears when you sit through long meetings where you are not a decision maker, simply because it feels risky to decline. It is there when you spend hours polishing internal slides that will never be seen by a customer or investor. From the outside, this all looks responsible and diligent. From the inside, you know you are not really getting better at anything that would stand up in a harder, more demanding environment.
The damage to career growth starts slowly. Early in a career, responsiveness and volume of activity can be mistaken for strong performance. Managers are relieved to have someone who always answers, always attends and never misses a deadline. The reward for that reliability is often more of the same kind of work. That feels like progress for a while. The problem is that as a company matures, it starts to value people who can own outcomes instead of tasks. Advancement depends less on being busy and more on being able to point to specific results that matter to the business.
This is the point where pretend work shows its true cost. Promotion cases are built on evidence. Leaders ask what metrics you have changed, which projects you have owned from end to end and what impact you have had on revenue, costs, customer retention or product quality. Pretend work almost never produces this kind of evidence. Someone whose calendar is full of coordination, reactive messaging and low leverage responsibilities may be trusted to stay busy, but they are not trusted to move the needle. They become the person who knows every internal workflow but is rarely associated with the launch that opened a new market, the initiative that saved real money or the product improvement that stopped churn.
Over a few years, this pattern creates a very narrow professional identity. You are known as reliable, available and responsive. You are not known as someone who can take a messy problem, design an approach and deliver a measurable result. When the organization restructures or enters a tougher market, that distinction matters. People whose value is linked to real outcomes tend to attract new opportunities, even in rough times. People whose contribution is mostly tied to visible activity find themselves exposed. The ceiling on their career is suddenly clear.
Pretend work also distorts the way organizations measure performance in the first place. Many companies still track things such as hours online, tickets closed and messages sent as proxies for productivity. These metrics are easy to measure, so they become central dashboards. People learn to optimize for them, often unconsciously. The result is a kind of internal theatre. The shallow work that creates lots of visible activity is rewarded. The deep, difficult work that requires focus and produces fewer immediate signals can appear less valuable, even when it is the real engine of progress.
For ambitious people, that environment creates a quiet but powerful pressure. If you want to be seen, it is tempting to lean into the metrics that managers watch. You jump into more threads, volunteer for more status updates and stay constantly reachable. In doing so, you crowd out the time and focus needed to build the skills that actually compound over a career. The work that would really stretch you, such as owning a complex project, solving a hard technical issue or driving a new customer outcome, demands concentration and tolerance for ambiguity. Those qualities struggle to coexist with a constant appetite for surface level activity.
The mental health effects sit underneath all of this. Pretend work keeps you in a state of permanent partial attention. You jump between meetings, notifications and small tasks, rarely getting to stay with one meaningful problem long enough to see it through. At the end of the day, you feel drained, yet it is hard to name a clear win. This gap between effort and impact is corrosive. It feeds a sense of futility, as if no matter how hard you work, nothing important really changes.
There is also a quieter moral discomfort that many people feel but rarely articulate. Most capable operators know when their day has been filled mostly with low value activity. If the system keeps rewarding that pattern, they face an uncomfortable choice. They can numb themselves and go along with it. They can disengage and mentally check out while keeping up appearances. Or they can internalize a belief that this shallow work is all their career will ever be. None of these options is healthy, and all of them nudge people toward burnout. Burnout often has less to do with the total hours worked than with the feeling that those hours do not matter.
From the perspective of founders and senior leaders, an organization saturated with pretend work is not only a culture problem. It is a capital allocation problem. The company is paying salaries, tool costs and opportunity costs for activity that does not translate into capability, defensibility or durable value. Worse, it is burning the attention and energy of people who might otherwise grow into the next generation of owners. A founder who wants employees to behave like owners cannot keep them trapped in a system that mostly rewards performance for show rather than performance for impact.
Reducing pretend work begins with a clearer definition of real work. In most companies, real work is anything that measurably improves customer value, revenue quality or the resilience of the core product and operations. Many other tasks may still be necessary, but they belong in a secondary category, not at the center. Once leaders define what counts as high value work, they can begin to ask cleaner questions. How much of each role’s week is spent on activities that a customer would notice or pay for. Where are senior people stuck in coordination and oversight rather than decision making. Which meetings and rituals exist primarily to manage appearances rather than drive decisions.
For individuals, the path out of pretend work is uncomfortable but direct. It starts with an honest audit of outcomes instead of tasks. Keeping a simple private log of the results you create each week can help. That log should list concrete things that changed because of your effort, such as a bug that stopped a churn pattern, a process you redesigned that removed a recurring fire drill or a sales artifact that helped close a key account. If, after a few weeks, this list looks thin, the answer is not to hide. It is to treat that gap as a signal that your time and your value are out of alignment.
Once you see the gap, the next step is to protect specific blocks of time for work that feeds that outcome list. That can mean turning off notifications for a few hours, pulling yourself out of recurring meetings where you do not contribute to key decisions, or asking for a clearer definition of success before accepting a project. You will probably feel less visible at first. That is the trade. You are intentionally swapping surface level visibility for deeper proof that you can move important numbers. Over time, it is that proof which builds a career that travels with you across companies and market cycles.
Leaders have their own work to do. Job descriptions need to shift from long lists of tasks toward a handful of core outcomes that define success. Performance reviews should lead with those outcomes and use responsiveness and volume as supporting details rather than primary measures. Team rituals such as standups, weekly check ins and dashboards should be examined with frankness. If a ritual has become a stage for performative updates rather than a place where real decisions are made, it needs a new format or it needs to disappear.
Most importantly, leaders must model the behavior they want to see. If the founder or senior manager is online at all hours, hopping into every thread and demanding constant updates, the message is clear. In that environment, responsiveness will always beat results. If instead leaders are seen protecting their own focus time, asking for precise problem statements and praising people who simplify, delete and refocus work around outcomes, the culture will tilt in a different direction. People learn far more from what is honored and tolerated than from any values document.
The impact of pretend work on career growth and mental health does not arrive in a single dramatic moment. It builds quietly, in busy weeks that blur together, in promotion cycles where you cannot point to a meaningful achievement, in the slow erosion of energy and pride in your work. The sooner you can see it, the sooner you can act. Whether you are an individual contributor or a founder, the challenge is the same. Stop treating busyness as a badge of honor and start designing your days, your roles and your company around work that actually matters. Busy activity is cheap. Outcomes are the only thing that compound.
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