Everyone is Faking the Productivity

The Honest Hour - Issue #3

The Honest Hour | Real talk for people who work for a living

Let me tell you about Rahul from Bangalore. Senior software engineer. Been with his company for four years. Works 10-hour days, debugs production issues at midnight, and mentors juniors on weekends.

Last month, HR called him in. “Your Microsoft Teams shows you as ‘Away’ too often. Are you actually working?”

Meanwhile, Priya in marketing has been “available” for 8 hours straight. She’s attending her nephew’s birthday party. Her secret? A ₹2,500 mouse jiggler from Amazon.

Welcome to 2025, where productivity isn’t measured by what you deliver it’s measured by whether a small green dot appears next to your name.

Here’s what the data actually shows about our obsession with looking busy:

Indian employee engagement dropped to 19% in 2025 (down from 24% in 2024) [Source: ADP People at Work 2025]

Yet we spend 11.3 hours per week in meetings [Source: OECD Productivity Report]

And employees waste 2.09 hours daily on non-work activities [Source: Hubstaff 2018]

But here’s the kicker: 60% of work time is spent on “work about work” meetings about meetings, status updates about status updates, and Slack messages asking, “Did you see my Slack?” [Source: Productivity Research 2024]

Microsoft Teams: 320 million monthly active users [Source: Microsoft Teams Statistics 2024]

Slack: 79 million monthly active users [Source: Slack Statistics 2025]

Mouse jigglers on Amazon: 10,000+ reviews (and growing) [Source: Market Research 2025]

We’ve created an ecosystem where both productivity tools AND productivity-faking tools are billion-dollar industries.

50% of meetings are considered time-wasting by attendees [Source: Finances Online]

103 hours per year spent in unnecessary meetings [Source: Productivity Statistics 2024]

209 hours per year on duplicated tasks [Source: Productivity Statistics 2024]

352 hours per year discussing work instead of doing it [Source: Productivity Statistics 2024]

That’s 664 hours of performative productivity annually. Or 83 full workdays. Roughly 4 months of your year are spent proving you work instead of actually working.

Remember when we thought productivity software would make us more productive?

2019: “Slack will reduce email clutter!” 2025: You now have 47 Slack channels, 6 active Teams, and still check email obsessively. You’ve just added more places to look busy.

The Tool Explosion:

The average company uses 3.3 messaging apps [Source: Workplace Messaging Report]

77% of organizations use multiple collaboration tools [Source: Enterprise Messaging Study]

Workers spend 32% of time just switching between apps [Source: SoftActivity Research]

Result: We’re “collaborating” so much, there’s no time left to actually do the work

Here’s the honest truth nobody wants to admit: productivity software often makes us less productive. Not because the tools are bad they’re brilliant. But because we’ve confused activity with achievement.

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room, or rather, the tiny USB device under it.

Mouse jigglers. The hardware that keeps your screen “active” by moving your cursor in imperceptible circles. They’ve become so popular that:

Wells Fargo fired multiple employees for using them in 2024 [Source: Flowace Blog]

Amazon’s mouse jiggler section has thousands of products [Source: Market Analysis]

The search for “mouse jiggler India” has exploded since 2020 [Source: Wikipedia - Productivity Theater]

But here’s the thing: people aren’t using mouse jigglers because they’re lazy. They’re using them because:

Surveillance has replaced trust. When companies track every keystroke and mouse movement, employees respond by gaming the system.

“Always available” culture is exhausting. Microsoft Teams shows you as “Away” after 5 minutes. God forbid you think for 6 minutes without touching your mouse.

Actual productivity is invisible. Reading a 50-page technical document? Looks like you’re doing nothing. Attending your 6th Zoom call of the day discussing the previous 5 Zoom calls? Peak productivity!

One Glassdoor user put it perfectly: “I hate that companies can make you work weekends and 60-hour weeks while only recognizing it as 40 but then also expect you to be at the helm when things get slow.” [Source: Glassdoor Community]?

DeskTime analyzed Q1 2024 productivity data from Indian tech companies. The results? Hilarious and depressing in equal measure. [Source: DeskTime India Study]

Most Productive: Sales teams Why? Because their metrics are crystal clear: revenue. Can’t fake that with a mouse jiggler.

Least Productive: Digital marketers. Fair? No. Accurate? Sort of. Marketing involves research, brainstorming, and content creation all activities that look like “doing nothing” to productivity trackers. Social media monitoring gets flagged as “unproductive” even though it’s literally their job.

The Real Insight: The “least productive” teams are often doing the most creative, strategic work. But creativity doesn’t show up in time-tracking dashboards.

Want to know what’s really killing productivity in India?

Not mouse jigglers. Not Slack notifications. Not “quiet quitting.”

It’s this: presenteeism costs the UK economy over £100 billion annually [Source: The Guardian Report] more than actual absenteeism. India’s numbers? Similar pattern, different scale.

Presenteeism = showing up but mentally checked out. Green dot online, brain completely offline.

Why it happens:

86% of professionals say poor communication causes productivity failures [Source: TeamStage]

77% of workers globally are disengaged or actively disengaged [Source: Gallup Global Workplace 2024]

Only 19% of Indian employees feel engaged at work [Source: ADP People at Work 2025]

Translation: Most of us are zombies going through the motions, desperately keeping the green dot alive.

Here’s where it gets really funny. The productivity software itself is often unproductive.

Microsoft Teams vs Slack: The Eternal War

Companies spend millions on “collaboration tools,” then watch employees:

Struggle to find documents (38% of Teams users report this) [Source: Slack vs Teams Report]

Duplicate work across platforms (remember those 209 hours?)

Miss messages because they’re in the wrong app

Attend meetings to discuss what was already discussed in Slack

The AI Productivity Promise:

72% of companies using AI heavily report “high productivity” [Source: G2 Productivity Statistics]

90% of workers say AI saves them time [Source: Archie App Research]

Reality check: We’re still attending 62 meetings per month [Source: FinancesOnline] and drowning in “work about work”

The software promised to make us productive. Instead, it created more ways to look productive.

The brutal truth? We’ve optimized for the appearance of work, not the work itself.

Real productivity metrics nobody tracks:

Problems solved

Value created

Quality of output

Impact on customers

Strategic thinking time

Creative breakthroughs

Things we obsessively track:

Green dots

Meeting attendance

Email response time

Hours “available”

Mouse movement patterns

The Fix Isn’t Software

It’s culture. It’s trust. It’s measuring outcomes instead of activity.

Some companies are already doing this:

Remote-first companies report higher productivity when they stop tracking time and start measuring results [Source: SMB Guide]

Outcome-based teams outperform surveillance-based teams [Source: Harvard Business Review]

Flexible work arrangements boost actual productivity by 10-20% [Source: G2 Research]

But that requires managers to actually understand what their teams do. It’s easier to just check if the green dot is on.

We’ve built a billion-dollar ecosystem of:

Software to track productivity

Hardware to fake productivity

More software to detect the faking

Consulting firms to optimize the tracking

Therapy to deal with the anxiety of being constantly monitored

And in the middle of it all: actual humans, trying to do actual work, spending most of their energy managing the performance of productivity instead of being productive.

Indian employees work some of the longest hours globally. We’re not lazy. We’re exhausted from performing productivity while trying to actually be productive.

Maybe it’s time we admitted: the green dot is lying. The dashboard is lying. The “always available” culture is lying.

And yes, that mouse jiggler? It’s lying too.

But at least the mouse jiggler is honest about what it does.

Next time your manager obsesses over your “Away” status, remember this:

60% of “productive time” is spent on work about work [Source: Productivity Research]

50% of meetings are pointless [Source: FinancesOnline]

19% employee engagement means most people are mentally checked out anyway [Source: ADP 2025]

The green dot isn’t a productivity metric. It’s a participation trophy for showing up.

Real productivity happens when you close Slack, mute Teams, and actually focus on work that matters.

But good luck explaining that to HR.

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The Honest Hour is a weekly newsletter challenging stereotypes about careers, money, business, and work in India.

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