The Cultural Trojan Horse of ‘Got a Sec?’
The phone buzzes against the desk, a low, insistent hum that vibrates right up my arm. My cursor is blinking on line 26 of a function that refuses to cooperate. My Slack status is a neatly chosen emoji-a brain, for ‘Deep Work’-and my notifications are snoozed for two hours. It’s a fortress. It’s supposed to be a fortress. The buzz, however, comes from a ‘critical’ override. A direct message from my boss. It’s four words: ‘Got a quick sec?’
The Performance of Availability: Async as a Marketing Term
We fell in love with the word ‘asynchronous’. It sounds sophisticated, efficient, and respectful of individual autonomy. Companies splash it across their career pages, promising a haven of uninterrupted productivity. But for most, ‘async’ is just a marketing term for ‘we let you work from home, but our trust issues are coming with you.’
We’ve simply swapped the anxiety of someone peering over your monitor for the anxiety of a green dot next to your name turning grey.
The Impossible Cognitive Load: Omar F.’s Story
It’s a performance of availability. I once worked with a livestream moderator, Omar F., whose entire job was the epitome of synchronous. For 6 hours a day, he was locked in, managing a torrent of real-time comments. Yet, his company prided itself on its async-first communication. It was a beautiful contradiction.
Omar would finish a grueling session, hands shaking from the caffeine, and find 46 unread messages in his team channel. One of them, from three hours prior, outlined a change in moderation policy that he was, apparently, already supposed to be implementing. He was criticized in a ‘sync’ meeting the next day for not being ‘caught up.’
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What does that even mean? He was doing his primary job. But the implicit expectation was that he should somehow be doing two things at once: the deep, focused synchronous work he was hired for, and maintaining a constant, low-level awareness of the asynchronous chatter. It’s an impossible cognitive load.
I find myself judging this behavior, this demand for instant validation. I scoff at managers who can’t wait 16 minutes for a reply. And then, I have to be honest with myself.
Recruited by the System: Managing Presence, Not Output
Last Tuesday, I was on a deadline for a project with a budget of over $676,000. I needed a crucial piece of data from a colleague in another time zone. I sent her an email. Then, 16 minutes later, I sent her a Slack DM. A few minutes after that, I saw she was active in a shared document, and I left a comment right next to her cursor, tagging her.
I became the very person I criticize. I let my urgency override our collective agreement. The system of pressure is so powerful that it recruits all of us to be its enforcers, even against our own principles.
We’re managing presence, not output.
A Human Design Flaw, Exploited by Tools
The entire problem feels like a design flaw. Not a software design flaw, but a human one. It’s like the panic I feel around 4pm when I remember I’ve decided to eat healthier. The craving for the old, easy, instantly gratifying thing-a bag of chips, an instant reply-is a powerful biological urge. Urgency feels productive. Waiting feels like falling behind.
This is where the real work begins, and it has nothing to do with buying new software. It’s about building a culture of trust so profound that a manager sees your status as ‘offline’ and their first thought isn’t ‘Are they slacking off?’ but ‘Good, I hope they’re making progress on something important.’
Shifting Focus: From Inputs to Outputs
This requires a radical shift from measuring inputs (time online, messages read) to measuring outputs (work completed, problems solved). But that’s hard. It requires clear goal-setting and a level of management skill that is frankly, quite rare. It’s much easier to just check if someone’s little green light is on.
Online Presence
Messages read, Time online
Impactful Work
Problems solved, Goals met
Reclaiming Attention: Decoupling Consumption from the Screen
We drown in information under the guise of staying aligned. The endless strategy documents, the 236-comment threads on a minor design change, the meeting summaries that are longer than the meetings themselves. There’s an implicit expectation to have consumed it all, instantly. This digital presenteeism forces you to be tethered to a screen, not just for communication, but for consumption.
This obsession with immediacy betrays a deep-seated anxiety that if we can’t see the work happening, it must not be happening. It’s a relic of the factory floor, where presence equaled productivity. Our work isn’t like that anymore. My best ideas don’t arrive when I’m staring at a blinking cursor with 16 browser tabs open. They arrive when I’m staring at the ceiling at 2 AM, or in the shower, or while pulling weeds in the garden. The modern workplace, with its async label and synchronous heart, actively works against the very conditions required for deep thought and creative problem-solving.
The Disease: New Tools, Old Broken Habits
So we end up in this performative state. We learn to time our responses, to send an email at 7 PM to show we’re still ‘on,’ to keep our Slack status green even when we’ve stepped away. We’re all just actors in a play about productivity.