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Wellness
We’re human beings, not human doings: Why always-on culture weakens productivity
When leaders confuse availability with impact, argues Andrew Sharman, they create a culture of permanent activation where everyone looks busy, but genuine value creation and efficiency fall away.
Rapid read:
- Always-on cultures mistake responsiveness for productivity; constant notifications fragment attention, fatigue judgment, and undermine the high-value cognitive work organizations increasingly depend on.
- Sustainable performance requires cycles of intensity and recovery. When work invades rest, psychological detachment declines, increasing burnout while weakening creativity and decision quality.
- Leaders can improve output through protected focus time, clearer response expectations, and visible recovery boundaries, modeling disciplined availability rather than permanent activation.
Many organizations still operate with an outdated belief: greater employee availability leads to greater productivity. Always reachable. Always responsive. Always connected. Slack’s 2023 State of Work report revealed how deeply this belief had entered workplace practice: 27% of executives said they relied on visibility and activity metrics to measure productivity, while 53% of desk workers felt pressure to respond quickly to messages, even outside working hours. More recent Slack research on the “app era” suggests the problem has not gone away: 56% of app users say switching between apps makes it harder to get essential work done, while 68% spend at least 30 minutes a day moving between tools.
Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Special Report goes further, describing the rise of the “infinite workday”: employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted, on average, every two minutes during core working hours by a meeting, email, or notification. The average employee now receives 117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily, while 48% of employees and 52% of leaders say their work feels chaotic and fragmented. Meetings after 8pm are up 16% year on year.
Digital tools have made work more flexible and connected, but they have also created something more problematic: fragmented attention, constant interruption, and chronic low-grade fatigue. The result is uncomfortable for leaders. Employees may be more reachable than ever, but not necessarily more effective. Always-on cultures may be one of the most overlooked barriers to sustainable performance. This matters because many organizations are simultaneously trying to increase output, improve innovation, accelerate decision-making, strengthen collaboration, and manage burnout risk. Yet the work systems they have created are often optimized for responsiveness rather than thinking.
Businesses increasingly depend on cognitive quality: strategic judgment, creative problem-solving, innovation, coaching, ethical decision-making, risk sensing, and the ability to make sense of complexity. These capabilities do not emerge easily from people who are continuously interrupted, mentally “on call,” and rarely fully recovered.
Temporary intensity can focus effort, but permanent activation keeps people in a sustained state of vigilance, eroding attention and judgment.
Recent studies suggest that digital availability carries a cognitive cost. Experimental research in Scientific Reports found that the mere presence of a smartphone can reduce cognitive performance, while research on notification interruptions has found that reducing notification-caused interruptions can improve performance and reduce strain. Studies on after-hours work connectivity show that being connected to work outside normal hours increases emotional exhaustion by weakening psychological detachment from work.
In The Wellbeing Book (June 2026), I argue that well-being is not simply about feeling good; it is about our capacity to adapt, function, contribute, and flourish amid uncertainty and complexity. My book explores the blurred boundaries between work and rest, the pressures of constant stimulation, and the need to remember that we are human beings, not just human doings. That distinction is increasingly important for leaders. The central argument is simple: availability is not the same as effectiveness.
The availability trap
Responsiveness feels productive because it is visible. Fast replies, full calendars, green status lights, and rapid message turnaround all create the impression of momentum. But visible activity is not the same as value creation. Many leaders unconsciously reward responsiveness because it is easy to observe. Deep thinking is harder to measure. Strategic reflection looks inactive from the outside. A thoughtful decision can take longer than a reactive one. Yet for many leadership and knowledge roles, the highest-value work depends precisely on these quieter cognitive processes. A CFO evaluating long-term capital risk, a safety leader identifying weak signals before an incident, or a senior executive navigating geopolitical uncertainty does not create value through constant responsiveness. They create value through judgment, and that judgment depends on attention.
Research by Sophie Leroy on “attention residue” demonstrated that when people switch tasks, part of their attention remains mentally attached to the previous activity, reducing cognitive performance on the next one. In other words, frequent switching weakens the quality of thinking.
Microsoft’s 2025 data suggests the challenge has intensified: work is no longer simply busy, but increasingly fragmented across messages, meetings, channels, and time zones. The problem is not connectivity per se, but unmanaged connectivity – the gradual conversion of every available moment into a work moment. This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a productivity problem. When employees spend the day responding to everything, they struggle to complete the work that matters most. Leaders may see activity and employees may feel busy, but the organization may quietly be losing the deep thinking, creativity, and discernment it most needs.
Three one-week experiments to improve efficiency
- Protect one hour of attention
Block the first 60 minutes of each working day for work that requires real thought: strategic preparation, writing, decision-making, risk review, coaching preparation, or problem-solving. Do not open email, Teams, Slack, or messaging tools during that hour unless there is a genuine operational emergency. At the end of the week, ask: What higher-quality work became possible? Which difficult tasks moved forward? Did the day feel more deliberate or less reactive? - Reset response expectations
Agree on a simple communication rule with your team: urgent means today; important means within 24 hours; informational means no response required unless requested. Use subject lines, tags, or opening words to make the level of urgency clear. At the end of the week, ask: Did this reduce unnecessary checking? Were decisions clearer? Did people feel more trusted to manage their attention? - Model one visible recovery boundary
Choose one boundary that others can see: no routine emails after 7pm, scheduled sending for non-urgent messages, no calls during lunch, or a genuine disconnection period during the weekend. Explain why you are doing it: not to work less seriously, but to protect the energy and judgment needed for better work. At the end of the week, ask: What did the boundary change in your own behavior? What signal did it send to others? Did it make performance feel more sustainable?
These experiments are deliberately small. The goal is not to create a new policy overnight, but to generate evidence. Leaders can then ask a better question: which operating habits are improving the quality of work, and which are simply keeping everyone permanently available?
How always-on cultures reduce output
Always-on cultures weaken productivity in three important ways:
1 – They fragment attention
Frequent interruptions and context switching make deep work harder. Imagine a leader preparing for a high-stakes board discussion while simultaneously fielding Slack messages, approving expenses, responding to Teams notifications, and attending back-to-back calls. Each interruption may seem small, but together they erode concentration and increase cognitive friction. The issue is not merely lost time. It is degraded thinking.
Research from the University of California Irvine found that after interruptions, workers can take more than 20 minutes to fully regain focus on the original task. During that time, mental energy is spent reconstructing context rather than creating value.
2 – They create cognitive fatigue
Professionals are often tired not because physical work is harder today, but because the mental load is relentless. They are processing information, managing emotional tone, tracking shifting priorities, making decisions, monitoring risks, and staying alert to incoming demands throughout the day. In always-on cultures, the nervous system rarely gets a pause because work does not arrive in clear, bounded episodes; it arrives continuously.
This is where constant connectivity becomes costly. As Microsoft’s 2025 “infinite workday” research shows, work increasingly spills into early mornings, evenings, and weekends. The issue is not simply volume, but vigilance: the quiet background expectation that something may need attention at any moment. That state of vigilance affects performance. Under sustained cognitive load, people become more reactive, less patient, narrower in their thinking, and less capable of strategic perspective. Teams may continue functioning operationally while quietly losing creativity, reflection, and sound judgment.
For leaders, this is the real risk of always-on culture: in addition to making people exhausted, it reduces the quality of the thinking on which modern organizations depend.
3 – They undermine recovery
When work leaks into evenings, weekends, holidays, and quiet moments, people never fully reset. The body may be at home, but the nervous system remains at work. This is the hidden cost of always-on culture: even when employees are not actively working, they may remain psychologically tethered to work, monitoring messages, anticipating requests, or carrying unresolved tasks into family time, sleep, and rest.
The World Health Organization defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterized by energy depletion, increased mental distance from work, and reduced professional efficacy. That final phrase matters: burnout is a performance issue as well as a well-being problem.
The human and economic cost is substantial. The International Labour Organization estimates that psychosocial risks at work are linked to more than 840,000 deaths annually and cost the global economy around 1.37% of GDP. It also reports that about 35% of workers globally work more than 48 hours a week.
Research into recovery from work consistently shows that psychological detachment – the ability to mentally switch off during non-work time – is strongly associated with better well-being, improved engagement, stronger sleep quality, and higher performance. Always-on cultures directly undermine that detachment by keeping work cognitively present even when people are physically elsewhere. Recovery, then, is not time away from performance; it is part of performance. Organizations that ignore recovery may gain short-term responsiveness, but they risk losing the sustained energy, judgment, and creativity on which high-quality work depends.
High performance is not built through permanent activation, but through cycles of effort and recovery.
Three leadership mistakes that sustain the problem
Mistake 1: Rewarding speed over substance
Some situations genuinely require immediate responses: safety incidents, customer escalations, and operational crises. The problem arises when every interaction is treated as equally urgent. When leaders praise rapid replies more consistently than thoughtful outcomes, employees learn that responsiveness matters more than reflection. The fastest responder appears most committed, even if slower thinking would produce better decisions. Over time, organizations drift toward reaction rather than judgment.
Mistake 2: Confusing access with alignment
A team can be constantly connected and yet deeply unclear about priorities. In many organizations, excessive communication is a symptom of weak alignment. Multiple leaders issue overlapping requests. Meetings proliferate because decisions remain unresolved. Teams spend increasing amounts of time coordinating work rather than doing work. More communication does not necessarily create more clarity, and overloaded communication systems often conceal poor operating discipline.
Mistake 3: Ignoring recovery as a performance lever
Many organizations treat recovery as a personal lifestyle issue rather than a strategic capability. But fatigue affects judgment, emotional regulation, creativity, patience, and the quality of decision-making. If leaders care about sustained performance, they must care about the conditions that sustain human capacity. Those conditions include:
- Protected focus time
- Manageable cognitive load
- Clarity of priorities
- Psychological safety
- Sleep and recovery
- Movement and breaks
- The ability to disconnect from work outside working hours
High performance is not built through permanent activation, but through cycles of effort and recovery.
What leaders can do differently
The good news is that improving this situation does not necessarily require dramatic transformation. Relatively small operating changes create significant impact.
Create protected focus zones. Leaders should create periods where deep work is protected from interruption. That may mean blocking the first 60 to 90 minutes of the day for strategic work before opening email, introducing meeting-free mornings, or reducing unnecessary recurring calls. The goal is not to reduce collaboration, but to improve the quality of thinking applied to important work.
Redesign communication norms. Not every message requires an immediate reply. Organizations should distinguish between urgent, important, and informational communication. Leaders can clarify expected response times, reduce after-hours messaging, and use scheduled sending for non-urgent communications. This reduces unnecessary reactivity and lowers cognitive load across teams.
Model recovery from the top. Culture is shaped less by policy and more by behavior. If senior leaders consistently send midnight emails, respond instantly while on holiday, or visibly reward exhaustion, teams quickly absorb the message that constant availability is expected. Leaders who model healthier boundaries create permission for others to do the same. That is not softness, but operating discipline.
Leaders who model healthier boundaries create permission for others to do the same.
The real productivity test
The point is not to make work gentle, undemanding, or free from pressure. High performance will always involve intensity, and there will always be moments when teams need to move quickly, respond decisively, and work hard together toward an urgent goal. But there is an important difference between temporary intensity and permanent activation. Temporary intensity can focus effort, build momentum, and create shared commitment. However, permanent activation keeps people in a sustained state of vigilance, gradually eroding the attention, recovery, and judgment on which long-term performance depends.
The real productivity test is not whether an organization can extract more activity from people in the short term, but whether that intensity is sustainable, particularly in a world increasingly dependent on innovation, adaptability, trust, and cognitive quality.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data show productivity growth remains modest across many advanced economies despite increasingly sophisticated technology and digital tools. At a time when organizations are searching aggressively for productivity gains, it is worth asking whether losses are hidden in plain sight: fragmented attention, exhausted judgment, and work cultures that mistake activity for impact.
Productivity is not created by squeezing ever more attention from exhausted people. It is created when capable people have the clarity, energy, and space to do their best work.
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