Slack’s co-founder has dropped a warning that cuts straight through the modern office: a huge amount of what people call work isn’t work at all.
Stewart Butterfield, who has built two major tech companies from scratch, says today’s workplaces are overflowing with tasks that mimic productivity but deliver very little value.
Most people, including top executives, don’t even realise it.
“Here’s my grand theory: Hyper-realistic worklike activities goes along with this other concept called known valuable work to do,” Butterfield said on Lenny’s Podcast.
“Hyper-realistic worklike activity is superficially identical to work…But this is actually a fake bit of work, and it’s so subtle.”
The man has earned the right to make the accusation.
Butterfield oversaw the birth of Flickr in the early 2000s, lived through the chaos of building a Web 2.0 company from nothing, then co-founded Slack in 2009 and turned it into a multibillion-pound communications platform used by millions.
Through all that scaling, he says he kept seeing the same shift play out: the bigger the company, the more fake work people find to do.
It often sneaks in unnoticed, hidden in tasks that feel urgent and necessary – but ultimately produce little impact.
The Early Days Are Simple
Butterfield says the problem never appears when a company is small.
In the beginning, every task matters. Nobody holds a meeting unless it directly contributes to keeping the business alive.
“You fix problems, build features, file paperwork, set up infrastructure and stitch together the foundations of the company,” he said.
“The problem with almost every organisation [is] at the very beginning, you have an enormous amount of work that you know what to do, and you know that it’s going to be valuable,” he explained.
“Everyone’s going to work in the morning like, ‘I have 10 things to do and every single one of them is like something I know how to do, and it’s definitely going to be valuable.’”
Those early tasks generate “almost infinite” value, and are essential for the company to function.
But this clarity does not last. As the organisation grows, the nature of work changes, even though the need to feel productive remains.
As the Company Grows, Clarity Collapses
Once hiring ramps up, the ecosystem changes quickly.
Senior leaders build teams, and those teams subdivide. Managers hire junior staff to support them. More seats need filling.
As a result, there are far more people than obvious, high-impact tasks.
Workers still stay busy, calendars are full and documents multiply – yet much of what gets produced does not truly move the business forward.
Butterfield stresses that this isn’t about laziness.
People want to contribute and be recognised for good work, but when leadership fails to define what valuable work is, employees fill the vacuum with tasks that look impressive but lack substance.
And it’s not just small tasks – they might create entire processes, hold extra meetings or polish materials excessively, all in the name of looking busy.
The Corporate Pantomime: Meetings About Meetings
Butterfield points to a familiar example: pre-meetings.
These are meetings held purely to rehearse another meeting.
“People are calling meetings with their colleagues to preview the deck that they’re going to show in the big meeting, to get feedback on whether they should improve some of the slides,” he said.
The scene is familiar: a group in a conference room, a deck projected on the screen, everyone debating slide transitions or phrasing.
It looks exactly like collaboration, but often lacks substance and meaning.
Even senior staff are vulnerable. Executives often drift into these activities when they lack full context or authority.
“I’ll do it, our board members will do it, every exec will do it,” he admitted.
“The further you are from having all of the contacts, and all the information, and the decision-making authority, the easier it is to get trapped in that stuff.
“And people will just perform enormous amounts of hyper-realistic worklike activities, and have no idea that that’s what they’re doing.”
Fake Work Is a Leadership Failure
The responsibility, Butterfield argues, sits with leaders.
If a team is drowning in fake work, it is because leaders have not defined real priorities clearly.
“It’s actually your responsibility to make sure that there’s sufficient clarity around what the priorities are, and explicitly saying ‘no’ to things upfront, rather than words like, ‘Hey you guys are a bunch of idiots wasting your time on this thing that doesn’t matter,’” he said.
When priorities are vague, employees default to visible tasks.
They gravitate toward meetings, documents, and other outputs that are easy to measure.
Butterfield’s message, though arguable, is stark.
In many companies, the performance of productivity has replaced productivity itself.
And unless leaders act to define real value, the corporate theatre will continue, and employees will keep performing busyness instead of producing results.
