Why Invisible Work Feels Like a Waste of Time (It’s Not What You Think)

Last week I wrote a post about re-invention not being about adding more to your life, but more about taking away the things that aren’t really yours (read it here, if you’re interested and haven’t yet).

As I was writing that post, I found myself following a different tangent (as I often do) and had to stop. Because I started thinking about how we often feel the need to prove that we’re productive. And, if you’re anything like me, that comes with a feeling that everything I do must be able to be portrayed as productive in some way.

Throughout schooling and my career, I’ve felt as though I needed to always have something tangible to come out of my working time, something that I could show people (almost like a cat who brings you something they found and waits for praise). Because I always felt like I needed to prove that I was working hard enough, that I was doing things well enough, that I was being “good” enough to have earned my grades, my salary, and sometimes even that I was worthy of existing. 

Moving from academia and traditional employment to self-employment

When I started building something new, outside of a corporate structure where you have a boss or someone you report to, I almost automatically looked to find away to rebuild the structures I had left. I wanted to create a “boss” that I could check-in with daily to prove how much I was accomplishing and that it was worth starting something on my own. So, I just started dumping lists of things I accomplished each day in novel length text messages to my husband. He never asked for me to treat him like a boss, but that was the way I navigated the uncertainty of building something new with a structure that doesn’t operate like the ones I’d spent my entire career in up until that point. 

Eventually, my body realized that I didn’t need to treat my husband like a boss, that he wasn’t asking for (nor did he even really want) novel length texts about the things I was working on or the things I was building. We’re partners, he wasn’t my boss, he wanted me to succeed and he trusted that I would work hard at my own business just like I did when I was traditionally employed, because one, that’s just who I am, and two, he knows how deeply I care about what I’m building. Mentally and emotionally, I sometimes still struggle with feeling like I need to have something tangible to prove that I’m working hard, but I also just know that the “proving” myself to an audience (even just an audience of one) isn’t necessary for me to build.

Why we think invisible work is a waste of time

So what does this actually mean? Why do we focus so much on appearing productive to an audience? Why do we insist on classifying the things we do in terms of productivity? And why does invisible work feel like a “waste of time”? The answer for all of these questions is that invisible work doesn’t feel productive because we’re not working hard enough or are insecure about what we do. Somewhere along the way, we internalized the idea that productive work is work that can be witnessed. The audience is the thing underneath all of it. 

Think about what that actually means in practice. The thinking time, the hours at your desk with chicken scratch and half-formed ideas in a notebook, doesn’t pass the witness test. The months you spent building something in a direction you later walked away from don’t pass it either. Neither does the afternoon you spent doing nothing in particular because your brain needed to stop. None of it can be reported. None of it produces something you could hand someone and say: here, this is what I did today. 

But that’s the work that built something real. The direction I walked away from taught me what I didn’t want, which turned out to be the most clarifying thing I did all year. The thinking time produced the idea that the next three months ran on. The rest let me come back to my desk and write something I was actually proud of. 

Why the invisible work matters

The invisible work is often the most generative. And performing for the witness, finding ways to demonstrate that I was working hard enough, didn’t just cost me time. It cost me the work that was actually mine.

Now, is every time I choose to do invisible work going to result in something miraculous and life-changing? Absolutely not. Not every piece of invisible work is going to change you, but eliminating the invisible in favour of something with an auditable output means you stop doing the work that builds something real. 

I spent years (literally – far too many years to be honest), feeling compelled to perform productivity for an audience (no matter how small). I thrived on the praise and feeling of satisfaction when someone would tell me how productive I clearly was, when I presented my carefully crafted and presented version of what I had accomplished with my time. I came to rely on the external validation of being seen as the productive one, the work horse. 

And then, slowly, not in any sort of dramatic fashion, I stopped performing my productivity. I didn’t even realize that I had stopped announcing my accomplishments for the day in novel length text messages to my husband. I just had a realization one day, that I hadn’t sent a “this is what I accomplished today” text to him in months.

And when I reflected on the work that I prioritized when I wasn’t thinking about how I’d frame it in those texts in terms of what tangible thing I did? That work was genuinely deeper, more honest, and felt more like me, than most of what I produced before that. Because, I realized that when I was treating my productivity as something that needed to be performed for someone else, it meant that my work was no longer mine, no longer for me, no longer even for those deeply held dreams to help change the world.