The Great Mouse Jiggle: Is Performance the Only Work We Have Left?
The mouse pointer drifts. You slam it back to the corner of the screen with a frantic wiggle, a desperate jolt of motion to keep the light green. It’s 4:51 PM. A Slack message from your boss, sent 11 minutes ago, sits unread. Replying now would prove you were at your desk, but it would also invite a follow-up question. Silence is a gamble. A jiggle of the mouse is a prayer to the god of presence, a tiny, frantic performance in an empty theater.
There are 21 browser tabs open, each one a monument to a task started but not finished. One is a slide deck with 41 slides, mostly blank, for a presentation you’re supposed to give in the morning. Another is a project management tool where you’ve moved the same virtual card from “In Progress” to “Blocked” and back again 11 times this week. The work isn’t happening in the tabs. The work is the frantic switching between them, the constant, low-grade hum of anxiety that proves you are, in fact, working.
We call this a time management problem. We buy planners. We download apps that lock us out of social media. We read articles about deep work and pomodoro techniques, all in the hope of wrestling back control of our time. But what if the problem isn’t our management of time at all? What if the problem is that our jobs are no longer

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