What If We've Been Measuring Productivity All Wrong? Making Work Work, CEO Series Vol. 13

Last Tuesday, before most people were awake on the east coast, I'd already reviewed a lease amendment. Later, I took a board call from my car between carpool and an onsite construction meeting in Harvard Square, recorded a podcast at noon, and signed off on a marketing proposal in my home office after lacrosse practice.

After spending more than 20 years in the workplace industry, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most productive people I know rarely work a traditional workday. They're not working less. They're just working differently. Maybe that looks like answering emails at 6:00 a.m. before the house wakes up or disappearing from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. for school pickup and sports practices.

"Microshifting"

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted a growing trend called "microshifting", people breaking their workdays into focused chunks based on when they have the most energy, attention, and availability. To me, this isn't a trend. It's an admission. An admission that the traditional workday was never designed around how humans actually work.

For decades, we've treated productivity as something that only happens between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. We built policies, offices, and operating practices around the idea that if people were physically present for eight consecutive hours, good work would follow. But somewhere along the way, we confused presence with productivity. For years, I thought the key to my own productivity was structure. My goal was to get my family’s schedule on autopilot so I wouldn’t have to manage it. I believed consistency was the secret to efficiency. And for a while, it worked.

But as I've gotten more experienced, not just as a CEO, but as a person, I've realized that productivity isn't really about managing my calendar. It's about understanding myself.

I've learned that by Friday, I have decision-making fatigue. So I block my calendar from meetings and treat it as my admin day. I don't want to spend my best hours reviewing contracts, processing email, or catching up on paperwork. Likewise, I rarely schedule meetings after 3 p.m. Not because I'm unavailable. Because I know myself.

By that point in the day, I'm simply not making my best decisions. My energy is different. My focus is different. My ability to think strategically is different. So I save those hours for tasks that require less creative horsepower. I realize I'm fortunate to have enough control over my schedule to work this way. But it has taught me something important, the goal isn't to find the perfect schedule, it’s to understand when you're at your best and protect that time.

The reality is that most people don't have eight straight hours of peak focus in them. Very few of us do our best work at exactly the same time every day. And once you add children, aging parents, commutes, doctor's appointments, school concerts, sports practices, and everything else that comes with being a human being, the idea of a perfectly linear workday starts to fall apart.

That's one reason the Wall Street Journal's recent article on microshifting resonated with me. It's not really about working fewer hours. It's about aligning work with energy, focus, and real life.

And it's also why a recent conversation on Setting the Bar with Alison Campbell and Danielle Hartigan stuck with me.

Burnout doesn't always look like disengagement

In fact, their research found that some of the people experiencing the highest levels of burnout still looked incredibly productive. They were the doers. The hand raisers. The people generating ideas and moving work forward. What changed wasn't their activity. It was their innovation capacity.

As a CEO, that hit me hard because most leaders are trained to look for burnout in the wrong places. We look for declining performance, missed deadlines, or people checking out.

But what if the bigger risk is hiding among the people who never stop showing up?

What if the people who appear to be thriving are actually running on fumes?

The traditional workday isn't just inefficient, it is very likely limiting our ability to do our best thinking.

At Workbar, we've had a front-row seat to this shift for years. We've watched members build workdays that look nothing like the traditional model. Some arrive before sunrise and leave before lunch. Some come in after school drop-off and head home before the afternoon rush. Some use our spaces for deep focus work and collaborate remotely with their teams. Others split their time between multiple Workbar locations throughout the week.

What's fascinating is that there is no single pattern. The common thread isn't where people work,it's that they understand when they work best. And increasingly, employers are recognizing that too. I think that's one of the biggest reasons we're seeing coworking membership sales continue to grow. Employers don't want to pay for office space that's sitting empty Monday through Friday from 9 to 5. A coworking membership gives employees access to a professional workspace when they need it, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional office. It supports a more nuanced workday, one built around productivity rather than presence.

Of course, flexibility without accountability doesn't work. Teams need overlap. Deadlines matter. Communication matters. Results matter. But if we're measuring outcomes instead of hours, we can stop pretending that productivity only happens within a narrow eight-hour window. The most productive people I know aren't working less. They're simply working when they're at their best.

Rethinking when people work

For years, the future-of-work conversation has centered on where people work.

->Office

->Home

->Hybrid

->Remote

I think we've been focused on the wrong variable. The bigger opportunity is rethinking when people work.

The future of work isn't remote, hybrid, or in-office. It's giving people the freedom to do their best work when they're actually at their best. Because if we're serious about innovation, we can't just measure activity. We have to protect the energy, creativity, and focus that make innovation possible in the first place.

And maybe that's how we finally make work work.