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The feedback landed in a first-month check-in at my job: “You’re great, but you can be hard to get hold of.” I didn’t know what to do with that. I was in the middle of getting my PhD, and I needed to find full-time work to raise funds for my studies. In contrast to the doctorate — which involved disappearing for long, quiet stretches to think hard about a single problem — this work seemed to center on how fast you answered a Slack message. I found this odd. Nobody who knows me would say that I’m a fast responder on any media: text, email, or call — partly thanks to my instinct to guard the hours when my brain is sharpest, spend them on the thing that matters most, and let the small stuff sit. Apparently, the currency at work, according to my manager, was different.

It took me years to understand that my manager and I were each half right, and that Cal Newport, an author and professor of computer science, had already mapped the whole misunderstanding.

Pseudo-productivity

Newport has a name for what my manager was really asking for: “pseudo-productivity,” which he describes as using “visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.” Knowledge work never inherited a clean measure of output, so we reached for the crudest one on the shelf, which is motion. Are you at your desk? Are you answering emails? Do you have the appearance of being focused, your calendar is full, and therefore the image of being important?

“It’s no longer you just see me in my office looking vaguely busy,” Newport says. “You can actually see every email I’m sending and how active I am in a Slack chat.” Responsiveness became the currency and the standard because it was a literally visible metric.

In my PhD, I’d been insulated from that nonsense. At the start, I was handed a key to an office and told that they would see me four years later. Good luck. My output was a dissertation and a few papers, to be judged by the quality of the thinking held within. So I’d learned to spend my best hours on the hardest problem in front of me and check email whenever I surfaced for air. And depending on when you might have seen me during the day, it might have looked like nothing (naps were commonplace). But I learned the hard way that a good 30 minutes was worth four hours, and a good three hours could be worth days of middling focus.

The instinct turned out to be sound, and the research is on my team here. Every quick reply we make (text, email, Slack, Teams, etc.) is a context switch, moving from one task to another. It takes a while for the brain to fully focus on the new task or return to the original one, so these are not cost-free switches. Psychologist Sophie Leroy named the tax: “attention residue,” the slice of your mind still stuck on the last thing when you start the next, and it takes time for you to reach full attention again.

Continuous partial attention

In his 2024 book Slow Productivity , Newport folds in a related idea from the researcher Linda Stone : “continuous partial attention,” the state where you are mostly on one task while checking Slack every few minutes.

“If you could look inside your skull,” Newport says, “what you see is a train wreck.” Stay reachable all day, and no single task ever gets your full capacity, which means almost all of us are living in a state of constant, unfocused attention.

Still, my manager was right about some things. Complete non-responsiveness, on its own, is not discipline. It’s just being hard to reach, and possibly being an ass. What the PhD never forced me to build, because I mostly worked alone, was the other half of the equation: a way for people to trust that the important things would still get picked up on handoffs.

Fortunately, Newport’s real argument is not “withdraw.” It is to “educate and replace.” You take the availability people have learned to lean on, and you swap it for a system they can lean on instead. The predictability matters for others to be able to trust you.

Two mechanisms do most of the work. The first is office hours: set windows, daily or every other day, where you are genuinely reachable. “Jump on the phone, jump in my office, jump on Zoom, we can figure this out in five minutes.” ( My addition to this is to genuinely and consistently hold those boundaries. If you don’t respect them, no one else will. ) The second is the docket-clearing meeting: a shared document where anything non-urgent gets parked, then worked through together a few times a week in alignment with the highest priorities for your boss and/or the team.

Together, these help you move away from the promise of “I’ll answer the second you ask” (sacrificing the important for the urgent) and toward “nothing you need will fall through the cracks.” That second promise is the one people actually want resolved.

So please, don’t detonate your inbox this week. This is a slow build over time. Pick a single channel and give it a structure other people can see. Post two office-hour windows, and when a “quick q” lands outside them, reply once with where it goes: “I am focused on X right now. Let’s take this at 2 tomorrow, or drop it on the team doc, and we’ll clear it Thursday.”

The first few times may feel difficult. That’s ok. It will be an ongoing navigation and negotiation with others, but if you stick with it, you can get things done on schedule, with your full attention instead of a fragment of it. Non-responsiveness protects your best work only when it comes with a visible promise that the important things still land. Without the system, you’re just hard to reach. With it, you’re exercising judgment about where your attention goes to do the most important work.

What could you make next week if your sharpest three hours belonged to the most important work instead of the false urgency of your inbox?

This article The case for not responding to every little work message is featured on Big Think .