Productivity culture is rooted in the performance of work: making a to-do list and crossing items off it, achieving in-box zero, writing and sending memos, or holding meetings, or completing tasks that transmute the intangible products of knowledge work into something tangible. Some of this work serves a purpose, some of it stinks of desperation, but all of it offers the worker the feeling that they’re productive, so visible and undeniable that others feel it too.