I had a conversation last week that’s stuck with me. Someone was describing their week — back-to-back meetings, an inbox wrestled down to zero, a colour-coded calendar that would make a project manager weep with joy. They were exhausted and, oddly, proud of it. So I asked a simple question: what did you actually make? Long pause. The honest answer was “not much.” A full week of motion, and almost nothing to show for it.
We’ve quietly redefined productivity to mean busyness. How fast you reply. How many minutes you squeeze from a day. How efficiently you move between tasks. But strip the word back and the heart of it isn’t the activity — it’s the product. The thing that exists now that didn’t exist on Monday morning. The proposal that’s written. The decision that’s made. The client problem that’s solved. Everything else is just noise around the signal. We measure the noise because it’s loud and easy to count. The signal is quieter, and it’s the only part that actually matters.
Motion is easy to measure. Output is the hard part.
The reason we drift toward efficiency is that it’s comfortable. You can count emails sent and meetings attended. You feel the satisfaction of a tidy inbox. But none of those are products — they’re scaffolding. I’ve watched people spend an entire afternoon “getting organised” and call it a good day’s work, when really they just rearranged the furniture. The week looked productive. Nothing was produced.
This is where I think Copilot changes the conversation, and not in the way the marketing suggests. The point isn’t that it makes you faster at the busywork. It’s that it takes the busywork off the table, so what’s left is the actual product. When I ask Copilot in Outlook to summarise a long thread and draft the reply, I haven’t saved twenty minutes — I’ve removed a task that was never the point. The reply was never my product. The thinking behind it was.
Spend the time you save on something worth showing.
That’s the part people miss. The danger isn’t that Copilot does the low-value work — it’s what you do with the gap it opens up. If Copilot pulls your meeting notes and action items together in Teams, and you spend that reclaimed hour clearing three more emails, you’ve efficiency-ed yourself in a circle. But if you use it to write the strategy document you’ve been avoiding, or to think properly about a client’s problem in Word with Copilot helping shape the argument, the tool has earned its place. Or you point Copilot at a messy spreadsheet in Excel, ask it what the numbers are really saying, and walk into the meeting with an answer instead of a pile of data. The output, not the speed, is the scorecard.
I’ve started asking myself a blunt question at the end of each day, and I’d suggest you try it. Not “was I busy?” — I’m always busy. The question is: what can I point to? What did I produce that someone else could pick up, use, or judge? Some days the answer is a single solid thing, and that beats a day filled with forty small tasks that vanish the moment they’re done.
Copilot has made me more honest about this, because once the friction is gone, you can’t hide behind it. The empty afternoon is exposed for what it is. That’s the real shift worth watching — not doing things faster, but finally being able to ask whether the thing was worth doing at all.
CIAOPS 