Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

by Serguey Shinder

For a long stretch of my career I measured my days by how full they felt. A calendar packed edge to edge, a chat window that never went quiet, a sense of being needed everywhere at once. I would end those days exhausted and mistake the exhaustion for accomplishment. If I was this tired, surely I had done something worth being tired about.

The illusion held until I was asked, in a quiet review, what I had actually finished that quarter. I started listing things and found, to my discomfort, that most of them were activities rather than outcomes. Meetings attended. Threads answered. Fires half-fought. I had been enormously busy and had moved almost nothing meaningfully forward.

That was a hard afternoon. I had built an identity around being responsive, and responsiveness, it turned out, is a way of letting other people set your priorities while feeling productive about it. Every ping I answered instantly was a small vote for their agenda over mine. I had confused motion with progress, and the confusion had cost me a year.

What changed was not a productivity system. I have tried enough of those to know they mostly rearrange the busyness. What changed was a single question I started asking at the end of each day: if this were the only day this week I worked, would I have chosen to spend it this way? Most days, the honest answer was no. I had spent them reacting.

Slowly I learned to protect the unglamorous, quiet work, the kind that produces something a month later and generates no pings along the way. That work never feels urgent. Nothing interrupts you to demand it. Which is exactly why it is the first thing to get crowded out, and exactly why it is usually the thing that matters most.

I still feel the pull of busyness. There is a genuine comfort in it. A full day asks nothing of you except that you keep moving, and it spares you the harder question of whether you are moving in the right direction. Reactive work is easy precisely because someone else has already decided it is important.

Now I try to end each week with at least one thing I can point to that would not exist if I had not deliberately chosen it over the noise. Some weeks I fail. But the measure has changed. I no longer trust the feeling of a full day. Fullness is not the same as usefulness, and I spent a year learning the difference the slow way.

– Serguey Asael Shinder