10 Subtle Clues Your Coworker Is Just Pretending to Work

10 Subtle Clues Your Coworker Is Just Pretending to Work

Ever suspect a colleague is sprinting on a treadmill that isn’t plugged in? Office performance theater is a real art form, and some coworkers deserve Oscars for their daily performances. Spotting it can save your team time, sanity, and missed deadlines.

Read on for ten subtle, hilarious, and painfully familiar tells that someone’s only pretending to be productive.

1. Their Inbox Is Always “Empty”

Pristine inboxes are impressive until you notice nothing important ever gets answered. The illusion of zero unread messages often hides a graveyard of archived threads, snoozed reminders, and deleted requests.

They’ll brag about “Inbox Zero” while the rest of the team waits on their approvals like it’s a customer support line from 2004. When pressed, they cite “filter rules” and “system automations,” as if technology mysteriously solved accountability.

Colleagues forward screenshots showing unanswered questions, and suddenly a “spam filter” becomes the handy culprit. Meanwhile, priorities sink beneath a glossy veneer of tidiness. The boss sees a serene mailbox and assumes efficiency, unaware of the digital rug-sweeping happening daily.

Real productivity leaves a trail: replies, threads, and decisions. Performance cosplay leaves silence, then panic. If transparency is sunlight, these folks live in blackout curtains.

2. They’re Always “In a Meeting”

Their calendar looks like Tetris on hard mode, yet nothing ever lands. Meetings appear mysteriously titled—“sync,” “touch-base,” “alignment”—with guests you’ve never heard of and agendas that vanish upon scrutiny.

Ask what was decided and you’ll get high-level buzzwords that vaporize on contact with specifics. It’s busyness cosplay: a parade of status calls that produce precisely zero status.

Meanwhile, they’re never available when deadlines loom, because there’s always “one more quick thing.” Somehow, every discussion gets bumped to the next discussion, like kicking a can into a time loop. The result is momentum theater: motion without progress.

Truly valuable meetings have pre-reads, actions, and owners. These ones have vibes, nods, and escapes. If calendars were currency, they’d be rich; if outcomes were, they’d be bankrupt.

3. You Never See Actual Work From Them

Grand updates sound impressive until you realize nothing materializes. You’ve heard about frameworks, pillars, and roadmaps; you haven’t seen a deliverable since last quarter’s kickoff.

When asked for examples, they reference “ongoing iterations” and point to slides that are somehow always “in draft.” It’s a magic trick: attention drawn to process so you don’t ask about outcomes.

Colleagues quietly do the heavy lifting while this person narrates “progress” in charismatic color. Weekly check-ins devolve into the same whirlwind of jargon with no attachments. Deadlines slip into “soft targets,” then “learnings,” then “retrospectives.”

Real work leaves artifacts: code, reports, docs, shipped tickets. Smoke and mirrors leave calendar invites and feelings. If you can’t point to a finished thing with a link, a date, and an owner, you might be watching productivity pantomime.

4. They’re the Masters of Delegation

Collaboration is wonderful; abdication is not. They brandish “cross-functional synergy” as a wand that makes every task someone else’s responsibility.

Assignments arrive gift-wrapped with flattery—“You’re perfect for this!”—and vanish from their to-do list like smoke. By the time the credit rolls, their name sits top-billed while the actual doers are a footnote.

Requests often arrive with vague requirements and urgent timelines, ensuring the helper must also do the thinking. If pushed for details, they escalate to leadership to “unblock,” conveniently framing themselves as coordinators. The delegation ladder turns into a slide straight to your desk.

Healthy delegation includes ownership, accountability, and follow-up. This version includes calendar invites and disappearing acts. If their main skill is forwarding emails with “Thoughts?” they’re not leading—just shedding weight.

5. They’re Always “Researching”

Somehow, the “discovery phase” never discovers anything useful. They browse, bookmark, and brainstorm until the project’s half-life expires. When questioned, they produce a gorgeous Notion page of links and quotes that don’t answer the actual problem. Research becomes an infinity pool—serene, bottomless, and impossible to exit.

Ask for a decision, and you’ll get a promise to “validate assumptions” next week. Meanwhile, competitors ship features while your colleague polishes a reading list. The team’s velocity slows, but hey, the documentation looks exquisite.

Good research narrows questions, informs trade-offs, and ends with a recommendation. Endless research expands scope and delays commitment. If there’s no summary, no next steps, and no owner, the experiment is you—testing your patience.

6. Their Status Is Always “Online”

Green dots can’t ship work. They’re omnipresent on Slack, Teams, and email—reacting with emojis, dropping one-liners, and popping into channels like a productivity hologram. Hours pass with activity but no artifacts. The illusion of responsiveness replaces the reality of results.

Colleagues remember the chatter, not the completion. Their presence becomes a comfort blanket for managers scanning dashboards: “Look, they’re active!” Meanwhile, tickets age like fine wine nobody wants to drink. When deadlines arrive, they pivot to “unexpected blockers.”

Healthy availability includes quiet stretches for deep work and visible outcomes. Perpetual presence usually means context-switching and avoidance. If someone always replies within seconds but never attaches a deliverable, you’re looking at a status light show, not productivity.

7. They Talk More Than They Work

Conversation is free; conclusions cost effort. They conjure sprawling discussions that chase their tails, complete with icebreakers and parking lots. Brainstorms end with sticky walls and no owners. By the next week, you’re rehashing the same points like a sitcom rerun.

They thrive on the social currency of meetings—speaking airtime, not shipped outcomes. The louder the performance, the thinner the action items. People leave inspired, then realize no one knows who’s doing what by when.

Effective talk compresses ambiguity and assigns work. Empty talk expands ambiguity and eats calendars. When the soundtrack is endless “great points,” but the credits roll with blanks, you’ve witnessed productivity karaoke.

8. They’re Suddenly “Experts” in Excuses

Excuses evolve faster than software patches. One day it’s a vendor delay; the next, a VPN glitch or a mysterious permissions issue. They speak fluent “blocker,” peppering updates with passive voice—“wasn’t provided,” “got delayed,” “is being looked into.” Accountability gets washed out like a whiteboard after a storm.

Curiously, the excuses never come with a paper trail: no ticket numbers, no timestamps, no evidence. When the obstacle disappears, the milestone moves anyway. It’s progress charades.

Good operators surface risks early and show receipts—support threads, logs, mitigation steps. Chronic excuse-makers show fog. If every sprint review sounds like a tale of external forces, you’re not hearing updates; you’re hearing mythology.

9. They’re Great at Taking Credit

Victories have many parents; this colleague brings adoption papers. The moment something lands, they appear with a summary email framing themselves as the conductor of a symphony they never rehearsed. They sprinkle “we” generously while positioning their name at the top of the cc list. Praise sticks because they arrive first to narrate the story.

Meanwhile, the doers draft in silence. When recognition is scarce, loud narrative beats quiet delivery. Leaders, time-starved, accept the elevator pitch and move on.

Healthy teams cite specific contributions with receipts: commits, slides, owners. Credit poachers wield headlines and ellipses. If celebration emails feature them as the hero but their Jira board looks like a desert, you’ve met a credit connoisseur.

10. Their Workload Never Changes

While everyone else juggles flaming bowling pins, they calmly rotate a single foam ball. Requests bounce off with a serene “bandwidth is tight,” yet their task board remains eerily stable. Peaks and valleys hit the team, but their graph looks like a flatline on vacation. Somehow, priorities always land elsewhere.

They avoid commitments that create measurable outputs, opting for “advisory” roles and “support” tasks that resist deadlines. Quarterly reviews become a masterclass in selective reporting.

Real workloads breathe with the business—surges, crunches, deliveries. A perpetually light plate suggests ducking, not balance. If the only thing changing is the story, not the sprint, you’re seeing work minimalism masquerading as Zen.