A client recently told me about one of those days at the office. You know the type: she’d walked in with a crystal-clear mission to finally conquer that strategic report that had been haunting her for weeks. The plan was beautiful in its simplicity. A few hours of focused writing, quick sandwich at her desk, and voilà – task triumphantly ticked off by day’s end.

But by 5pm? That report hadn’t even seen the light of day.

Instead, her carefully crafted day had been completely hijacked by meetings that could’ve been emails, random desk drive-bys, a coffee walk with a colleague who needed to vent about another colleague, and being pulled into not one but TWO impromptu brainstorms.

“I got nothing real done,” she told me. “Total write-off of a day.”

Sound familiar?

This sentiment is so common, especially among hybrid workers. We’ve been conditioned to equate productivity with tangible output – the deep, focused work that we can point to and say “I did that today.”

Deep work is essential (you won’t get any arguments from me on that). It’s often when we make progress on our most meaningful projects.

But here’s the problem: when we physically go into the office, our days rarely unfold as pristine blocks of uninterrupted focus time.

They’re messy. Social. Reactive. Someone interrupts you with a “quick question” (that’s never actually quick). There’s the hallway catch-up, the shared lunch break, the post-meeting debrief that goes off-topic but surfaces something unexpectedly important.

All of which makes the day feel unproductive – at least by traditional definitions.

But I want to offer a reframe: For days in the office, that is the work.

The spontaneous collaboration. The unplanned mentoring moment where you helped someone navigate a tricky situation. The energy boost from sharing a ridiculous story with team mates over lunch. The subtle but critical cues you pick up from being in the same physical space. Someone’s stressed posture, their confused expression during a presentation, their genuine excitement about a project. The sense-making that happens not in the meeting itself, but in those golden two minutes afterward when someone turns to you and says, “Wait, what did that actually mean?”

These seemingly “unproductive” moments build trust. They foster culture. They keep people aligned. And they’re really hard to replicate in back-to-back Zooms or Slack threads.

This year at Inventium (where we have proudly been remote-first for five years), we instituted monthly co-working days. For one day every month, we all now gather at a co-working space in Melbourne (our go-to is The Commons) and we spend the day together.

Our schedule is ALL about connection. Some of this involves team connection, some is 1:1 connection, and some is client connection.

Not an ounce of Deep Work gets done on these days. Nor do we expect it to be.

Productivity isn’t just about demolishing your to-do list (though that feels amazing, I won’t lie). It’s also about how well your team works together, how aligned you are, and how connected you feel.

So next time you leave the office feeling like your to-do list didn’t budge an inch, try asking yourself a different question:

How did I help create a workplace people actually want to be part of?

Chances are, far more than you realise. And that’s productivity too – just not the kind you can measure with a tick box.

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