I hate mouse jigglers

People are selling a device that physically jiggles your computer mouse so your status light stays green. Other people are buying it. This is where we are now.

If you are a senior leader and your organisation has a culture where people feel they need to purchase a small piece of plastic to simulate continuous activity so nobody questions their commitment, you have a serious problem. And the problem is not the person buying the jiggler.

The problem is that your organisation has confused presence with performance. It has equated the green dot with contribution. It has built a system where the most important skill a person can develop is the ability to look busy, not the ability to do good work.

Steady State is for Machines

This is what happens when we adopt the machine metaphor without questioning it. The organisation is an engine that should run at a constant RPM. The people are parts that should perform at a predictable, measurable, flat-line rate of output. Eight hours a day, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year. The same energy, the same pace, the same responsiveness.

I certainly don’t work that way. Humans have seasons of high motivation and seasons where everything feels like wading through treacle. The afternoon where your brain simply refuses to cooperate, and the week where you are sharper than you have ever been. These aren’t defects. They’re being a thinking, feeling person.

The mouse jiggler exposes the mind-blowing absurdity at the heart of the steady-state myth. If you reward visible “activity” over actual contribution, people will optimise for visible activity. They will schedule emails to send at 10pm. They will join meetings they do not need to attend. They will leave their desks cluttered so it looks like they never left. They will, eventually, buy a small device that lies on their behalf.

And you will look at all this activity and nod approvingly. "Look how busy everyone is." No. Look how terrified everyone is of being caught not producing for fifteen minutes.

Organisations that worship the green dot are not just annoying (although they are definitely annoying)... they’re dumb. They’re actively destroying the conditions for good work. Deep thinking requires space, silence, and the freedom to stare at a wall without fearing someone will mistake it for idleness. And even work that doesn’t necessarily require deep thinking, when performed by people, isn’t done in a steady state for however many hours a week, however many weeks a year.

When you penalise the natural rhythm of human work, you get two things: compliance and burnout. People learn to perform the rituals of productivity without actually producing anything of substance. And they exhaust themselves doing it, because pretending to be a machine is far more draining than actually being one.

If you are leading a team and your primary indicator of performance is whether people are visibly active, you have abdicated your responsibility to measure what matters. You have chosen the easy metric over the meaningful one.

Human pace is human. It ebbs and flows. It has dead hours and dead weeks and bursts of brilliance that cannot be predicted or scheduled. Your job as a leader is not to iron these out. Your job is to create an environment where the bursts are possible and the ebbs are survivable.

The mouse jiggler is not the symptom. Your culture is the symptom. The jiggler is just the placebo people buy when the real medicine, a leader who trusts them to do their job, is unavailable.

Until next week,

Madeleine

I help accomplished professionals untangle difficult career questions so they can thrive in work and life.

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