Managers direct progress. Managers and designers report on progress. When reporting on progress, there is a natural tendency to pull focus to recent activities. This tendency is partially because what has most recently been worked on and discussed lingers in collective memory and is subject to recency bias. What is current is fresh in our minds and can be described with the most possible detailed accuracy. The ability to draw upon minutiae leads to the proclivity to do so. Perhaps you have been to a meeting and experienced this phenomenon which occurs often in group forums.
Everyone wants to report on breakthroughs. Breakthroughs are direct progress. Breakthroughs though happen infrequently and sporadically. In lieu of breakthroughs, an approach to demonstrating individual value is through perceived effort. Long-winded descriptiveness serves as a proxy for that effort.
Recency doesn't necessarily correlate with importance and busy doesn't necessarily correlate with effective. The mindset seems to be that a regular cadence of busyness is a functional input that equates to a predictable linear output of progress. Pushing on a brick wall is difficult and can be a real time suck but serves no goal (besides getting shapely glutes).
“Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action” - Tim Ferriss
The biggest cause of perpetual busyness isn't a lack of resources or the nature of difficult work, as most think. This is evident when new personnel are added and the level of busyness doesn't decrease (Parkinson's law). Busyness is a byproduct of prioritization and discipline (the lack thereof). The best tool to alleviate the cycle of unproductive churn and long hours without an end is the urgent/important (Eisenhower) Matrix. Busyness is caused by letting the urgent take precedence over the important.
A coworker messages you "Taco Tuesday!" This is urgent! With every passing minute you don't reply with a GIF of a dancing taco, the message will lose impact. Is Taco Tuesday important? In the grand scheme of things, very. In this particular instance, no. Flash sales, TikTok, other people's agendas, these are urgent and unimportant time sucks that creep into our energy resources and ultimately inundate us. Like small holes in a ship, they only slow us down until they sink us.
Imminent deadlines force importance. When the luxury of time is stripped away, the urgent and important quadrant suddenly becomes paramount and the what and who crystal clear. The crunch time surrounding a deliverable changes the nature of trivialities from welcome distractions or small nuisances to key obstacles.
Deadlines are forced discipline. Self-imposed discipline is another, far better, strategy for focusing on the important. With self-imposed discipline, critical work needn't be compressed to the end when margins are tight and the opportunity to adapt is severely limited.
Busyness is a false idol. Busyness can look and feel good because it masquerades as progress under the linear progress delusion. Chasing shiny distractions is a busyness hallmark.
"All that glitters is not gold." - Aphorism
Busyness conflates quantity with quality. Some actually use busyness as procrastination to self-sabotage against progress because progress poses fear of ownership and going deeper into the realm of the unknown. The busyness mindset incentivizes short sightedness and waste instead of what's the most efficient and effective in the long run. Busyness begets more busyness. The busy ones, the scramblers, negatively impact the culture. They're creating more noise, kicking up more dust, getting in more face time and working longer hours during crunch time. In this way, they make the ones who aren't staying late, aren't vocalizing all the difficulties and aren't reinforcing a cycle of last-minute triaging actually look bad for being done on time. In a case of perverse incentives, the busyness people are rewarded as heroes for troubleshooting last minute and high visibility struggles caused by their own lack of proactiveness.
The mindset must be disciplined and fearless towards effectiveness. Let's get busy, nope, let's get effective.