I have great work ethic. And it's one of my worst traits. I've developed a solid reputation—people know they can rely on me because I get things done. But there's a cost to this that I failed to appreciate.

Work ethic makes you good at responding, which means you get more to respond to. Work finds you. More tasks lead to more completion, which brings more validation, which attracts more tasks. The cycle reinforces itself. The dangerous part is that being busy feels productive. Clearing your inbox, knocking out tasks, staying responsive—it all counts. You're perpetually in motion. But motion isn't the same as direction.

The hard thinking I sideline never sends reminder emails. The big strategic questions don't fight for attention the way Slack does. They sit there, patient and ignored. What fades is the unstructured time to sit with genuinely hard problems. There's no todo list for this.

The alternative is strategic thinking—or what I've started calling selective unresponsiveness. I wrote about the mechanics of this in my post on email filters, but the core idea is simple: you have to protect time from the noise. The problem is it's hard to be selectively unresponsive without looking negligent. They produce the same external output—silence—but come from completely different generators. It also feels wrong because there's no artifact to point to. You can't prove you were productive to yourself or someone else; there's no completed task list.

Work ethic optimizes tactics and execution. Strategic thinking optimizes strategy and direction. Bad direction executed well still gets you to the wrong place. One insight that reshapes your strategy is worth more than x completed tasks, where x is your leverage factor. But it's hard to find that insight if you're too busy being responsive.

The real tension is that you can't have both at full capacity. For some, work ethic is the default—it's rewarded, visible, measurable. Strategic thinking requires defending apparent idleness in a culture that rewards apparent productivity. You have to be okay looking like you're doing less than you're capable of. You have to believe that not-doing-things can be higher leverage than doing-things. You have to resist the dopamine hit of clearing your queue in favor of the discomfort of sitting with ambiguity. The deeper problem: strategic thinking requires betting on yourself. You can think deeply, pick the wrong direction, and have nothing to show for it. With work ethic, at least you completed something. With strategic thinking, you might just be wrong—and there's no safety net of visible output to fall back on.

Being too good at responding means you never stop long enough to ask what you should be responding to.