[strken]

I think busyness, work hours, productivity, and context switching are all conflated with each other. They're interrelated but not the same.

When a lot of people talk about being busy, they're not so much saying "I had to do 50 hours of focused work this week," they're saying "I did 10 hours of focused work, because clients kept emailing me and we had a bunch of meetings, then our biggest customer's DB got corrupted for preventable reasons and we had to recover it, but we never test our restore process and so it all went wrong."

This is touched on in the grey box side-note and elsewhere in the article. Writing software is not usually a factory floor job where hours worked is linearly correlated with output. Removing slack from your team (not the app, the "free time" that gets filled with urgent incoming tasks or maintenance work) has long-lasting consequences for everyone that may be counterproductive.