I saw a TikTok last week that made me want to hurl my MacBook into the neighbor’s pool. It was a guy showing off a $25 ‘mouse jiggler’ he bought on Amazon so his Slack status would stay green while he took a nap. The comments were full of people calling him a genius. But here is the thing: if your employees are buying hardware to trick you into thinking they are working, you haven’t built a team. You’ve built a digital prison. And you’re the underpaid warden.

I’ve been on both sides. I’ve been the guy sweating because my ‘active’ percentage on Hubstaff dropped to 60% because I spent twenty minutes thinking about a problem away from my keyboard. And I’ve been the manager who felt that pit of anxiety when I didn’t see a green dot next to a developer’s name at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday. It’s a sickness. We’ve replaced actual leadership with a perverse form of digital voyeurism, and it’s making everyone miserable and, frankly, less productive.

The time I tried to be a digital warden (and failed)

Back in 2019, I was managing a small creative team at a boutique agency in Chicago. We went remote six months before the pandemic hit, and I was terrified. I was convinced that without the physical ‘vibe’ of the office, everyone would just spend their days watching Netflix. So, I convinced the owner to let us try Teramind. It tracked everything. Keystrokes, screenshots every five minutes, ‘idle time’—the whole dystopian suite.

I remember sitting there on a Thursday afternoon, scrolling through screenshots of my lead designer’s desktop. I saw she had a tab open for a local animal shelter. I felt this surge of ‘gotcha’ energy. I called her into a Zoom meeting and made some passive-aggressive comment about ‘staying focused on the client deck.’ The look on her face wasn’t guilt. It was pure, unadulterated disgust. She quit three weeks later. She was my best producer, and I lost her because I cared more about her browser tabs than her output. I was an idiot. I spent the next four months doing her job plus mine because I couldn’t find a replacement. That was the turning point. I realized that surveillance is just a tax you pay for being too lazy to define what ‘good work’ actually looks like.

Surveillance is a confession of managerial failure.

Why I changed my mind (and why you should too)

An inspiring coffee-themed text displayed with Scrabble tiles on a white background.

I used to think that accountability required visibility. I was completely wrong. Accountability requires clarity. If I don’t know if my team is working unless I see their mouse moving, it means I haven’t given them a clear enough goal. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. If the work is getting done, on time, at a high quality, why do I care if they took a three-hour lunch to go to the gym? I don’t. Or at least, I shouldn’t.

I know people will disagree with this, but I genuinely believe that if you work from a coffee shop, you’re probably only operating at 40% capacity. The noise, the tiny tables, the spotty Wi-Fi—it’s a performance of work, not actual deep work. I hate the ‘digital nomad’ aesthetic. But even so, I would never install software to stop someone from doing it. If they can hit their KPIs while sipping an overpriced latte in Lisbon, more power to them. I might be wrong about the coffee shop thing—maybe some people thrive in chaos—but my bias stands. I just don’t have to enforce it with software.

The ‘No-Spying’ Step-by-Step

If you want to ditch the spyware, you have to replace it with a system that actually functions. You can’t just stop tracking and hope for the best. That’s how companies go bust. Here is how I do it now:

  1. Define the ‘Definition of Done’ for every single task. Don’t just say ‘write the blog post.’ Say ‘write a 1,200-word post with 3 internal links and a meta description by Thursday at 4:00 PM.’
  2. The Friday Demo. This is non-negotiable. Every Friday, we have a 30-minute sync where everyone shows one thing they finished. If you have nothing to show, it’s obvious. You don’t need a keystroke logger to see a lack of progress.
  3. Shift to Asynchronous Communication. Stop the ‘quick huddles.’ I hate Slack huddles. They are just a way to hijack someone’s brain because you’re too disorganized to write an email. Use Loom or just write a thoughtful message.
  4. Trust by Default. This sounds like HR fluff, but it’s practical. Assume they are working until the output proves otherwise.

I tested this ‘outcome-only’ approach over 18 months across 42 different projects. I tracked the delta between estimated completion and actual delivery. In the surveillance era, we were 12% over schedule on average. In the trust era? We were 4% under. People work faster when they aren’t pretending to work.

The tools I refuse to touch

I have a personal vendetta against Monday.com. I know, everyone loves the colorful little boxes and the ‘done’ animations. But to me, it feels like a tool designed for people who want to feel busy rather than actually do anything. It’s ‘surveillance-lite.’ It encourages people to spend two hours a day updating their status instead of doing the work. I’ve banned it in my current setup. We use a simple Notion board and GitHub. If it’s not in the repo, it didn’t happen.

And don’t even get me started on ‘Time Doctor.’ If a company asks me to install that, I’m out the door. It’s digital handcuffs. It treats adults like naughty children. Total waste of time.

The part that’s actually hard

Leading without spying is actually much harder than using software. It requires you to be a better communicator. You have to actually know what your team does. You can’t just look at a dashboard and see ‘Green = Good.’ You have to read their code, look at their designs, and understand the nuances of their challenges. It’s exhausting. It’s much easier to just be a creep with a screen-monitoring app.

But the payoff is that your team doesn’t hate you. They don’t buy mouse jigglers. They actually tell you when they are struggling because they aren’t afraid of a ‘low activity’ alert triggering a meeting with HR. I still get nervous sometimes. I still wonder what the team is doing on a sunny Friday afternoon. But then I remember the Chicago agency and the look on that designer’s face.

Are you actually managing their work, or are you just managing your own anxiety?