Three years into full remote and i’ve noticed my relationship with “being busy” has completely changed and i’m not sure it’s entirely good.

When i worked in an office i was visibly busy pretty much all day. Even when i wasn’t doing much i was present, at my desk, in meetings, walking between floors. Busyness was ambient and automatic and i got a kind of passive social credit for it just by showing up and existing in a shared space. Remote work stripped all of that away. Nobody sees me. There’s no ambient evidence of effort. And what i’ve noticed over three years is that i’ve become genuinely more productive in the measurable sense but also significantly more anxious about whether i’m being perceived as productive, which is a different thing entirely. I check my messages more than i need to. i respond faster than is probably necessary because i’m aware that nobody can see me and a slow response might be interpreted as absence. In the office if i didn’t reply for two hours it was fine because people could see i was in a meeting or on a call or just clearly existing. Now a two hour gap feels like something i have to justify even when i’m doing deep work. I think what i actually miss isn’t the office itself, i don’t miss the commute or the open plan noise or the bad coffee. What i miss is the effortless visibility. The way presence itself communicated something. I’ve had to learn to communicate output instead of presence and that’s probably healthier in the long run but it required more conscious rewiring than i expected. Anyone else find that the anxiety didn’t go away, it just changed shape?