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You’ve spent three weeks working on a concept. Then a short message arrives: the project won’t be moving forward for now. Other priorities.
Maybe you’ve been sending out the same report every Friday for months and have started to wonder who actually reads it. There’s no criticism, but there are no questions either. In fact, there’s no reaction at all.
Nothing about your job has formally changed. You’re still being paid, your responsibilities are the same, and you may even be just as busy as before. And yet, over time, some things can start to feel harder. You begin later, check your work less carefully, or take longer with things that once came easily.
Two experiments show surprisingly well why this can happen.
Eleven Figures Versus Seven
Dan Ariely and two colleagues asked students to build small Lego figures. They received two dollars for the first figure and a little less for each one after that. They could continue for as long as they wanted and stop whenever they chose.
For one group, the completed figures stayed on the table. With each round, they could see what they had already accomplished. For the other group, the experimenter took apart a completed figure as soon as the participant started building the next one. The pieces went back into the box and were later used again.
The task was the same for both groups, and so was the payment. Yet there was a clear difference. Participants whose figures remained on the table built around eleven on average. The others completed only about seven and stopped earlier.
The researchers called this second condition “Sisyphus,” after the figure from Greek mythology who repeatedly pushes a stone up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again. What mattered was not that the work had become more difficult, or that anyone had criticized it. It simply kept disappearing in front of the people who had just completed it.
Two Seconds of Attention
In a second experiment, the researchers looked at something even closer to everyday office life. Participants were given sheets filled with long strings of letters and asked to find particular combinations. Once again, the payment decreased with each additional task.
This time, there were three conditions. In the first, participants wrote their names on the sheet. When they were finished, the experimenter took it, looked over it briefly, nodded and placed it on a pile. There was no praise and no comment.
In the second group, the experimenter also took the sheet but placed it on the pile immediately, without looking at it. In the third, the sheet was fed directly into a shredder in front of the participant.
You might expect the shredder to make the biggest difference. What was more surprising, however, was how similarly the second and third groups behaved. Whether the work was placed on a pile without being looked at or destroyed immediately made far less difference to people’s willingness to continue than you might expect.
The largest gap was between those groups and the one whose work had been briefly acknowledged. Those participants kept working for longer, in some cases even when there was almost nothing left to earn. There had been no praise and no detailed feedback. A brief look and a nod had been enough.
What Remains of This in the Office
In everyday working life, of course, people rarely destroy someone’s work in front of them. But work can disappear in far less dramatic ways.
A concept is sent by email and never mentioned again. Figures are prepared for a presentation, but you never find out whether they were actually used. A project is stopped after weeks of work without anyone explaining what led to the decision.
Usually, there’s no bad intention behind this. Perhaps the report was read, the analysis was useful, and the concept genuinely influenced a decision. The person who did the work simply never hears about it.
Over time, that can make a difference. If you never know what became of your work, it becomes harder to judge its value. Why spend the extra half hour? Why revise a sentence for the third time if you never find out whether anyone even read that far?
This usually doesn’t happen consciously. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to give only eighty percent from now on. Instead, a feeling gradually develops that the extra effort doesn’t seem to make any visible difference.
Recognition May Require Less Than We Think
What makes the second experiment especially interesting is how little was needed. The experimenter didn’t praise the participants or tell them their work was especially important. He simply looked at the sheet, reacted briefly, and put it aside.
Perhaps recognition at work is sometimes made more complicated than it needs to be. Not every task requires elaborate praise. Often, a small piece of feedback is enough to show someone that their work actually reached another person.
“We used the figures in your appendix yesterday to make the decision.”
“We’re taking your second proposal into the next version.”
“We’re not moving forward with the project, but your analysis showed us that the effort isn’t worth it at the moment.”
These are not grand gestures. But they communicate something that a general “Thanks, looks good” does not necessarily convey: someone actually paid attention. At the same time, they answer a question that can otherwise remain open: What happened to my work?
Even a Rejected Project Can Still Have an Outcome
Just because something isn’t implemented doesn’t automatically mean the work was pointless. Concepts are rejected, campaigns are stopped, presentations are never given, and priorities shift. In organisations, that is part of normal working life.
The problem is more often that no one explains how the decision was reached. Someone who spends three weeks on an idea and is only told that the topic will not be pursued has a very different experience from someone who hears: “Your analysis showed that the market is currently too small, so we’re stopping here.”
The outcome is the same in both cases. The project ends. But in the second case, the person at least knows what role their work played in the decision.
Perhaps that is the important difference from the Sisyphus experiment. Not everything we work on has to remain visibly on the table. But it helps to know why it is no longer there.
When You’re the One Hearing Very Little Back
If you’ve noticed that certain tasks have started to feel harder, or that you’re putting less energy into them than you used to, it may be worth looking at the feedback surrounding that work. Do you actually know what happens to the things you hand over? Do you find out which of them are useful and which are not?
Sometimes, a simple question is enough. What happened to the concept? Was the analysis useful? Is the report still needed, or should it be changed? Those questions don’t have to sound accusatory. Often, feedback is missing simply because no one realised that the other person needed it.
It can also help to make the effect of your own work a little more visible. Not with a complicated productivity system, but perhaps with a short note at the end of the week: What did I finish? Which decision did I help prepare? Who did I make something easier for? What is different today compared with Monday?
That doesn’t replace feedback from other people. But it can stop the week from feeling like a collection of tasks that simply vanished the moment you sent them.
This Week: Really Look Once
If someone sends you something over the next few days that took time and effort, try responding to one of those things with something a little more specific than “Thanks” or a thumbs-up.
It doesn’t have to be praise. One sentence is enough to show that you genuinely looked at it: “The structure on page three helped me” or “The figure in the second section was important for the decision.”
Then you can ask the same question in the other direction. Think of something you handed over in the past few weeks and never heard about again. Ask what happened to it.
The answer may be completely unremarkable. But at least you’ll know where your work ended up.
