I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.
I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.
Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.
This sounds like the tragedy of commons. If someone arranges a meeting with you, it is more likely that you will work on their project afterwards, because you have already been thinking about it during the meeting, you already have the context in your mind, and probably a few ideas about what to do next...
Therefore, everyone starts demanding meetings from you, because they have nothing to gain by not doing so -- you wouldn't use the extra time to work on their projects, but on the projects of those who insisted on meetings.
If you have so many meetings that you can't get actual work done, that sucks for everyone, but again, they have nothing to gain by canceling their meeting, unless everyone else does the same thing. But the others won't do the same thing, because now you have time to work on some projects, and they prefer those to be their projects.
I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.