You stand up to refill your water, and by the time you sit back down your little green dot has gone grey. Two minutes later someone messages: “Hey, you around?”

The dot was supposed to tell colleagues whether you were available. It has quietly become something else, a tiny public record of whether you are working. Presence stopped being information and turned into performance.

The jacket on the chair, upgraded

Offices have always had a signal for this. People left a jacket on the back of the chair when they went to lunch, so anyone passing would assume they were somewhere in the building. It was a small lie, and everyone understood it.

The chat app made that lie automatic, and removed your option to tell it. You cannot leave a jacket on a green dot. The software decides whether you are present, using the last time your mouse moved or your keyboard clicked.

Compare it with the office of 1995. If a colleague’s desk was empty, you had no idea whether she was in a meeting, at the dentist or eating a sandwich on the stairs, and nobody thought it their business. The old office was full of unexplained absences. The new one has almost none.

Before the dot there was the away message. In the days of early instant messengers, people wrote their own: a song lyric, a joke, “back in 10”. It was a sentence with an author, which is exactly what a dot lacks.

The jacket could mislead, but it misled in your favour, and a colleague could always walk over and check. The dot misleads in nobody’s favour, because there is no one to argue with. It simply testifies, and nobody asks it for context.

A dot cannot tell resting from absent

Here is the mechanism. A presence indicator measures activity, and activity is a poor stand-in for work. Reading a long document, thinking through a problem or walking to the window to untangle an argument all look identical to leaving the room.

Picture a Tuesday at 2:15 p.m. You have been reading a contract for twenty minutes without touching the keyboard. The dot goes yellow, a message pops up asking “Everything ok?”, and the contract is gone from your head.

So the dot rewards the visible and punishes the invisible. The person who answers instantly and says little stays green. The person doing slow, deep work goes grey, and has to explain herself.

This is the quiet shift: availability, which used to be something you offered, becomes something you owe. Once the dot is public, being unreachable stops being a neutral state. It starts to look like a choice, and choices get questioned.

The dot comes with its own grammar, too. A clock means away, a red circle means do not disturb, and each carries a faint moral weight. Nobody switches to “do not disturb” to concentrate without feeling slightly rude.

Think of the small anxieties it creates. Eating lunch with the laptop open. Taking a call on the sofa to avoid the dot going yellow. Watching it flip to grey at 5:01 p.m. and wondering who noticed.

Time zones make it stranger. A colleague three hours behind sees your dot go grey in what is, for her, the middle of the afternoon, and quietly concludes you have left early. You have not. It is simply evening where you are, and the dot cannot say so.

There is an honest case for the dot. In a remote team it stops you pinging someone who is clearly in a meeting, and it saves a good deal of “are you there?” Many people like it, and with good reason.

People buy gadgets to keep it green

The proof that the dot has become a performance is a small, cheap gadget called the mouse jiggler. It nudges a cursor at intervals so a computer never looks idle, and people buy it for one reason: to keep the dot green while they are away from the desk.

Nobody needs to be told what that means. When a status indicator can be faked for the price of a lunch, the indicator is no longer measuring work. It is measuring willingness to look busy.

A habit has grown up with no name yet: pre-emptive visibility. People post in the channel just to turn the dot green, or reply “on it!” to a question they will answer an hour later. The reply is not information. It is a flare.

There is a fairness problem hiding here. Someone who works at a slow, steady pace is grey half the day, while someone who spends it in short bursts of chat looks tireless. Neither tells you who got more done.

Some workplaces have tried to patch it with “focus” settings that silence the pings and show a small icon saying so. It helps, and it also proves the point. We needed a feature to give ourselves permission to think.

Managers sometimes treat the green dot as reassurance, and workers treat it as a tax. Both are reacting to the same fact: a signal nobody designed as a scoreboard has become the unofficial one.

When presence gets measured, people start producing the signal instead of the work.