'I Did No Work for a Year and Nobody Noticed': Londoner Reveals How She Got Away With 'Looking Busy' in the Office

A former colleague at the same company tracked Leyla Kazim down on LinkedIn last month. The message was blunt. They could have written her viral essay themselves, the colleague said, and nothing at the office had changed since Kazim left years ago.

The essay in question, published on Kazim's Substack newsletter A Day Well Spent in March, had already torn through social media when The Telegraph commissioned its own version on 24 April. The comments section passed 1,000 replies within days. HR trade press labelled the behaviour 'ghost working'. By the time the dust settled, Kazim had given a name to something millions of office workers apparently recognised but had never said out loud.

Her claim is extraordinary by any standard. Kazim, a London-based food and travel writer, says she spent close to a decade in a corporate role, company BMW, calendar packed with meetings, before concluding her job was entirely pointless. So she tested the theory.

'I developed a nagging suspicion that my role was irrelevant and futile, so I decided to conduct an experiment,' she wrote. 'I resolved to stop doing any work.'

Fifteen Minutes a Week Was All It Took to Look Busy

Half an hour before each weekly one-to-one, Kazim would spend roughly 15 minutes pulling together a page of notes and sending a couple of emails. She would deliver her updates and her manager would nod. The rest of the week went into a sprawling spreadsheet that looked like project work but was, in fact, a 10-month personal travel itinerary.

Kazim described the spreadsheet as the ultimate office disguise. Colleagues would glance over, see rows of small text and columns, and assume it was work. Nobody questioned it. What they were looking at was day-by-day itineraries, budgets, accommodation and train routes across multiple countries.

She expected someone to pull her aside within a fortnight. Nobody did. 'It lasted a year,' she wrote. The experiment ended only because Kazim quit. No performance review. No disciplinary meeting. She walked out, and her theory had been proven.

Why Ghost Working Has Hit a Nerve Across British Offices

Kazim anchored her essay on the work of the late anthropologist David Graeber, who coined the term 'bullshit job' in a 2013 essay that drew over a million readers. Graeber defined it as a role so pointless that even its occupant cannot justify its existence—and estimated that between 20% and 50% of all jobs qualify. Kazim cited a YouGov poll that found 37% of British workers felt their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world.

The timing of the essay's explosion is no accident. HR Executive connected the story to a wider disengagement crisis, noting that over 60% of employed Americans now fear losing their jobs, a 30% jump since 2019. When layoff anxiety sits that high, the publication argued, workers are more inclined to withdraw effort from roles they suspect are meaningless anyway.

Separately, HR Magazine framed Kazim's account as part of a growing ghost working trend, where employees use company hours for personal projects while maintaining the appearance of productivity. The publication noted she had been 'strategic' about the experiment, choosing to appear busy in person during the pre-remote-work era when physical presence was the only performance metric that counted.

Kazim herself drew a firm line in her essay. The advice, she stressed, was not for nurses, teachers or anyone drowning under genuine workloads. It was aimed at people stuck in roles where, if they vanished tomorrow, no customer or colleague would notice.

'Not being caught out didn't feel like a relief,' she wrote. 'It just compounded the meaninglessness of it all.'

Kazim has since left corporate life entirely. She writes to more than 8,000 Substack subscribers and says she now works late into the night on projects she actually cares about. The year she spent doing nothing, she maintains, was the year she finally understood how modern offices actually operate—and decided she wanted no part of it.