Look Busy During Meetings
The average knowledge worker attends more meetings than they probably should, and a significant percentage of any given meeting is relevant to roughly half the attendees. For the other half, there's CubicleComa. Keep a realistic work simulator open on your laptop during meetings and you'll look like the most engaged person in the room while actually conserving mental energy for the work that matters.
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Launch Fake PowerPoint Strategic Deck →The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email
Some meetings need your full attention. Most don't, for most of their duration. The challenge is that you can't visibly disengage — scrolling your phone, visibly browsing, or staring at the ceiling are all professionally inadvisable. A laptop with a work simulator open is the perfect middle ground: your eyes are on the screen, your hands are near the keyboard, and the screen content looks appropriately work-adjacent. You're attending the meeting. You're just also doing other things.
Best Simulators for In-Meeting Cover
The fake PowerPoint is the strongest choice for meetings: it looks like you're following along with a deck or working on a presentation. The Jira board signals project management awareness — great for standups and planning meetings. The fake Outlook Calendar simulator shows meeting management, which is meeting-appropriate meta-work. For all-hands and town halls where you're clearly just an attendee, the Excel chart dashboard or Slack feed both work well.
Laptop Meeting Positioning
In in-person meetings, position your laptop screen to face slightly away from the facilitator. Most people read the top half of a laptop screen; keeping the simulator in the lower portion of the screen makes it less scrutinizable. In video meetings, your screen isn't visible to others unless you share it — so run the simulator freely on any monitor. The main goal is preventing the 'what are you looking at?' conversation, which this accomplishes entirely.