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In today’s hybrid workplaces, productivity is often mistaken for busyness. It sounds like clacking keyboards, looks like back-to-back video calls, and pings endlessly with notifications. But most of the time, these are just indications of activity, not achievement, and the pressure to be constantly visible has quietly overtaken the drive to be effective and productive.

But real work isn’t always ‘observable’. Some of the most valuable thinking happens away from the keyboard, in deep focus and genuine creative collaboration. If we want to drive better outcomes for both people and businesses, it’s time to shift our benchmark from hours logged to energy invested.

This isn’t a call for a new metric to be tracked and reported. It’s a mindset shift. It asks leaders to look inwardly, to examine where their teams’ energy is going and then consider whether it’s moving them forward as a company, or just simply keeping things in motion.

The rise of performative productivity

In many modern workplaces, especially where employees work remotely, it’s easy to confuse motion with progress. When people aren’t physically present, they often feel as though they the need to show they're working in other ways, such as being constantly available, joining every meeting or sending a steady stream of updates.

This creates a culture of performative productivity, where time and visible activity become substitutes for effectiveness. As a result, teams can end up trapped in a cycle of reactive work: attending unnecessary calls, replying to messages, jumping between tasks – all while struggling to find time to fit in the work that is truly impactful.

This constant context-switching can be both inefficient and mentally exhausting. It splits attention and reduces creative thinking and also obscures a deeper problem: we’ve designed systems that reward visibility instead of outcomes.

The irony is that some of the most impactful work is delivered quietly. It happens in moments of uninterrupted concentration and problem-solving that doesn’t always show on a calendar. If we continue to equate productivity with presence, we’ll risk overlooking the contributions that are actually driving long-term value.

The better benchmark for efficient work

Rather than counting hours, business leaders should be considering energy as a way of thinking about how work gets done. Working out which tasks require deep focus, which generate momentum and which ones are draining effort without creating any real outcome.

Looking at productivity through the lens of energy provides a more human, realistic perspective, and it considers that not every hour is equal. For example, an hour spent in concentrated thinking or constructive collaboration can be so much more valuable than three spent juggling distractions. It puts the emphasis back on quality of attention, outcomes and of the overall working experience.

Ultimately, employees don’t need another performance metric to hit. In reality, it’s about organizational awareness, where companies can assess whether they’re creating the right conditions for valuable work, and whether their systems and tools are enabling focus, or interrupting it.

When we prioritize energy, we’re more likely to invest in what really matters. This could be a case of rethinking meeting culture or simplifying processes. It also sends a message to employees that their business values their judgment and contribution, rather than just their availability.

Smarter systems and faster tools

Technology’s role is to make work more efficient, but if used incorrectly it often adds complexity. Endless notifications, multiple platforms to navigate and constant availability have created a noisy digital environment that negatively impacts energy rather than saving it.

The next generation of workplace technology, particularly artificial intelligence, should be an opportunity to reverse that trend. But the value will be in making space for better thinking, rather than just expecting faster output. Tools that summarize meetings or help prioritize tasks based on importance can be used to improve clarity and focus so there’s more time to work on less mundane tasks.

When time is spent on how technology is being used, it can reduce distractions and protect time for the work that really matters. But this requires a shift in how we adopt and design these systems, so that we’re moving away from a focus on volume and speed, and towards usefulness, clarity and wellbeing.

Ultimately the challenge is not in measuring energy, but more so respecting it, so that workflows, teams and tools are built around how people work best, not how fast they can respond. When that’s done, companies can reduce digital noise as well as create a space for better ideas, stronger collaboration and meaningful progress.

We've listed the best performance management software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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• China’s cloud rescue plan aims to sell leftover CPU power from idle government data centers
• Despite massive investment, many Chinese data centers run at only 20 to 30 percent capacity
• Old CPUs cost money even when idle, China wants to monetize them before they expire

China is shifting its approach to managing excess data center capacity by proposing a new nationwide system to redistribute surplus computing power.

Following a three-year boom in infrastructure development, many local government-backed data centers now face low utilization and high operating costs.

As data centers get older and fewer new customers need their services, the Chinese government aims to revive the sector’s viability through a coordinated national cloud service that would unify computing resources across regions.

A coordinated response to growing inefficiencies

The proposal, driven by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), involves building a network that allows surplus CPU power from underused data centers to be pooled and sold.

According to Chen Yili of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, “everything will be handed over to our cloud to perform unified organization, orchestration, and scheduling capabilities.”

The goal is to deliver standardized interconnection of public computing power nationwide by 2028.

The glut emerged from the “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative, which encouraged building data centers in less populated, energy-rich western regions to serve the more developed eastern economic zones.

But many centers, despite housing some of the fastest CPUs, now sit idle, and this is a serious concern because data center hardware has a definite lifespan.

Also, CPUs and their related components are costly to acquire and can become outdated quickly, making unused infrastructure a financial liability.

Data centers are expensive to operate, and cooling systems, electricity, and maintenance consume major resources.

So when high-performance workstation CPUs are left underutilized, they still incur ongoing expenses, which is very bad for business.

Utilization rates reportedly hover between 20% and 30%, undermining both economic and energy efficiency.

Over 100 projects have been canceled in the last 18 months, a stark contrast to just 11 in 2023.

Despite the setbacks, state investment remains substantial. Government procurement reached 24.7 billion yuan ($3.4 billion) in 2024 alone, and another 12.4 billion yuan has already been allocated in 2025.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has stepped in to impose stricter controls.

New projects must meet specific utilization thresholds and secure purchase agreements before approval.

Also, local governments are now barred from launching small-scale computing infrastructure without a clear economic justification.

On the technical front, integrating CPUs from various manufacturers, including Nvidia and Huawei’s Ascend chips, into a unified national cloud poses a serious hurdle.

Differences in hardware and software architecture make standardization difficult, and the government's original target of 20-millisecond latency for real-time applications like financial services remains unmet in many remote facilities.

That said, Chen envisions a seamless experience where users can “specify their requirements, such as the amount of computing power and network capacity needed,” without concerning themselves with the underlying chip architecture.

Whether this vision can be realized depends on resolving the infrastructure mismatches and overcoming the technical limitations currently fragmenting China's computing power landscape.

Via Reuters

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• Researchers found a way to extract email addresses from Lovense user accounts
• A mitigation was released, but allegedly it's not working as intended
• The company claims it still needs months before plugging the leak

Lovense, a sex tech company specializing in smart, remotely controlled adult toys, had a vulnerability in its systems which could allow threat actors to view people’s private email addresses.

All they needed was that person’s username and apparently - these things are relatively easy to come by.

Recently, security researchers under the alias BobDaHacker, Eva, Rebane, discovered that if they knew someone’s username (maybe they saw it on a forum or during a cam show), they could log into their own Lovense account (which doesn’t need to be anything special, a regular user account will suffice), and use a script to turn the username into a fake email (this step uses encryption and parts of Lovense’s system meant for internal use).

That fake email gets added as a “friend” in the chat system, but when the system updates the contact list, it accidentally reveals the real email address behind the username in the background code.

Automating exfiltration

The entire process can be automated and done in less than a second, which means threat actors could have abused it to grab thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of email addresses, quickly and efficiently.

The company has roughly 20 million customers worldwide, so the attack surface is rather large.

The bug was discovered together with another, even more dangerous flaw, which allowed for account takeover. While that one was quickly remedied by the company, this one has not yet been fixed. Apparently, the company still needs “months” of work to plug the leak:

"We've launched a long-term remediation plan that will take approximately ten months, with at least four more months required to fully implement a complete solution," Lovense told the researcher.

"We also evaluated a faster, one-month fix. However, it would require forcing all users to upgrade immediately, which would disrupt support for legacy versions. We've decided against this approach in favor of a more stable and user-friendly solution."

Lovense also said that it deployed a proxy feature as a mitigation but apparently, it’s not working as intended.

How to stay safe

The attack is particularly concerning as such records could contain more than enough of sensitive information for hackers to launch highly personalized, successful phishing campaigns, leading to identity theft, wire fraud, and even ransomware attacks.

If you're concerned you may have been caught up in the incident, don't worry - there are a number of methods to find out. HaveIBeenPwned? is probably the best resource only to check if your details have been affected, offering a run-down of every big cyber incident of the past few years.

And if you save passwords to a Google account, you can use Google's Password Checkup tool to see if any have been compromised, or sign up for one of the best password manager options we've rounded up to make sure your logins are protected.

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