Can we talk about this for a second?
You are sitting at your desk, looking at an inbox that has quietly crossed the three-digit threshold of unread messages. Your calendar looks like a game of Tetris where someone is definitely losing. You are tired, you are behind, and you genuinely aren’t sure what your actual job is anymore.
So, what is your brilliant plan to fix this?
You schedule a meeting.
Not just any meeting. A sync to discuss how you’re going to streamline your workflow.
Somehow this always happens.
The Illusion of Doing Something
It feels completely reasonable in the moment. You tell yourself that if everyone just gets in a room for thirty minutes, you can finally get on top of things. You’ll align. You’ll coordinate. You’ll make a plan to stop having so many meetings.
Then the meeting happens.
Because thirty minutes wasn’t quite enough to solve everything, you decide to create a shared document. Everyone can put their updates there so you don’t have to meet as much.
But three days later, nobody is looking at the document. It’s just sitting there in the cloud, gathering digital dust. So you do the next logical thing. You set up a Slack channel specifically to remind people to update the document.
Now you have an inbox full of emails, a calendar full of meetings, a document nobody reads, and a Slack channel buzzing with notifications about the document nobody reads.
At some point, it stops being about the work.
It starts being about managing the tools we created to manage the work.
Turning Up the Tap
It is a lot like standing in front of a bathroom sink that is slowly filling to the brim. The water is rising. The drain is clearly blocked by something.
Instead of turning the water off and finding a plunger, you decide to turn the faucet on even harder. You convince yourself that if you just get enough water moving at a high enough speed, the sheer force of it will blast through the clog and solve all your problems.
We all know how this ends.
Now your socks are wet, and you’re looking for a towel.
In the office, we do this constantly. We try to solve the problem of having too much to do by adding more steps to the process of doing it. We create a task force to figure out why projects are taking so long. We introduce a new project management software that requires everyone to take a three-hour training course just to learn how to log their tasks. We write a long, detailed email explaining why we need to send fewer long, detailed emails.
Five minutes later, you find yourself staring at your screen, wondering how a simple task that used to take ten minutes now requires an approval chain, two status updates, and a color-coded spreadsheet.
The Comfort of a New Spreadsheet
Why do we do this to ourselves? It isn’t because we want to make our lives harder. It’s actually because our brains are wired to prefer action over waiting. When we feel overwhelmed, doing nothing feels dangerous. Sitting quietly and simply choosing to do fewer things feels like we’re failing.
So we do the opposite. We add things.
There is a comforting logic to adding a new step. If we create a new tracker, we feel like we’ve taken control. We get a little rush of energy because we’ve designed a beautiful, clean system where everything has a place. For some reason, this suddenly feels like real progress.
But we confuse motion with forward movement. It’s much easier to create a new process than it is to look at an existing one and decide to throw half of it away. Getting rid of things requires hard choices. It means saying, “We aren’t going to do this anymore.” Adding things, on the other hand, feels positive. It feels like growth. It’s the ultimate professional comfort blanket.
Letting the Water Drain
But the truth is, you can’t cure a water shortage by drowning, and you can’t fix a busy week by giving yourself more homework about your homework.
Sometimes, the best way to unclog the pipe is to simply turn off the tap for a second. It’s okay to let a message sit for an hour. It’s okay to skip the optional meeting that could have been a quick text. It’s okay to realize that a simpler, slightly messy system that actually works is always going to be better than a perfect, beautiful system that nobody has the energy to maintain.
We’ve all been there. You’ll probably find yourself opening a new browser tab to look at a new productivity tool later today, fully convinced it’s the one that’s going to save you.
Honestly, we all do this.
But maybe, just for today, you can leave the faucet alone, step back from the sink, and let things drain at their own pace.
