I’m currently hovering my finger over the ‘submit’ button on a digital form that has already consumed 45 minutes of my morning. I am trying to justify the purchase of a $15 software plugin. Field 25 asks for a ‘Strategic Alignment Justification,’ which is a fancy way of asking me to lie about how a small piece of code will change the fate of the entire corporation. My neck is stiff from the tension. I actually yawned just now, right in the middle of drafting this sentence. Not because I’m tired of the idea, but because the mere thought of the 45-step procurement process at my last job is physically draining. It’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from realizing the scaffolding of your job has become more important than the building itself. We are masters of the measurable triviality.

Ambiguity vs. Friction

Take the project I’m currently ‘managing.’ It has a budget of $555,555. It’s a massive undertaking that involves 45 different stakeholders. Yet, if you ask any of those 45 people what ‘done’ actually looks like, you’ll get 45 different answers. There is no process for defining the finish line. There is no 37-step form for establishing the conceptual clarity of our primary goal. However, if I want to buy a new stapler, I have to navigate a labyrinth of approvals that would make a Byzantine emperor blush. We have optimized the $5 expense to the point of absolute friction, while the half-million-dollar project floats in a sea of chaotic ambiguity, steered only by the occasional, confusing email chain that ends with someone saying ‘let’s circle back.’

Why do we do this? It’s because measuring the cost of a stapler is easy. You can put it in a spreadsheet. You can show a graph to a board of directors and say, ‘Look, we saved 15% on office supplies this quarter.’ It creates an illusion of control. It’s much harder to measure whether a creative team is actually solving a problem or just spinning their wheels. You can’t put ‘conceptual breakthrough’ into a pivot table.

The Efficiency Fallacy

It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of value. We’ve been taught that efficiency is the highest virtue, but we’ve confused efficiency with ‘ease of measurement.’ Real work-the kind that moves the needle, the kind that creates something from nothing-is notoriously inefficient. It involves 15 false starts, 5 dead ends, and a lot of staring out the window. You can’t optimize a epiphany. But you can certainly optimize the way an employee requests a new laptop. And so, we focus on the laptop. We make the procurement process so robust that it takes 45 days to get the tools needed to do a job that was supposed to be finished in 15 days.

Emerson C. told me that in his work, the most important moments are the ones that aren’t scripted… They are the ‘actual work’ of the trial. But the system is so obsessed with the procedure that it often misses the truth. I see this every time I attend a 105-minute meeting about ‘workflow optimization’ where not a single person mentions the fact that our customers are leaving because our product is fundamentally broken. We are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but we’re doing it with a very sophisticated, 35-step seating chart.

The Recursive Tragedy

There’s a specific kind of madness in a company that will spend $1455 in labor costs to decide whether or not to approve a $145 flight upgrade. We lose the forest for the trees, and then we hire a consultant to count the leaves. The consultant then produces a 255-page report that nobody reads, which is then filed away using a 5-step archiving process. We are recursive. We are a snake eating its own administrative tail.

I think back to Emerson C. yawning in that courtroom. He wasn’t being disrespectful; he was having a human reaction to an inhuman level of pedantry. We should all be yawning more. We should be yawning at the 45th email in a thread about nothing. We should be yawning at the requirement to get three signatures for a pack of dry-erase markers. Yawning is a signal that the brain is starved for oxygen, and our corporate brains are starved for the oxygen of real, meaningful work.

The Choice: Purgatory or Production

We need to start asking ourselves what would happen if we just… stopped. What if we deleted the 35-step process for the stapler? What if we spent that energy defining what ‘done’ looks like for the $555,000 project instead? It’s a terrifying thought because it requires us to take responsibility for outcomes rather than just adherence to rules. But it’s the only way out of the paper-shuffling purgatory we’ve built for ourselves.

I’m going to close this 45-minute form now. I’m not going to finish it. I’m just going to go do the work. Or maybe I’ll just stare out the window for 15 minutes and wait for an actual idea to show up. That would be a much better use of the company’s time, even if I can’t find a field for it on the form. If the goal is to actually produce something, we have to stop optimizing the path and start looking at the destination. We have enough forms. We have enough spreadsheets. What we don’t have is enough people willing to admit that the $15 software subscription isn’t the problem, but the 45 minutes spent asking for it is.

It’s time to stop polishing the guillotine and start questioning why we’re standing in line for it in the first place.