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Make things better by making better things.
If you opened your calendar and task list today, how much of it is real work—and how much is just managing the system?
That gap between (real) work and "work-about-work" is where our systems quietly take over.
Over time, systems left alone will always become more complicated. Without real intent to cut the cruft, digital debt compounds until systems become unusable. Many of the tools that were supposed to 10x your work ten years ago are now practically worthless.
"Work-about-work" has become a full-time job.
As a friend recently put it, “Salesforce is an 800-pound gorilla you just have to deal with.”
When a system is layered with abstractions, it stops being a place for productive work and becomes a place to hide. Take sales: the real job is to talk to people. But if you spend all your time in a system tracking and measuring those interactions, you forget what you were actually hired to do. College Professors feel the same way. If all you do is report what you’re going to teach, teaching itself becomes secondary.
Systems were built to support workflows. Over time, they became the very thing we manage and hide behind—the disease—instead of the thing that helps us do the actual work of talking to humans—the cure.
Tomorrow morning, spend your first hour talking to humans before you open any system. See how different the day feels.