The Assault of Inefficiency
That electric blue, that sickly fluorescent glow of the Miro board, was assaulting my retinas at 8:43 AM. I wasn’t even supposed to be in this meeting, but I had committed the cardinal sin of standing too close to the door when they started talking about ‘leveraging synergies.’ Now I was trapped, staring at a spaghetti diagram that detailed the new internal approval process for a single Instagram story.
I checked my watch. We were 43 minutes into a 3-hour meeting designed to finalize a system that, according to the lead analyst, would save the marketing team a collective 53 minutes a week. Fifty-three minutes. That’s enough time to walk to the coffee shop and back, assuming the light is green and you don’t stop for a squirrel.
180
(For 53 minutes of theoretical recovery)
The Optimization Trap
It’s the Core Frustration of the modern office: We optimize everything except the actual work. We spend endless cycles polishing the container, ensuring the wrapper is perfectly folded, while the gift inside is mediocre, late, or maybe even unnecessary. We design the optimal route to a destination we never check if anyone actually wants to visit. This, I’m starting to realize, isn’t management. It’s organizational procrastination.
It’s easier-so much terrifyingly easier-to endlessly tinker with the how of the work than to confront the difficult, ambiguous, and emotionally taxing what and why. The optimization loop is a comfortable psychological bubble. You can point to the 13 boxes you eliminated… You can’t point to ‘fewer existential crises,’ or ‘better creative output,’ because those things resist the tyranny of the metric.
“They require confronting the terrifying emptiness of the unknown, and frankly, who has the emotional bandwidth for that before their second cup of coffee?”
I admit I’m deeply conflicted. I criticize this paralysis, yet I spent nearly 3 hours last week rewriting the detailed instructions for how I name my PDF files-a task I do, maybe, 23 times a month. I did it anyway. Why? Because the chaos felt sloppy, and the sloppy felt like a reflection of my inner state. I needed to impose order somewhere, anywhere, even if that order was actively inefficient. It was a misplaced need for control… It’s the adult version of arranging your pencils perfectly before starting the impossible homework assignment.
Optimizing for Presence, Not Privilege
I saw this contradiction amplified when I talked to Emerson N.S., who coordinates hospice volunteers. Emerson doesn’t deal in 53-minute savings; Emerson deals in the last 53 minutes of someone’s conscious life, which is a different calculus entirely. Volunteers would drop off before training, citing complexity. The initial intake form was 33 pages long.
Onboarding Time
Onboarding Time
Emerson didn’t hire a consultant or build a complex Miro board. They did the radical thing: they asked the volunteers what the biggest barrier was. The answer was overwhelming: the 33-page form. Emerson cut it to 3 pages… They eliminated friction to allow the real work to happen faster.
Friction Reduction for the Recipient
This is the problem we ignore when we are optimizing our internal software deployment schedule or the 13-step chain of email approvals. We’re not removing gatekeepers; we’re just making the gates shinier, adding $373 worth of gold plating to the hinges. We fetishize the measurable, the clean metric, even if that metric has zero bearing on the output quality.
The philosophy of removing complexity so the client can focus on the core decision-the joy, the transformation-is what genuinely differentiates service. It’s the core focus of companies like Bathroom Remodel, where the entire business model is built around bringing the showroom experience to the home, streamlining the inherently complex choice of flooring by curating options and managing logistics that would otherwise suck up a consumer’s life force. They optimize the interaction, not the internal tracking software.
That difference is critical. Optimization should be focused outward, toward reducing friction for the person receiving the benefit, whether that’s a customer choosing a durable surface or a volunteer showing up to hold a hand.
Internal Process Optimization Level
73%
(Still not the goal)
The Chilling Final Step
Back in the meeting, the analyst finally presented the 13-step final flowchart. It required three different software tools, 43 specific status updates, and sign-offs from 3 VPs. Old process: Ask Dave. New process: 33 hours of bureaucratic lag.
If your optimization effort requires a 3-hour meeting to explain, and it doesn’t fundamentally change the quantity or quality of the delivered work, you are not optimizing. You are performing theater. You are giving yourself permission to avoid the strategic challenge by mastering the tactical triviality.
While forgetting the destination.
