The screen froze, eight faces simultaneously pixelated into the shape of stunned boredom, a collective digital yawn. This was the third meeting this week dedicated solely to approving the Q3 newsletter font, and the air was thick with performance-the anxiety of looking busy while actively preventing work from happening. Someone, a VP whose salary I mentally calculated as precisely $575 per minute for this call, cleared his throat and delivered the ultimate anti-action statement: “Let’s just circle back after we get more feedback.”

I was sitting in my kitchen, nursing a dull throbbing right above my eyebrow, a reminder of the sharp edge of the glass door I walked straight into earlier this morning. Utterly preventable, deeply embarrassing, yet somehow instructive. It happened because I was ‘optimizing’ the two minutes it takes to walk from the car to the house by checking Slack for any last-minute, urgent updates on the Q3 font discussion. I was looking through the door, not at it. We are always looking through the work, hunting for the system that governs it, rather than simply doing it.

The Terrifying Clarity of Singular Ownership

This isn’t about laziness. It’s about defense. The moment you define a task clearly-say, ‘Write the first draft of the campaign copy’-you create a single point of failure and a single point of accountability. That is terrifying. It means someone, one person, can fail, or worse, one person can succeed without eight other people validating the approach for 45 minutes first.

So, we create ‘meta-work.’ Meta-work is the bureaucratic buffer, the protective layer of meetings and documentation that ensures ownership is not just diffused, but actively liquidated. If eight people must approve the font, and another 15 must weigh in on the shade of blue, then when the newsletter flops (or succeeds, which is often just as scary), no individual can be held responsible. Everyone was involved. Therefore, no one was truly in charge.

Navigating the Bureaucracy as the Primary Product

I’ve tried to fight it. Honestly, I have. My natural inclination is to draw a line, assign the task, and walk away. But the system rewards the navigator, not the producer. Think about career advancement. Who gets promoted faster? The person who quietly delivers five pristine projects on time? Or the person who successfully manages the political landscape of 25 parallel stakeholder meetings, adeptly collecting feedback, synthesizing five competing priorities into one ambiguous action item, and always ensuring the Highest Paid Person in the Room feels validated?

Career Advancement Metrics (Perceived Value)

Cora P. and the Elimination of Noise

I was talking to Cora P. about this last month. Cora is an acoustic engineer, the kind of person who deals exclusively in specific, measurable reality. She doesn’t deal in ‘vibe checks’ or ‘circling back.’ She deals in decibels and frequency responses. Her job is to eliminate noise. When she’s designing a passive noise cancellation system for a device-the kind of precision hardware that powers high-definition displays and complex home systems, the things we expect to simply *work* when we plug them in-she doesn’t call a 95-minute meeting to discuss whether the damping material should be foam or rubber. She runs the tests. She looks at the data point of 135 hertz and makes a decision based on empirical proof. She cuts the noise because clarity is the only thing that matters.

“

If you can’t measure the interference, you’re calling it collaboration.

That hit me hard, the clarity of it, the simple refusal to mistake friction for progress. When you focus on delivering concrete, tangible value-like the reliably powerful and clear performance of a premium display, ensuring your investment truly delivers on its promise of quality-you stop needing endless meetings to validate your existence. It forces a return to the foundational idea that things should just function, solving the problem directly, which is the exact philosophy behind reliable technology from options where you can buy a TV at a low price. They focus on the core output, not the endless meta-discussion about the bezel size or the refresh rate process.

Participating in the Cycle You Condemn

But we are conditioned against that clarity. We want the meeting, we want the consensus, because consensus guarantees a comfortable middle-ground where no one has to stand alone and say, “I did this, and this is the result.”

I tried to apply Cora’s thinking to my own life, to simplify. I swore I’d stop accepting calendar invites without defined outcomes. I swore I’d start pushing back against meetings scheduled for 75 minutes when 25 minutes would suffice.

And here’s the internal contradiction, the criticism-to-action cycle that proves the system has already won: five minutes after the $575-per-minute VP decided to “circle back,” I sent a scheduling poll for a follow-up session. I criticized the meta-work, and then immediately participated in its propagation. Why? Because the pressure to *appear* collaborative is stronger than the pressure to *be* productive.

The meta-work is a high-functioning anxiety blanket. It gives us the illusion of control over wildly complex systems. If we meet about the problem enough times, we feel we have managed the risk, even if the problem itself remains untouched, festering under a mountain of PowerPoint slides. We are optimizing our feeling of security, not our output metrics. The cost of this systemic risk-aversion is staggering-not just in the $1,475 in labor wasted on the Q3 font decision across the team, but in the slow, systematic devaluation of competence.

We confuse motion with progress. We confuse visibility with value. And every meeting we schedule to discuss efficiency is simply another layer of noise, another glass door we are about to walk into because we are too distracted by the process of avoiding the impact to look straight ahead.