The task arrives in Asana. A ghost, a title, a due date. Then the questions begin, not in Asana, of course, that would be too simple. They bloom in Slack, a chaotic garden of @-mentions and threaded replies that spiral into cul-de-sacs of confusion. There are 46 new messages in the project channel alone. Someone drops a Loom video to ‘quickly explain’ their perspective, which requires a new tab and seven minutes of your life. Someone else has built a sprawling Miro board, a beautiful and completely indecipherable constellation of digital sticky notes, meant to represent the workflow we’ve abandoned. It’s referenced in a Google Doc, which has 236 unresolved comments from six different people. And after all this digital collaboration, this symphony of productivity, I find out that Mark, in marketing, is doing the exact same thing I am.
We buy software subscriptions that cost $676 a year, promising a single source of truth, and in doing so, we create a sixth source of truth. Each new platform is a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling wall. We’re meticulously polishing the plumbing in a house with a cracked foundation.
I confess, I once spent an entire Tuesday-a full six hours-building an automated workflow for a new client intake process. It was a masterpiece of digital artisanship. A form submission on our website would trigger a new card in Trello, which would then automatically create a folder in Google Drive, populate a welcome document from a template, and send a notification to a specific Slack channel with all the relevant links. I was immensely proud. The next day, in our team meeting, we decided to pivot our service offering, making that entire intake process obsolete. Six hours of optimizing a ghost.
The exhaustion I felt wasn’t from hard work, it was the hollow fatigue of meaningless complexity.
I remember yawning right in the middle of someone explaining the strategic importance of the pivot; it wasn’t boredom, it was the physical manifestation of my spirit giving up on the process.
Compacted Soil: The Real Problem
It reminds me of my friend, Taylor K. She’s a soil conservationist, and she spends her days on vast farms, kneeling in the dirt. The farmers, she tells me, are always asking her for a recommendation. The new fertilizer, the high-tech irrigation sensor, the genetically superior seed. They want the shiny solution. Taylor just smiles, picks up a clump of earth, and crumbles it in her hand.
Our organizations have compacted soil. We have layers of hardened ambiguity and unclear authority. There’s no oxygen. A new app is just expensive fertilizer poured on concrete. The real problem is that we’ve made it easier to adopt a new piece of software than to have a difficult, clarifying conversation. A five-minute talk where you ask, “Who truly owns this?” or “What is the single most important outcome here?” feels more daunting than migrating 46 projects to a new platform.
It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? Taylor talks about the vast, invisible networks under the soil. Mycelial networks, fungi that connect trees and plants, shuttling water and nutrients back and forth based on need. It’s a perfectly decentralized, ruthlessly efficient system of collaboration. It works because the roles are clear, the pathways are established, and the mission-survival-is non-negotiable. Our digital tools are supposed to be our mycelial network, but we’ve instead built a tangled, above-ground scaffold that we constantly trip over. It gets in the way of the sun. It prevents the rain from reaching the roots.
We choose the scaffold because the soil is messy. The soil is where you have to talk about conflicting priorities. It’s where a manager has to admit they gave two different people the same task. It’s where a team member has to confess they don’t actually know what they’re supposed to be doing, even after watching the Loom and reading the Google Doc. Those are vulnerable, human moments, and they don’t fit neatly into a Kanban board. So we add another column. We create a new tag. We schedule another sync. We optimize the plumbing.
The real work is always simpler, and harder, than the systems we build to avoid it.
Building Foundational Habits
It’s the same logic that applies to our own health. We can buy the vibrating toothbrush and the water flosser with 6 different pressure settings, but if the foundation is weak, if the underlying habits aren’t there, it’s just expensive maintenance on a slow decay. The most advanced tools can’t fix a fundamental problem. A good family dentist understands that their job isn’t to sell you on the most complex procedure; it’s to build the foundational, preventative habits that make those procedures unnecessary. It’s about the composition of the soil, not the brand of the shovel.
And I’ll be honest, knowing all this doesn’t make me immune. Just last week, I spent an hour researching a new note-taking app that promised to integrate all my scattered thoughts through a system of bi-directional linking. I could feel the familiar pull, the seductive whisper that this time, this tool would be the one to finally organize the chaos. I caught myself before I clicked ‘download’.
The chaos wasn’t in my notes; the chaos was in my commitments. The problem wasn’t the tool; it was the lack of clarity about what I was trying to achieve.
I closed the tab.
Maybe. I might have closed the tab. Or maybe I downloaded the free trial. The addiction to optimizing the container instead of clarifying the content is a powerful one.
