The neon blue outline of a Jira card flickers on the monitor, casting a sickly glow over the 43rd minute of our morning stand-up. It is a digital sticky note representing a task that has been discussed, refined, groomed, and pointed, yet not a single line of code has been written for it in 13 days. A developer is currently explaining, with the patient exhaustion of a hostage, why a sub-dependency of a theoretical feature-a feature that has not yet been greenlit by the stakeholders-requires its own dedicated epic. The project manager, meanwhile, is clicking and dragging a status bar with the tactile satisfaction of a child playing with blocks. We are moving things. We are updating things. We are, by every measurable metric on the dashboard, 83% efficient. And yet, the actual work lies untouched, shivering in the corner like a forgotten pet.
The Cemetery Consultant
Reese V. knows something about this. Reese is a cemetery groundskeeper I met 23 years ago, a man who spends his days maintaining the final resting places of people who likely spent their lives worrying about 103 things that never actually happened. Reese has a specific way of looking at the world. He doesn’t care about the ‘velocity’ of his grass cutting. He cares about the blade. He once told me that he saw a neighboring cemetery hire a consultant to optimize their burial schedule. They created a complex grid system, a digital map that updated in real-time to show which plots were being prepped. They spent $503 on software to track the movement of dirt.
“The problem,” Reese said, leaning on a shovel that looked older than my parents, “is that the dirt doesn’t care about the map. You can have a beautiful spreadsheet showing that Grave 73 is ready for occupancy, but if the frost has hardened the ground three inches deeper than the software predicted, your schedule is a lie. They spent so much time looking at the screen that they forgot to check the weather. They optimized the paperwork, but they lost the rhythm of the shovel.”
We have become a culture of cemetery consultants. We have fetishized the process of doing the thing to such an extent that the thing itself has become an afterthought, a messy inconvenience that threatens to ruin our beautiful charts. The Agile methodology, originally intended to be a flexible way to respond to change, has been ossified into a religious liturgy. We have ceremonies. We have high priests. We have sacred scrolls called ‘backlogs’ that contain 203 items, half of which are ghosts of ideas that died in 2023.
The Illusion of Control
This obsession with process is not actually about efficiency. It is a psychological defense mechanism. The world is inherently chaotic, unpredictable, and prone to sudden, violent shifts. Writing code, building furniture, or managing a supply chain is hard. It involves failure. It involves those 3 a.m. realizations that you have built the entire foundation on a mistake. Process gives us the illusion of control. If we can just move the Jira ticket from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Internal Review,’ we feel a hit of dopamine that mimics the feeling of actual achievement. We are safe within the confines of the methodology. If the project fails, but we followed the process, no one can be blamed. The process is the shield we carry to avoid the vulnerability of truly creating something.
Optimized naming conventions, zero users.
I remember a specific sprint where we spent 33 hours in meetings across a two-week period. We were discussing the naming conventions for a database that we weren’t even sure we needed yet. We had 13 people in the room, all of them earning significant salaries, debating whether a column should be ‘user_id’ or ‘uid.’ By the time we reached a consensus, the market had shifted, the client had lost interest, and the project was scrapped. But the documentation? It was exquisite. We had 63 pages of technical specifications for a ghost. We had optimized the naming convention to perfection, and we had zero users to show for it.
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The process is the shield we carry to avoid the vulnerability of truly creating something.
– Key Insight
This is where we lose the thread. In the pursuit of predictability, we strip away the artisan’s intuition. We treat humans like interchangeable components in a machine. If a developer leaves, you just slot in another ‘resource’ of the same ‘level,’ as if you’re replacing a spark plug. But craft doesn’t work that way. Reese V. doesn’t dig every grave the same way. He listens to the soil. He knows where the roots of the old oak tree are likely to interfere. He knows that the ground on the east slope retains more moisture than the west. You cannot put Reese’s 43 years of experience into a Jira ticket.
Working for the Metric
When we prioritize the report over the result, we create a perverse incentive structure. People start working for the metric rather than the mission. If you measure a team by how many tickets they close, they will start breaking one meaningful task into 23 tiny, meaningless ones just to make the graph look better. It is performative productivity. It is the equivalent of Reese V. moving a single handful of dirt 53 times just so a sensor could record his ‘activity level.’ It looks like work, but the hole never gets deeper.
Lost to Meetings
Required for Simple Q
I saw a company once that had a ‘Process Optimization Officer.’ This person had 13 certifications in various management styles. Their entire job was to find ‘friction’ in the workflow. They introduced 3 new software tools to help us communicate more efficiently. Within 3 months, we were spending so much time communicating about how we were communicating that we stopped actually talking. We had messages in Slack, comments in Figma, updates in Notion, and tickets in Jira. If you wanted to ask a simple question, you had to decide which of the 53 possible channels was the ‘correct’ one according to the latest internal memo.
We need to return to the idea of the workshop. A workshop is a place where process exists to serve the craft, not the other way around. In a real workshop, the tools are sharp, the materials are respected, and the goal is to make something that lasts. There is a specific kind of integrity found in companies that refuse to get lost in the performative weeds. For example,
Canned Pineapple operates with a focus on the actual output, understanding that the value is in the final piece, not the number of meetings it took to get there. They seem to understand what Reese V. understood: that at the end of the day, you either have a hole in the ground or you don’t. The map you drew to get there is just a piece of paper.
Direction Matters More Than Speed
Consider the ‘velocity’ metric again. In physics, velocity is displacement divided by time. It requires a direction. In most offices, ‘velocity’ is just speed. We are running very fast in a circle, 333 miles per hour, and wondering why the scenery never changes. We are hitting our targets, but our targets are arbitrary points on a map that no one has bothered to check against the actual terrain. We have optimized the engine to run at 93% capacity, but the wheels aren’t touching the ground.
The Single Stone
Actionable Focus
The Whole Field
Paralyzing Scale
Unchecked Growth
The Unplanned Work
I asked Reese V. if he ever felt overwhelmed by the amount of work he had to do. The cemetery is large, and there are over 403 plots that need regular maintenance. He looked at me, wiped his brow with a handkerchief that had seen better decades, and pointed to a single headstone. “I don’t look at the whole field,” he said. “I look at that one stone. I make sure it’s level. I make sure the weeds are gone. When that one is done, I move to the next one. If I spent my time staring at the map of the whole place, I’d get paralyzed by the scale of it. I’d start making plans for the plans. And while I was planning, the weeds would win.”
Do The Work
We have to stop mistaking the movement of digital cards for the movement of the world. We have to admit that we don’t know everything, and that the ‘predictability’ we sell to clients is often a comfortable lie. Projects are messy. Creative work is a series of failures that eventually coalesce into a success. You cannot schedule a breakthrough for Tuesday at 2:03 p.m. You can only create the conditions where a breakthrough is possible, and that usually involves clearing away the process-bloat so the actual work has room to breathe.
I still think about that door. The handle was designed for a pull, but my instinct was a push. I was wrong. The system was right, in that instance. But most of our systems aren’t like that door. Most of our systems are like a door that requires you to fill out a form, attend a 23-minute briefing, and wait for 3 approvals before you’re allowed to even touch the handle. By the time you get inside, you’ve forgotten why you wanted to be there in the first place.
We need fewer managers of maps and more keepers of the ground. We need to value the person who can tell you that the soil is too wet for the shovel, even if the software says otherwise. We need to realize that a project with a 73% ‘on-time’ delivery rate on a useless product is a 103% failure. We need to stop optimizing the everything and start doing the something.
The Keeper’s View
Reese V. is probably still out there today. He’s likely ignoring a notification on a phone he doesn’t use, focusing instead on the weight of the shears in his hand. He isn’t worried about his ‘personal brand’ or his ‘sprint capacity.’ He is worried about the grass. And because he worries about the grass, the cemetery is beautiful. Not because of a plan, but because of the work.
It is a simple truth, one that we have spent billions of dollars trying to complicate, but it remains:
The only way to do the work is to do the work.