I am currently staring at a calendar invite for a ‘Pre-Planning Sync’ that is scheduled to last exactly 84 minutes. The notification popped up while I was mid-saw, attempting to cut a piece of reclaimed timber for a shelving unit I saw on Pinterest. It was supposed to be a simple weekend project, a way to escape the digital ether and actually touch something tangible. Instead, I ended up with a pile of 14 mismatched wood scraps and a deep sense of existential dread because I spent more time organizing my ‘Project Inspiration’ board than I did measuring the actual wood. I fell into the trap. I optimized the preparation and completely neglected the execution. Now, my living room looks like a lumber yard had a panic attack, and I have to go talk about how we are going to talk about work in 4 minutes.

Take Zoe M.K., for example. She’s a food stylist I worked with on a project back in 2024. Watching Zoe work is like watching a neurosurgeon perform a bypass on a head of lettuce. I once watched her spend 124 minutes meticulously placing 14 individual sesame seeds on a burger bun with a pair of surgical tweezers. She was optimizing the appearance of the food, which is her job, but she’s the first to admit the irony: the burger itself was cold, gray, and held together by 4 hidden toothpicks and a liberal coating of engine oil to make it shine. It was a masterpiece of meta-work.

The Corporate Burger: Polishing the Sesame Seeds

Our corporate lives have become that burger. We spend our days polishing the sesame seeds, ensuring the lighting is perfect for the quarterly review, and adjusting the toothpicks of our status reports. But underneath the sheen, there is no substance. There is no nourishment. We are styling the work instead of doing it, and we wonder why we feel so intellectually malnourished by 4:04 PM every single day.

This obsession with meta-work is a direct symptom of a systemic lack of trust. When leadership doesn’t trust that the work is happening, or worse, when they don’t understand how to measure the quality of complex knowledge work, they default to measuring activity. Activity is visible. Activity is loud. You can put activity in a 24-slide deck. You can’t always explain the 4 hours of deep, silent thought that led to a single breakthrough line of code or a pivot in strategy.

The Fear of Friction

I realized this most acutely during my failed Pinterest DIY disaster. I had 34 tabs open on my browser, each one a different tutorial on ‘minimalist floating shelves.’ I had purchased a 14-piece set of specialized drill bits that I didn’t know how to use. I had even color-coded my ‘Project Goals’ in a dedicated app. I was the CEO of my own shelf-building enterprise, and I was doing a fantastic job of managing the stakeholders (my cat and a very confused neighbor). But when it came time to actually drive a screw into a wall, I froze. I had optimized the theory to such a degree that the reality felt like a letdown. I was afraid of the friction. Real work is messy. Meta-work is clean. We choose the meta-work because it protects us from the vulnerability of actually making something that might fail.

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The noise of a notification is not the sound of progress.

– Author’s Note

I remember a specific meeting last quarter-it was the 4th Tuesday of the month. We spent 74 minutes debating the nomenclature of our internal filing system. Should the folder be named ‘Active_Projects’ or ‘Current_Workstreams’? We had 14 people on the call, including two directors and a consultant who was being paid $344 an hour. By the end of the call, we had reached a consensus on the name, but nobody had actually filed a single document in 4 weeks. We optimized the library’s cataloging system while the books were still being written in crayon on the back of napkins.

Confusing the Map for the Territory

Zoe M.K. once told me that she hates the term ‘content creator.’ She prefers to call herself a ‘maker of things that look like other things.’ There’s a brutal honesty in that. She knows she’s not making dinner; she’s making a photograph. The problem in our offices is that we’ve forgotten the distinction. We think that by making the spreadsheet look like a finished project, we have finished the project. We are confusing the map for the territory.

We need to start asking ourselves: if the ‘Pre-Planning Meeting’ didn’t happen, would the work suffer? Or would we just have 84 more minutes to actually do it? We are so terrified of wasted effort that we waste all our effort trying to prevent waste. We have built digital panopticons where we watch each other work, but nobody is looking at the output anymore. We are looking at the ‘status.’

Reclaiming the Mess

I’ve noticed that when I talk to people about this, there’s a flicker of recognition in their eyes-a mix of relief and exhaustion. Everyone knows. We all see the 14 unread messages in the ‘General’ channel and know that 94% of them are noise. We are participants in a grand, collective delusion that busy-ness equals value.

Last week, I saw Zoe M.K. at a local gallery. She wasn’t styling anything. She was just looking at a painting-a messy, chaotic piece with 14 layers of clashing colors. She smiled and said, ‘It’s great. You can see where the artist messed up and tried to fix it. You can see the actual work.’ We are so busy trying to hide the ‘mess’ of our process behind polished reports, we are stripping the humanity-the actual ‘work’-out of what we do.

My DIY shelf still leans a little to the left, and that’s fine. It represents 14 minutes of actual labor vs. 14 hours of meta-work. We have to stop being food stylists for our own careers, spraying glycerine on cold burgers to make them look appetizing for a camera that isn’t even there. We need to turn on the stove.

My 4th cup of coffee is finally empty. The 84-minute meeting is about to start. I’m going to join the call, but I’m going to do something radical. I’m not going to screen-share a slide deck. I’m just going to show them the crooked shelf. I’m going to tell them that I spent 14 minutes making something real, and it was the hardest work I’ve done all week. I expect there will be 4 seconds of silence, followed by a flurry of ‘alignment’ talk. But for those 4 seconds, we might all just remember what it feels like to actually do the work.

To break the cycle, we have to be willing to be ‘unoptimized’ for a while. We have to reclaim the ‘work’ from the ‘meta-work.’ This means saying ‘no’ to the meeting that could have been an email, but more importantly, saying ‘no’ to the email that didn’t need to be sent at all.