The mouse clicks-a sharp, plastic snap that echoes in the hollow silence of my home office-as I drag the card from ‘To Do’ to ‘In Progress.’ It is a minor dopamine hit, a artificial sweetener for the soul. The task in question is a reply to an email that has been sitting in my inbox for exactly 44 hours. It will take me exactly 4 minutes to write, yet I have spent 24 minutes updating the project management board, tagging three stakeholders, and setting a reminder in my calendar to ensure I don’t forget that I have already started it. This is the ritual of the modern professional: a choreographed dance of digital housekeeping that creates the illusion of momentum while the actual work remains untouched, cold and heavy, in the corner of the room.

I found myself falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole last night, chasing the history of the ‘dead man’s switch’-those mechanisms designed to fail-safe a system if the human operator becomes incapacitated. It struck me that our modern productivity suites are the inverse of this. They are ‘live man’s switches.’ They require us to constantly tap, swipe, and update to prove we are still here, still breathing, still economically relevant. We are terrified of the silence that comes with actually thinking, so we fill it with the noise of ‘process.’

We are all Ava. We are all meticulously logging our sips while our throats are parched.

Consider the meeting about the meeting. It’s a 54-minute block of time where 14 people gather to discuss the agenda for a 64-minute workshop that will happen next month. During this preliminary call, no decisions are made. Instead, we discuss the ‘framework’ for how decisions will be made. We argue over whether to use a Miro board or a shared Google Doc. We move the pixels of our collaboration tools around like we’re playing a high-stakes game of Tetris where the only prize is more Tetris. By the time the call ends, everyone feels a sense of accomplishment. We were ‘collaborating.’ We were ‘aligned.’ But the actual problem we were supposed to solve hasn’t even been described yet. It’s a ghost in the machine.

The Corporate Defense Mechanism

I recently looked at my own calendar and saw a solid block of 4 meetings in a row. Not a single one of them had a tangible output. They were all ‘syncs’ and ‘check-ins.’ It’s a form of corporate defense mechanism. If I am in a meeting, I cannot be blamed for not doing the work, because the meeting *is* the work-at least in the eyes of the system. We have created a culture where the appearance of effort is more valuable than the result. It’s performative busyness. It’s the guy at the gym who spends 44 minutes adjusting his playlist and 4 minutes actually lifting weights. He looks the part, he’s wearing the gear, but his muscles don’t know the difference between him and someone sitting on a couch.

This obsession with process over outcome is leading to a specific kind of burnout-a hollow, cynical exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. It’s the exhaustion of knowing that if you disappeared tomorrow, the only thing the company would miss is your ‘green’ status on Slack. This is where the physical world starts to look incredibly attractive. There is a raw, undeniable honesty in physical movement that digital tools can’t replicate. You can’t fake a 14-mile hike. You can’t ‘optimize’ the process of climbing a hill to make it feel like you did it when you didn’t. You either move, or you stay still.

The Grounding Contrast

I was thinking about this while considering a trip to the Rhineland. There is something grounding about the idea of segwaypoint duesseldorf, where the focus isn’t on the ‘strategy’ of seeing a city, but the actual act of moving through it. You aren’t dragging a card across a screen; you are shifting your weight, feeling the air, and actually arriving at a destination. There is no ‘To Do’ list for a sunset over the Rhine. You just stand there and watch it. The contrast is jarring. In the digital world, we are constantly ‘arriving’ but never being anywhere. In the physical world, the movement is the point.

Ava C.-P. once tried to explain the ‘TDS’ (Total Dissolved Solids) of my work life. She argued that my productivity tools were adding too much sediment to the stream. ‘You are trying to drink mud,’ she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. She was right. I had 124 open tabs in my browser, 74 of which were articles about how to be more productive. I was reading about how to work instead of working. It’s a feedback loop of procrastination disguised as self-improvement. I spent 84 dollars on a subscription to a ‘second brain’ app, only to realize that my first brain was perfectly capable of remembering things if I stopped clogging it with the digital equivalent of industrial runoff.

I admit, I have made the mistake of thinking my value was tied to my ‘output’ as measured by a dashboard. I once spent a whole weekend-roughly 54 hours of my life-reorganizing my file structure on my cloud drive. I created folders within folders. I color-coded the icons. I felt like a god of organization. On Monday, I couldn’t find a single document I actually needed. I had optimized the system into oblivion. I had built a library where the Dewey Decimal System was more important than the books. It was a classic Ava C.-P. move: I had filtered the water so much that it was no longer wet.

I’ve decided to implement a new rule. If a task takes less than 14 minutes, I do it immediately without putting it on a list. If a meeting doesn’t have a clear agenda that fits on a post-it note, I don’t attend. And if I find myself spending more than 4 minutes ‘choosing’ a tool to do the work, I just use a pen and paper. The pen doesn’t have notifications. The paper doesn’t ask for a monthly subscription. It just sits there, waiting for me to actually say something. It’s a quiet, 4-gram piece of technology that doesn’t care if I’m ‘in progress’ or ‘done.’ It only cares about the ink.

The Unfiltered Conclusion

Ultimately, the productivity theater is a distraction from the fact that we are mortal. We only have a limited number of 24-hour cycles. Do we really want to spend them moving virtual cards back and forth? Or do we want to actually be somewhere? Ava C.-P. would tell you that the best water is the kind that flows naturally from the earth, unfiltered and full of the minerals of the path it took to get to you. Our work should be the same. It should have some grit. It should have some ‘mouthfeel.’ It should be the result of a journey, not a process.

I’m closing my tabs now. All 124 of them. I’m going to go for a walk. I might not track my steps. I might not even take my phone. I’m going to find a physical space where I am not a ‘resource’ or a ‘user,’ but just a person moving through the world. No boards, no tags, no updates. Just the click of my own shoes on the pavement, a sound much more satisfying than the click of a mouse.