“Work” That Isn’t Doing The Work

July 17, 2025 • Work • Lessons ⌇ Connect ↗

Scheduling a meeting to discuss the work isn’t doing the work.

Attending the alignment call to sync up on the work progress isn’t doing the work.

Having a pre-meeting to prepare for the meeting about the work isn’t doing the work.

Writing a follow-up email to recap what was discussed in the meeting about the work isn’t doing the work.

Creating a deck with 14 slides to visually represent what could have been a three-sentence email isn’t doing the work.

Sending a Slack message asking for a “quick sync” about the work isn’t doing the work.

Requesting feedback on the framework for thinking about the work isn’t doing the work.

Attending the retrospective meeting to discuss how the work went isn’t doing the work.

Sending an Email to get buy-in from management on the work isn’t doing the work.

Creating a one-pager to summarize the work for leadership isn’t doing the work.

Building a dashboard to monitor the metrics of the work isn’t doing the work.

Sending a calendar invite to block time for the work isn’t doing the work.

Scheduling time to “circle back” on the work isn’t doing the work.

The only thing that is doing the work is doing the work.

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Closing Thoughts

This was a riff off of things that aren’t doing the thing by strangest loop. It came about during many frustrating hours dealing with (semi)-corporate work environments where talking about the work instead of doing the work quickly becomes suffocating when all you want to do is deliver value, but your time is spent doing the opposite.

Until next time.

Connect

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