My life is governed by chaos.
The thought floated through my mind like it has ten thousand times before.
It started, like it usually does, with a “quick question.” I had just slipped into project mode (head down, caffeine up) when a coworker stopped by.
“Do you have two seconds?” he asked.
Spoiler alert: he did not require two seconds.
His desk is maybe 30 feet away with two other desks between us. As we passed the first, another engineer looked up. “Hey, real quick…” You already know where this is going. Five minutes later, we made it to the original guy’s desk — only to be interrupted again by the apprentice who popped in, also “real quick.” Five more minutes. Then one of my employees walked up with her own “quick question,” which turned into a full-on discussion. Then the boss showed up and hijacked all of us for something completely unrelated.
By the time I got back to my desk, the “two second” interruption had cost me 30 minutes (900 times the original estimate from my coworker). I had an hour to work on a project before a string of meetings. That hour was now half. And because the project still needed to be done for one of those meetings, I ended up multitasking through the entire first one — camera off, mic muted, pretending to listen while I scrambled to finish something that was doable in about an hour.
Meanwhile, messages piled up on Teams, each one demanding attention right now. Every ping felt like a mosquito bite to my focus.
And for what it’s worth, my calendar clearly said “DO NOT DISTURB.” But in 25 years of working, I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at that and said, “Oh, I’ll wait. He’s in focus mode.” We treat other people’s boundaries like optional signage: “Construction Ahead (but feel free to drive through it).”
I get that real issues come up. But let’s be honest: at least 89% of workplace interruptions (a made-up number) aren’t urgent. And 63% (another made-up number) are so useless they make you question your entire career path or at least why you didn’t call in sick that day.
Have you ever written up a crystal-clear process document, only to have someone walk up and ask what it says because clicking it and reading was too much effort? That’s what I mean.
Governed by chaos.
It’s absurd, really. Modernism promised us clean lines, better systems, and more free time. What we got was a shallow structure held together with Scotch tape, chat notifications, and calendar collisions.
We built systems to save time and preserve attention.
Then we filled them with reasons to interrupt both.
Chaos Is Our Culture
Somewhere between the invention of instant messaging and the 47th calendar app (or was that 470th), we forgot that productivity isn’t about speed. It’s about momentum. And momentum doesn’t come from flailing around multitasking, but from periods of uninterrupted depth. The kind of work that actually moves the needle, even if nobody sees it happen in real-time.
But our current culture doesn’t reward depth. It rewards availability. The person who answers fastest is deemed the most helpful. The one who doesn’t respond right away? Difficult. Uncooperative. Not a team player. MIA.
We measure productivity in replies. Presence in notifications. Contribution in how many meetings someone attends. It’s a system built to look efficient from the outside, while hollowing out focus from the inside.
And the wildest part? We’ve accepted it. We joke about the chaos. We build our days around interruption. We brag about how many things we’re juggling at once — never stopping to ask whether any of them are the right things.
The Illusion of Systems
The irony is that we built systems that look like order, meant to control chaos, but they’re really just powered by chaos.
- Project management boards (and guidelines)
- Communication platforms (and protocols)
- Workflow charts (and triage mechanisms)
- Color-coded calendars with highly-ignorable “Focus Time” labels.
They’re all tools designed to tame the madness, promising control, visibility, and “flow state.” They work. For about 13 minutes. Until someone (my boss) breaks the system to save a few seconds.
Like when a task marked “Waiting on Review” gets skipped because “it looked fine” and “we were in a hurry.” Or when a Teams thread gets hijacked with a completely unrelated topic because “everyone’s already in here.” (Full disclosure: I’m probably the worst at this in my office.) Or when someone decides to shortcut the standard operating procedure because “I figured it’d be faster this way.”
We love systems. . .until they require discipline, and discipline is way harder than disruption.
So, we bypass the systems constantly. We respond to every ping like it’s a fire drill, then wonder why everything always feels on fire. We build clever automations, then override them manually (I’ve made a career of writing overridden automations). We write documentation and ignore it. We beg for clear processes and bypass them at the first sign of friction.
Look, we know how to build better workflows. We’ve got teams of people and AI to help us optimize things, even finding ways to make it fun to “stick to the script,” but we always seem to forget that a system is only as good as the people who adhere to it. And adherence requires restraint. Unfortunately, restraint isn’t measurable or monetizable.
The d̵e̵l̵u̵s̵i̵o̵n̵ illusion is that we think tools, apps, and templates will save us from chaos, but we’re really just feeding the chaos through these tools.
And in the blink of an eye, we’re back where we started: scattered, stretched thin, wondering what the priority actually is, and why nothing ever quite works like it’s supposed to, even though we’ve got a platform for everything and a checklist for every task.
The loss of control didn’t come from lack of systems. It came because we stopped trusting the ones we already built. Maybe we never did trust them.
Busy Looks Better Than Effective
We’ve built a culture where looking busy is safer than being effective.
Think about it: nobody ever got called out in a meeting for replying to emails too quickly. But plenty of people have been questioned for stepping away to do deep work. “Oh, I didn’t see you online…” is corporate-speak for “where were you when the group chat (or the boss’s hair) was on fire?”
We wear busyness like a badge. Booked calendars. Slack green lights. Emails with time stamps that imply dedication (read: guilt). The person always in motion wins by default, regardless of whether they’re moving toward anything that actually matters.
But busyness will never scale. Only effectiveness does.
A single hour of focused, meaningful effort beats eight hours of task-hopping, but the optics are all wrong. No one sees what you didn’t interrupt (at least not immediately). No one applauds a decision not to jump into a thread. You can spend a whole afternoon remastering a flawed process so it stops wasting ten hours a week for your team, and someone will still wonder why you didn’t respond to their message faster.
Our systems don’t reward clarity, either. They reward availability. This is where we posture, position, and perform. We fill our schedules to prove we’re contributing because showing restraint and unplugging to think feels like career sabotage.
This is why we stay in the chaos. It’s not productive — at all — but it is visible.
Why Boring Order Works
So, if we have a chaotic problem with chaos, what’s the fix?
Well, it’s definitely not another app. (Although it could be a replacement for one or more apps.) It’s not a prettier calendar view or a new productivity framework.
The answer is almost always less dramatic than that: it’s doing fewer things and with greater intention. It’s building simple systems and, news flash, sticking to them.
You know what’s revolutionary right now? Boundaries. Real ones. The kind that get enforced quietly and politely. It doesn’t have to be confrontational but can be done in a way that says, “My work matters, and I’ve designed a way to get it done.”
It looks like saying, “I’ll be offline for the next hour to work on this,” and not apologizing for it.
As if taking that stance wasn’t hard enough, the next thing is actually looking at your workload and asking, “Do I need to do this or am I just doing it to look busy?”
This is where trust in the system comes in. If your team has a process for triage, use it. If your project board has lanes that make sense to the team, stick to them. Don’t skip steps just because that feels faster in the moment. Shortcuts that lead to chaos are everywhere. The road to actual progress is paved with consistency.
You might jones for the dopamine-drip that comes from instant replies, but recovery only comes from giving yourself a few undisturbed hours to think, make, or fix something real.
If you don’t have buy-in from your boss, this approach to work isn’t likely to win you any medals. You might even be accused of slacking, but effectiveness almost always looks boring at first. That is, until the results start speaking for themselves.
We don’t need to burn everything down. We just need to stop confusing visibility for value. We need to remember that quiet, slow progress is still progress. Deep, real, uninterrupted, intentional work still, well, works.
Remember this little missive: the alternative to chaos isn’t perfection, it’s purpose.
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