The keyboard is still warm. Three hours gone, vanished into that beautiful, silent place where the code just writes itself. The solution, which felt impossible this morning, is now humming quietly on the screen, elegant and alive. My eyes burn a little, not from the screen, but from the feeling of surfacing too fast. And then comes the other feeling. The administrative dread. The tax.

Now begins the second part of the job: translating the act of creation into the language of corporate visibility. I have to find the ticket in Jira. It’s probably in the wrong column. I’ll drag it from ‘In Progress’ to ‘In Review,’ a satisfying little digital flick that represents absolutely nothing of the messy, recursive, and deeply human process that just occurred. Then I have to log my time. Was it 2.7 hours? Or 3.17? The system demands a number, a neat, auditable integer. So I’ll invent one. Then I need to write a comment, tagging the 7 people who need to be ‘kept in the loop,’ even though the loop is a vortex that just sucks their attention away from their own deep work.

The Lie We Were Sold

We were sold a lie. The lie is that Asana, Jira, Trello, and their 47 clones are ‘productivity’ tools. They are not. They are managerial visibility tools. They don’t exist to make you, the creator, the builder, the thinker, more effective. They exist to make your work legible to people who are not doing it. They are spreadsheets with better user interfaces, designed to turn the nuanced, unpredictable craft of knowledge work into a predictable, trackable factory floor.

And I’ll admit, I bought into it for years. I once designed a Trello board so complex it would have made a German automotive engineer weep with pride. It had 17 columns, automated rules, and 27 different labels. I forced a small, brilliant team to use it. I told them it would bring ‘clarity’ and ‘alignment.’ What I was really saying, without realizing it, was, ‘I don’t trust that you’re working unless I can see you moving digital cards around.’

Building Our Own Cages

It’s a strange contradiction. I despise these systems, yet I find myself building miniature versions for my own life. My personal to-do list is a labyrinth of nested projects and conditional formatting. Why? Because it gives me the illusion of control.

We criticize the corporate machine while building our own little cages, just with better aesthetics.

I was talking to a friend, Nora M., who works as a grief counselor. I tried to explain Jira to her, and she just stared at me, bewildered. We started joking about what her job would look like in that system. A new ticket, P-777, is created: ‘Client’s husband passed away.’ The task is assigned to Nora. Sub-tasks are automatically generated: ‘Initial Consultation,’ ‘Facilitate Expression of Anger,’ ‘Introduce Concept of Acceptance.’ She’d have to log her hours against each stage of grief. Can you imagine? ‘Blocked: Client is stuck in the Denial column. Need input from stakeholder @GriefSupportLead.’

The absurdity of it is comical until you realize we’re applying the exact same logic to design, to strategy, to writing, to every form of work that relies on intuition and insight.

The Sea of Digital Fragmentation

We’re drowning in a sea of digital fragmentation, and these tools are just one more island in a vast, disconnected archipelago. We have one app for team chat, another for email, 7 different project boards for 7 different clients, another for video calls, and yet another for documentation. Each one demands a slice of our attention, a toll for switching contexts. The friction adds up, leaving us exhausted by the end of the day, not from the work itself, but from the work of managing the work.

It’s no wonder we crave consolidation in other parts of our lives. We’ve grown tired of juggling 7 streaming services just to find something to watch, which is why a single, solid Abonnement IPTV that brings everything into one place feels like such a relief. We are desperate for less. Fewer logins, fewer tabs, fewer notifications. We want a single stream, not a flood.

And that’s what these systems are designed to fracture. Every notification, every tag, every required update is a tiny pebble thrown at the window of your concentration. They create a culture of constant, low-grade interruption. The expectation becomes not deep work, but responsive work. Are you online? Are you updating your tickets? The implicit message is that appearing busy is more important than being effective.

A ticket that sits in the same column for three days looks like neglect, even if those three days were spent in profound, unglamorous thought that will ultimately save the project 237 hours of rework.

Reclaiming Focus and Trust

The tools themselves aren’t evil. They are agnostic. A hammer can build a house or it can break a window. The problem is our application of them. We’ve adopted a model of work built for the 19th-century factory-where output was visible and linear-and tried to force the messy, invisible, and non-linear work of the 21st century into its rigid container. We measure progress by the movement of tickets, not the generation of insight.

There is no easy solution. You can’t just refuse to use the tools your company mandates. But you can start by naming the problem.