The air in Conference Room 6 had gone stale 46 minutes ago. We were entering the second hour of a mandatory ‘High-Velocity Marketing Sync,’ and the primary velocity I was experiencing was the slow draining of my will to live. On screen, a 56-slide deck detailed the exhaustive A/B/C/D testing of a call-to-action button. The presenter, with the earnestness of a surgeon announcing a successful heart transplant, revealed the winner: ‘Solar Flare Orange’ had outperformed ‘Slightly Less Solar Flare Orange’ by a staggering 0.26%.

A slow, polite clap rippled through the room. Someone murmured, “game-changer.” And all I could think about was the math. There were 16 of us in that room. Using back-of-the-envelope salary data, I pegged the hourly cost of our collective presence at roughly $7,736. This meant the company had just invested $15,476 of human capital to learn that a marginally different shade of orange might, under ideal conditions, nudge a few more people to click something. We spent a fortune to celebrate a victory so small it could only be seen with a microscope, while the meeting itself was a bonfire of money.

The Unacknowledged Absurdity: External vs. Internal Optimization

This isn’t a unique story. It’s the central, unacknowledged absurdity of modern knowledge work. We are obsessed with optimizing the things we can easily measure-the external, customer-facing machinery of our businesses. We build entire departments dedicated to squeezing another 0.06% out of an ad campaign. We hire consultants who charge $676 an hour to tell us our sales funnel has a leak somewhere between steps three and four. We treat the digital world where customers live as a pristine laboratory for ruthless optimization. But the internal world, where we live? That’s treated like a sacred, ancient ritual. Unchangeable. Opaque. Don’t touch the artifacts.

The Doorknob and the Burning House

I’ll confess, I’m the worst offender. Years ago, I spent 46 consecutive hours, fueled by vending machine coffee and a profound misunderstanding of priorities, optimizing a single database query. I got its execution time down from 16 seconds to 1.6 seconds. I was a hero. I saved the company 14.4 seconds of processing time. The catch? That query ran precisely once a month, during a batch job at 3 AM. Meanwhile, my team was suffocating under the weight of a daily stand-up meeting that had bloated to an average of 76 minutes, costing us hundreds of productive hours every single month. I was polishing a doorknob on a house that was actively on fire. And the worst part is, knowing all that, I still feel the pull to tweak the insignificant. It’s a cleaner problem. It doesn’t talk back.

We accept this dichotomy because optimizing a line of code is easy. It’s a technical problem with a quantifiable outcome. Optimizing how we work together is a human problem, a political problem. It means walking up to a vice president and saying, “Your mandatory weekly review, the one you’ve been running for six years, accomplishes nothing and wastes 236 work-hours per month.” That’s not a conversation about data; it’s a conversation about ego, power, and identity. No one gets promoted for killing the Senior Director’s favorite meeting.

The Economy of Folds: Lessons from Origami

I was complaining about this to a man named Charlie W., who, of all things, teaches traditional Japanese origami for a living. I met him at a street fair where he was folding impossibly complex dragons from a single sheet of paper. I thought he was just a craftsman, but he was a philosopher of systems. He spoke of the “economy of folds.” He explained that in high-level origami, you don’t just make a crease because it seems like a good idea. Every single fold is a commitment. It weakens the paper. It limits future possibilities. A master, he said, aims to achieve the form with the fewest, most intentional folds possible. A novice just keeps folding, crumpling the paper into a vague approximation of their goal, creating a weak and messy final product.

Our companies are the novice’s crumpled mess. Every “quick sync,” every approval layer, every cc’d email, every performative slide deck is another fold. We just keep folding, adding process on top of process, convinced that activity equals progress. We never stop to ask if we’re just weakening the paper. The cost of these folds is invisible, buried in the immense operational budget we call “salaries.” It’s not a line item like ‘Ad Spend,’ so we pretend it doesn’t exist. We meticulously track the pennies we drop in the digital realm while hemorrhaging dollars in our own conference rooms. We’ll install a poe camera to watch a loading dock to prevent the theft of maybe $1,286 in physical assets, but we refuse to even acknowledge the daily, systematic theft of our most valuable asset-our collective time and focus-happening in plain sight on our calendars.

The Overpriced Coffee: Inertia’s Premium

This isn’t an oversight. It’s a cultural choice. We choose the comfort of the measurable over the ambiguity of the meaningful. The button color is measurable. The cost of a demoralized, meeting-fatigued engineer is not. The click-through rate is a hard number. The opportunity cost of having your six best minds debate a minor feature for an entire afternoon is a ghost that will never appear on a spreadsheet. So we ignore the ghost.

I think this whole perspective shift really started for me in a moment of trivial frustration. I was online, about to buy my usual brand of coffee beans. Something made me check another site, and I found the exact same bag-same beans, same roaster, same weight-for $6 less. The same item, with two different price tags. It broke my brain for a second. Why was I willing to pay more for the identical thing? It was just inertia. Habit. A failure to look. And I suddenly saw my entire professional life as that overpriced bag of coffee. The same outcomes, just achieved with far more cost and effort, for no reason other than inertia. We pay a premium of time, energy, and money not for a better result, but for the comfort of not having to change how we get there.

We praise data-driven decisions, but we only apply that rigor to the safest territories. We A/B test the world, but not ourselves. We are scientific about everything that doesn’t matter, and superstitious about everything that does. We build intricate dashboards to monitor server uptime and customer acquisition cost, but the primary tool for managing our internal workflow remains vibes, tradition, and the whims of the highest-paid person in the room.

The Solution: Smooth Out the Paper

The solution is both brutally simple and impossibly hard. It’s to have the courage to treat our own time with the same respect we give our customers’ clicks. It’s to ask of every meeting, every report, every process, “What is the one, essential fold this is meant to accomplish?” And if there’s no good answer, you don’t just do it better. You stop doing it. You smooth out the paper. You save its strength for the folds that truly create the form of the thing you’re trying to build.