The Compulsive Check

The blue dot is blinking. It’s not just blinking; it’s pulsing with the urgency of a dying star, except instead of a cosmic event, it’s just Dave from marketing asking if I saw his comment on the spreadsheet I haven’t opened since Tuesday the 12th. I’m staring at a blank canvas in Photoshop, my stylus poised like a surgical instrument, but the steady ‘thrup’ of Slack notifications is playing a rhythmic counterpoint to the song currently stuck in my head-Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ at exactly 102 beats per minute. It’s a survival song, ironically enough. And right now, survival means resisting the urge to hurl my 32-core workstation out the window.

I’ve spent the last 42 minutes ‘preparing’ to work. This preparation involved checking three different project management dashboards, clearing 12 red bubbles from my dock, and responding to a ‘quick sync’ request that actually took 22 minutes of circular conversation. By the time I actually get my cursor to the layer I need to mask, a new email arrives. It’s an automated notification from Asana telling me that a task was moved from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Review,’ which is fascinating because I’m the one who is supposed to be doing the work, and I haven’t even started. We have reached a point where the tools we bought to save us time have become the primary consumers of it. We’ve optimized the logistics of work so thoroughly that there’s no room left for the labor itself.

The Weight of Digital Gear

In my other life, when I’m not tethered to a high-speed fiber connection, I’m Jax K.-H., a wilderness survival instructor. In the bush, gear is a double-edged sword. If you carry 82 pounds of ‘essential’ survival equipment, you’ll be the most prepared corpse in the forest because you’ll exhaust yourself before you find water. I see the same thing happening in the modern office. We are carrying 52 different software subscriptions in our digital backpacks, convinced that the next one will finally be the ‘silver bullet’ for productivity. But all we’re doing is adding weight. Every new tool is another interface to learn, another password to manage, and another stream of notifications to triage. We’ve mistaken connectivity for collaboration, and we’ve mistaken the frantic movement of data for actual progress.

Rewarding the Ping Over the Thought

We’ve built an ecosystem that rewards the ‘quick reply’ over the ‘deep thought.’ The person who clears their inbox 32 times a day is viewed as a high-performer, while the person who turns off their phone for 4 hours to solve a complex architectural problem is seen as ‘unresponsive.’ It’s a perversion of value.

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*Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alive.* It’s the rhythm of the modern worker. We’re just trying to stay alive in a sea of pings. We are using technology to protect us from the technology we bought to make us better. It’s recursive madness.

– The Bee Gees Counterpoint

I’ve seen how this manifests in the creative world. A designer used to spend 82% of their day designing. Now, they spend that time in ‘feedback loops.’ They spend it in Figma comments, in Loom recordings explaining the Figma comments, and in Zoom calls discussing the Loom recordings. The actual act of creation has been squeezed into the margins, the thin slivers of time between the ‘collaboration.’ We’ve fetishized the process and forgotten the product.

Craft Demands Silence

This is where the ‘craft’ disappears. You can’t have craft without silence. You can’t have excellence without the boredom that comes from staring at a problem long enough for it to blink first. When you remove the space for deep work, you end up with a culture of ‘good enough.’ You get products that are technically functional but lack soul. You get solutions that solve the immediate ticket but ignore the underlying systemic issue. We’ve traded the long-form brilliance of a focused mind for the short-term dopamine hit of a completed checklist.

I’m not saying we should go back to the Stone Age-though as a survivalist, I can tell you that a well-knapped flint blade is more reliable than 92% of the ‘productivity’ apps on the market today. I’m saying we need to recognize that ‘optimization’ has a point of diminishing returns. When you optimize for reachability, you sacrifice depth.

Implementing Survival Mode

The Required Decoupling

In my practice, I’ve started implementing what I call ‘Survival Mode’ for my projects. It’s simple: one tool, one goal, no notifications. If I’m writing, I’m in a text editor with the Wi-Fi off. If I’m designing, the phone is in the other room.

Execution Over Status Updates

We need a return to the actual craft, where the focus is on the output, not the status update. This is why teams are gravitating toward Done your way services, moving away from the noise and back toward the clarity of execution. It’s about doing the work, not just talking about the work in 12 different threads.

Focus: The Modern Commodity

Survival in the modern workplace isn’t about how much you can handle; it’s about how much you can ignore. We’ve built a world that makes it nearly impossible to focus, which means that focus is now the most valuable commodity on the planet. If you can find it, keep it. Don’t trade it for a green checkmark on a task list. The work deserves more than the leftovers of your attention. It deserves the whole thing.

I take a deep breath, adjust my grip on the pen, and make the first mark. No pings. No pulses. Just the craft. It’s a 2nd-hand realization that took me too long to learn: the best way to optimize the work is to actually do it.