In every job I’ve had, the hardest part was rarely the work itself. It was the way the work was set up.
People think of productivity as a matter of effort. You just need to try harder. But most people I’ve worked with weren't slacking off. They were working flat out and still falling behind. What slowed them down wasn't their motivation. It was the system they were operating in.
That’s not an obvious thing to notice. Because if you're working hard and still can't keep up, the natural impulse is to blame yourself. But once I got good at fixing workflows for teams, I started to see the same patterns everywhere. People drowning not in work, but in poorly-organized work.
The problem is that most organizations never really design their systems. They just emerge. One person has a spreadsheet, another forwards emails, someone else makes a checklist, and over time everything builds up into this mess of patches and hacks. And because it sort of works, no one questions it.
But these ad hoc systems compound inefficiency. It's not just that they waste time. They also cause mistakes, force people to re-do things, and create stress no one can really explain. It's chaos masquerading as order. And since everyone’s too busy dealing with the chaos, no one has time to fix it.
When I left the corporate world to do my own thing, I thought that problem would go away. I was wrong. Founders, creators, solo builders—they all hit the same wall. There’s always a point where pure effort stops working, and you have to start thinking in systems.
That’s when people realize there must be a better way. The best systems don’t just reduce effort. They change the shape of work. You stop reacting and start designing. The result feels almost like cheating. You do the same amount of work, or less, and get more done, with fewer mistakes.
AI and automation amplify this. But not in the vague “AI = magic” way people talk about on Twitter. They help because they let individuals and small teams do what used to take an entire department. But only if they’re plugged into a system that makes sense.
Tools don’t fix bad systems. They just make the chaos happen faster.
You don’t need a job title to do this kind of work. A lot of the best systems I’ve built were just for myself: content pipelines, CRM automations, dashboards that auto-update from half a dozen inputs. Not because I love tools, but because I hate friction.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You start noticing every broken loop, every redundant step, every “just this once” task that keeps coming back. You stop blaming yourself for being overwhelmed and start asking better questions. Why is this even a task? What would have to be true for this to take zero effort?
Most people never do that. They stay stuck in the loop. But anyone can learn to think in systems. You don’t need permission. You just need to start with the friction in front of you.
Then you fix it.