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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster.

Good luck trying to bring this through your typical bigco process management. Either your initiative dies, having gotten caught in a spider web of red tape, or it succeeds but now half your colleagues are angry at you to the point there's a non-zero chance of you getting beaten up, because now they have to do actual work or leave the niche they have made themselves comfortable coasting in for 20 years.

Office politics is even worse than actual politics.

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“You won’t have luck implementing a sensible solution on a dysfunctional system” is an evergreen answer which doesn’t offer any insight. It’s a cop-out and discourages any attempts at improving anything.

Not everyone works for big corporations, and of those who do some work in departments with sensible bosses where they can make some change.

As an exaggerated example, we could also say “one way to resolve issues in a community is to gather the people involved and have them talk through their issues in a room with an experienced impartial mediator to help guide the discussion” and then have someone reply “good luck trying that at a maximum security prison where inmates are constantly confined to solitary and beaten by the officers”. Yeah, no shit. You have to adapt your solutions to your environment, but that’s no reason to dismiss a general starting concept.

Having a name for these "thought-killing statements" or "thought-terminating cliches" has helped me recognize them in all sorts of settings in my life. Corporate, social, religious, the list goes on.

It makes sense as humans that we do many things to simplify things or even eliminate them in order to save energy and avoid stress, and we should be careful to recognize a need for balance while still working towards some greater goal, purpose, or good.

Even so, much like kerning, once you are aware of it, it is painfully difficult to ignore.

+1, I see it very clearly at my SO work.

Half of her organization has just a calendar filled with meetings.

And without meeting the organization would find that you only really need a third of the people, and you would even likely increase the overall output.

Many time wastes are just designed to make people busy, not productive.

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