Your Workflow is Already Easy Enough

Photo by Smartworks Coworking on Unsplash

It seems that everywhere you look, someone is publishing an article about how to make your “workflow” easier. Removing bottlenecks, reducing management, scalability, and increasing automation. This type of talk has infiltrated virtually every industry, from software development, to writing books.

By “easy workflow”, what they are saying is that they want to diminish input into projects. They want to reduce the effort that it takes to complete a project. Normally, this is not a bad thing. However, sometimes we can “optimize” too much.

What exactly are they trying to do?

I get it. Some things should be easier than they are, but other processes still need to retain the same dedication and care that they have always had. But those things do not. Instead, we are trying to reduce the workflow for every process and not just the mundane ones.

What good could possibly come out of optimizing the world out of something until the it is void of quality and purpose?

Do we not have enough optimization and streamlined workflows as it is?

The Diminishing Returns of “Quick to Market”

Everybody seems to be upset about how films, books, and other media just don’t seem as good as they used to. Why? We want it out fast.

Remember when a movie would be released at the theater, and then it would be months until you would be able to rent it on VHS or DVD? There is something to that. It’s called anticipation. People waited months for the iPhone, the PS2, and Star Wars sequals to come out. They would camp outside of shops until they opened to anticipate these things. This didn’t do anything but make the product more successful.

Marketing staff doesn’t care. They want things done fast. Fast product design. Fast product management. Quick release. Little build up. And this is why everything looks so cheap and unimaginative. The go-with-what-is-proven-to-work does have a point of diminishing returns. Taking shortcuts with research and development, automating brainstorming, and cutting out the ideation process will just create low-quality “stuff”.

Don’t we have enough low-quality stuff being pushed for us to buy?

It’s not that optimization and reduced workflows are “bad”. It is that they reduce quality. Getting things done is more important than getting the right thing done. Good stuff usually takes some effort to make.