My stomach tightens. It’s that familiar, visceral clench, the one that tells me another piece of my afternoon just evaporated. The calendar notification bloomed on my screen, a malevolent digital dandelion: ‘Quick Sync,’ thirty-six minutes from now. Eight attendees. No agenda. Just that sterile, deceitful promise of speed. I glance at the email I’m drafting, a carefully constructed narrative detailing six specific issues that need resolution. It’s concise, actionable. It would take six minutes for anyone to read. Yet, here we are, preparing for what will inevitably be a forty-six minute verbal skirmish, a half-baked conversation that should have been six paragraphs of text.

We call them ‘quick syncs’ but they are the antithesis of quick. They are the verbose, unedited first drafts of emails someone was too busy, or perhaps too lazy, to write down. Imagine commissioning a writer, paying them for forty-six minutes of their time, and instead of a polished article, they simply call you up and ramble. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a professional writer, so why do we accept it from ourselves and our colleagues?

This isn’t collaboration; it’s outsourced thinking.

We gather six, often eight, sometimes sixteen people, to collectively edit a thought in real-time, often without the benefit of a shared screen, just a cacophony of voices tripping over each other, trying to piece together a coherent narrative that could have been delivered

The metallic tang of blood in my mouth from where I’d bitten my tongue, hard, during lunch-a momentary lapse in concentration, a sudden, jarring distraction-felt oddly appropriate. It mirrored the sharp, unexpected pain of navigating our new “streamlined” expense system. To submit a paltry $44 expense, I now had to get a pre-approval from my direct manager, log into one system to fill out a meticulously detailed form, upload a photograph of the receipt to a completely separate, less intuitive portal, and then wait for sign-off from not one, but *two* different managers. The process, designed to curb overspending, had curdled into a six-step odyssey.

This isn’t malicious design. No one wakes up plotting to make things harder. It’s the accidental bureaucracy, a sprawling, hydra-headed monster born from a thousand tiny, well-intentioned decisions. Each new rule, each additional approval layer, each separate system was introduced for a perfectly logical reason. “We had an issue with unapproved travel expenses,” someone argued, and boom, pre-approval. “Receipts were getting lost,” another chimed, and a new digital upload portal appeared. “Who’s accountable?” a third queried, and suddenly, a second layer of managerial sign-off. Each piece makes sense in isolation, yet together, they form a suffocating blanket of red tape.

I

You were up 9-7. You missed an easy smash. It’s 9-8. You’re still replaying the miss in your head as your opponent serves. You’re not ready. You make a weak return, he kills it. 9-9. The momentum is gone, all because of one point you couldn’t let go of.

And just like that, the entire game, sometimes the entire match, spirals. It’s not about the missed shot, is it? It’s never truly about the misstep itself. It’s about what we do with the misstep, how we cradle it, replay it, and allow it to contaminate the pristine, untouched present moment that arrives exactly 3 seconds later. We think we need unwavering focus for 2 hours and 43 minutes straight, a laser-like intensity that never wavers. But honestly, who can sustain that? I know I can’t. Not for 2 hours, not for 43 minutes, not even for 233 seconds sometimes.

This isn’t about some superhuman ability to maintain perfect concentration. That’s a myth, a narrative peddled by those who probably haven’t faced the relentless pressure of a match point or a looming deadline. The real secret, the actual trainable, repeatable, life-altering skill, is the ability to drop a point, to lose a negotiation, to completely butcher a presentation-and then, within a mere 10 seconds, to fully disengage from that failure and be 100% mentally present for the very next opportunity. It’s the mental equivalent of hitting the delete button on your