The Tyranny of the Quick Question

The blue light of the monitor is beginning to pulse in sync with the dull throb behind my left eye. It is 6:09 PM. I am hungry, which shouldn’t be a surprise given that I made the questionable decision to start a restrictive diet at 4:00 PM today. My blood sugar is currently somewhere in the basement, and my patience is roughly the thickness of a single sheet of tracing paper. Across the office-or the digital void of Slack, which feels more real than the physical walls at this hour-the pings have finally slowed. For the last 149 minutes, I have been ‘focusing.’ My status icon is a little purple circle that is supposed to scream ‘leave me alone,’ but in this company, that icon is apparently interpreted as ‘please ask me that one thing only you know.’

I just finished answering my 29th ‘quick question’ of the day. It was from Greg, who couldn’t find the legacy folder for the 2019 audit. I am not the archivist. I am not the IT manager. I am, unfortunately, the person who was there when the folder was created, and because I have a memory like a steel trap and a pathological inability to say ‘I don’t know,’ I am the institutional memory for 49 different people. This is the reward for being good at my job: I get to do everyone else’s job until the sun goes down, at which point I am finally permitted to begin my own.

The Micro-Tragedy of Expertise

She spends her entire morning, from 9:09 AM until lunch, being a free encyclopedia for the fountain pen community. She fixes nothing during those hours. She generates $0.00 in revenue.

– Lily P. (Fountain Pen Specialist)

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Take Lily P., for instance. Lily is a fountain pen repair specialist I’ve known for 19 years. She operates out of a tiny, cramped studio filled with the smell of ammonia and aged celluloid. She is one of perhaps 9 people in the world who can properly re-tip a 1939 Sheaffer nib without destroying the heat-treated feed. When you walk into her shop, the first thing you notice isn’t the pens; it’s the noise of her telephone. It rings every 9 minutes. People call her from across the globe to ask if a specific ink is ‘too acidic’ or if they can use a sonic cleaner on a BCHR (Black Chased Hard Rubber) body. Lily, being a person of immense integrity and a slightly self-destructive streak of kindness, answers them.

She works until 10:59 PM most nights because that is the only time the world stops asking her for ‘just a second of your time.’ She is indispensable, and it is killing her craft. She’s developed a tremor in her hand that wasn’t there 9 years ago. The tragedy is that she’s so busy being the expert that she hasn’t had time to train an apprentice, which means her expertise will likely die with her.

I feel like Lily today. I am staring at a spreadsheet that requires 199 rows of precision data entry, and I haven’t even started because I’ve been busy being a human search engine. The organization has outsourced its documentation to my brain. Instead of building a wiki, they built a dependency on me. It’s a classic case of organizational knowledge mismanagement. When a company relies on a ‘hero’ to keep the gears turning, they haven’t built a system; they’ve built a hostage situation.

Building for Durability, Not Heroics

This is where we have to look at the philosophy of design. If you were building a structure intended to last for 99 years, you wouldn’t design it so that the entire roof collapsed if one specific bracket failed. You’d build redundancy. You’d build clarity. You’d build something that thrives on its own structural integrity, not on the frantic midnight labor of a single engineer.

This is why I find myself admiring the way certain spaces are engineered-not just for beauty, but for a kind of effortless durability. When you look at the modular precision of Sola Spaces, you see a commitment to systems that don’t require heroics to remain functional and beautiful. They are designed to let the light in and keep the elements out through smart engineering, rather than through some poor soul standing outside with an umbrella 29 hours a week. Organizations should be more like that. They should be transparent, light-filled, and robust by design, rather than reliant on the shadows of an ‘indispensable’ worker’s overtime.

The Dopamine of Dominance

But here I am, 149 calories into my new diet, feeling like a very fragile bracket indeed. I’m criticizing the system, yet I’m the one who keeps reinforcing it. Why do I answer Greg? Because there’s a small, ego-driven part of me that likes being the person who knows where the 2019 audit folder is. There is a dopamine hit in being the savior. We have to admit that we are complicit in our own burnout. We cultivate our indispensability because we fear being replaceable. We think that if the company can function without us for 9 days, then maybe we aren’t worth our $99,000 salary.

He doesn’t see the 199 hours of lost productivity every month. He doesn’t see the 9-page resignation letters being drafted in the minds of the people who are tired of being the ‘go-to.’ He just sees that things get done.

– Manager’s Perspective on Efficiency

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There is a technical debt in human capital. Every time I answer a question that should have been documented, I am adding to that debt. Eventually, the interest on that debt becomes so high that the ‘hero’ just quits. I’ve seen it happen. I saw a lead dev leave a firm 9 years ago, and they are still using a legacy server they don’t know how to patch because he was the only one who had the ‘magic touch’ to keep it running.

The Art of the Positive No

I’m thinking about Lily P. again. She actually did close her shop for 9 days last year. She went to the mountains and left a sign on the door that said, ‘Gone to find my hands.’ When she came back, she had 459 unread emails and 19 voicemails from people who were angry that their pens weren’t finished. She didn’t feel refreshed. She felt hunted. That is the reality of being the go-to person. Your ‘vacation’ is just a period of time where you accumulate a mountain of stress to be dealt with the moment you return.

My diet is making me nihilistic. Or maybe it’s just making me honest. I have 19 tabs open right now, and 9 of them are things I’m doing for other people. I need to learn the art of the ‘positive no.’ I need to tell Greg that I don’t know where the folder is, even though I do. I need to let the system fail in small ways so that the leadership realizes the system is broken. If the roof never leaks because I’m always there with a bucket, they’ll never realize they need a new roof.

It is now 6:39 PM. I’ve written about 1349 words in my head about why I hate my own competence, yet I just saw a Slack message pop up. It’s Sarah. She wants to know if I remember the password for the 2019 tax portal. My fingers are hovering over the keys. I could type it in 9 seconds. Or I could tell her to check the password manager that we’ve been paying for but nobody uses.

I’m going to tell her to check the manager. It will take her 19 minutes to find it. She will be annoyed. She might even think I’m being unhelpful or that I’ve ‘lost my edge’ since I started this 4 PM diet. But if I don’t stop being the bracket, I’m never going to have the energy to be the architect.

Maybe by then, Greg will have found his own folder. Probably not, but that’s a ‘him’ problem, and I’m officially off the clock for the ‘me’ that knows everything.

Next Steps: Building Robustness