I used to think I was reasonably tech-savvy. I mean, I’ve got all the usual apps on my phone, I can troubleshoot basic computer issues, and I even set up my mum’s smart TV last Christmas (a feat that deserved a medal, honestly). But then I started at this fancy marketing agency about eight months ago, and blimey, was I in for a rude awakening.
On my first day, after the usual awkward introductions and forgetting everyone’s names immediately, my team leader Dave sat me down for what he called “onboarding to our collaboration ecosystem.” I nodded along, pretending I knew exactly what that meant while secretly wondering if I’d accidentally joined some sort of corporate cult.
“So,” Dave began, “we use WorkFlowPro for all our internal communication and project management. It’s really streamlined our processes.”
What followed was a 90-minute tutorial on how to use what essentially amounted to glorified email with extra steps. By the end, my brain felt like scrambled eggs, and I had this nagging question: Couldn’t we just… talk to each other?
See, in my previous job at a small local agency, if I needed something from a colleague, I’d swivel my chair around and ask them. If they weren’t in the office, I’d send a text or, God forbid, call them. We had a shared drive for documents and a simple calendar for meetings. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked beautifully.
But here? Oh no. Here we had The System.
Need to ask a quick question? Don’t you dare walk over to someone’s desk or shoot them an email. Create a task in WorkFlowPro, assign it to the relevant person, set the priority level, add all appropriate tags, and place it in the correct workflow. Then wait while your colleague goes through their daily task review session (scheduled for 4 pm, naturally) before they might see your question about whether they want tea while you’re making one.
The tea would be cold by then, obviously.
About three weeks in, I needed our client’s logo in a different format for a presentation. In my old job, this would have been a 30-second conversation with the account manager. Here, it became an odyssey.
First, I had to check if the request warranted a new task or if it should be a subtask under the main project. After ten minutes of deliberation (and checking the 64-page “WorkFlowPro Best Practices” document), I created a new task. Then I had to select the appropriate task type from a dropdown menu with 27 options, none of which seemed to fit “I just need a bloody logo.”
I assigned the task to Nathan, our account director, with “High” priority (was that too dramatic for a logo request? I agonized over this decision). I added the appropriate project tags, client tags, and task type tags. I filled out the description field with what I needed and why, then added a due date of “as soon as possible” (which required selecting an actual calendar date and time).
Then I realized I needed to attach the current logo format I had, which meant I first had to upload it to our cloud storage in the correct folder structure, get the sharing link, and paste that into the task.
Twenty minutes later, my simple request was officially “in the system.”
Nathan responded three hours later asking which file format I needed specifically. Rather than typing “AI or EPS please” directly in the task comments, he created a subtask assigned back to me to “Specify required file format.”
By the time I actually received the logo, I could have drawn the bloody thing myself with crayons and it would’ve been quicker.
What kills me is how everyone acts like this is normal. Like it’s actually more efficient. During our monthly team meetings, management always highlights how WorkFlowPro has “increased productivity by 37%” and “improved cross-team collaboration metrics.” Whatever those are.
But here’s what I’ve noticed in reality. People are spending more time managing the tool than doing actual work. In meetings, you’ll hear things like, “I spent the morning sorting through my WorkFlowPro dashboard” or “I finally cleared my task backlog.” Everyone’s celebrating the completion of meta-work – work about work – rather than actual productive output.
And the irony? The real work still happens outside the system. I’ve lost count of how many times someone has popped over to my desk to ask something “quick” that they don’t want to “bother creating a task for.” Or the number of important decisions that happen in the kitchen while waiting for the kettle to boil. Or my personal favourite – the shadow email chains that start with “Don’t tell anyone I’m not using WorkFlowPro for this, but…”
One Tuesday morning, our server went down for three hours. WorkFlowPro was inaccessible, and there was a palpable panic in the office. What would we do? How would we function? Would the business collapse without our precious collaboration tool?
Then something magical happened. People started talking to each other. Actual face-to-face conversations broke out across the office. Problems that had been sitting in digital queues for days were suddenly resolved in minutes. A client emergency that would normally have triggered seventeen notification emails and a task priority escalation was handled with a quick huddle around someone’s desk. It was beautiful chaos – and somehow, everything that needed to get done still got done.
When the system came back online, I swear I could hear the collective sigh as everyone retreated back into their digital workflows, the brief moment of human efficiency already fading from memory.
Look, I’m not a technophobe. I appreciate good tools that actually solve problems. But somewhere along the line, we’ve confused adding complexity with adding value. We’ve started measuring success by how thoroughly documented our work is rather than by the quality of the work itself.
Last month, I needed sign-off on some ad copy from our creative director, Jane. Her desk is literally twelve steps from mine – I counted. But protocol dictated I put the copy in a shared document, create a review task, assign it to Jane, wait for her to review and comment in the document, then create follow-up tasks for any revisions, then create a final approval task once revisions were complete.
After waiting two days for this process to begin, I finally caught Jane by the coffee machine and asked if she’d had a chance to look at my copy.
“Oh, I haven’t checked WorkFlowPro today,” she said. “What was it you needed?”
I explained, and she said, “Just email it to me, I’ll look at it right now.”
Ten minutes later, I had my approval. But then came the worst part – I still had to go back and update all the tasks in WorkFlowPro to maintain the illusion that the system was working as intended. I essentially had to create a paper trail for work that had already been completed efficiently outside the system.
It’s not just a waste of time – it’s psychologically draining. Every task becomes more complicated than it needs to be. Every interaction requires more clicks, more forms, more documentation. The cognitive load of constantly context-switching between actual work and managing the work management system is exhausting.
And despite all the complexity, things still fall through the cracks. Because when everything is tracked with the same level of detail and importance – from ordering new printer paper to pitching a million-pound client – we lose our natural ability to prioritize. Everything becomes another identical task in the queue.
The final straw came for me last Friday. I’d been working late on a presentation due Monday, and I needed some data from our analytics team. I created the appropriate task, following all proper protocols, and set the due date for “End of Day Friday” since I’d be working on it over the weekend.
Come 5 pm, no response. Everyone from analytics had left for the weekend, and my task sat unacknowledged in the system. On Monday morning, I’d have an unfinished presentation and a perfectly documented excuse for why.
So I did something radical. I called the head of analytics on his personal mobile. He was at his kid’s football match but told me the data was actually already available in a report from last month and told me where to find it. Problem solved in a three-minute conversation that never would have happened if I’d respected the sacred workflow.
When I mentioned this interaction to my line manager this week during my review, suggesting that maybe sometimes direct communication is more efficient, he looked genuinely confused.
“But then how would we track that the task was completed?” he asked.
And that’s when it hit me. These systems aren’t built to make work easier – they’re built to make work more visible, more trackable, more quantifiable. They’re management tools disguised as collaboration tools. They exist so that people several steps removed from the actual work can feel like they know what’s happening.
Real collaboration – the messy, human, efficient kind – happens in spite of these tools, not because of them.
So now I play the game. I dutifully log my tasks and update my statuses and check all the right boxes. But when I really need to get something done? I still walk those twelve steps to someone’s desk, or send that quick text, or have that hallway conversation.
Because at the end of the day, work is still about people talking to people. And no amount of digital workflows will ever change that basic truth – no matter how pretty the Gantt charts are.
