Your Work Anti-Pattern Is
A handy reference for identifying the organizational dysfunctions that destroy flow, autonomy, and joy at work
🚫 The Accountability Theater
What it looks like: Endless status meetings, detailed time tracking, and micro-reporting that creates the appearance of oversight without actually improving outcomes.
Why it's wrong: You're measuring activity instead of results, and the measurement overhead often costs more than the value it provides.
The better way: Focus on outcomes and give people autonomy over their methods.
🎭 The Busy Badge of Honor
What it looks like: Celebrating being "slammed," working late hours, or having back-to-back meetings as signs of importance or dedication.
Why it's wrong: Busyness is not productivity. Sustainable results come from focused effort, not frantic activity.
The better way: Optimize for impact and protect time for deep work.
🔄 The Coordination Overhead Spiral
What it looks like: Creating more meetings, status updates, and coordination mechanisms to solve problems caused by... too many meetings, status updates, and coordination mechanisms.
Why it's wrong: You're treating symptoms, not causes. More coordination usually means unclear ownership or poor system design.
The better way: Clarify ownership, reduce dependencies, and eliminate unnecessary handoffs.
📋 The Decision Hoarding
What it looks like: Requiring multiple approvals for routine decisions, or escalating every choice to leadership regardless of stakes or reversibility.
Why it's wrong: You're creating bottlenecks and teaching people to avoid responsibility instead of building judgment.
The better way: Push decisions to the people closest to the information and consequences.
🎯 The Everything is Priority One
What it looks like: Calling multiple initiatives "urgent" or "critical," refusing to make trade-offs, or constantly shifting priorities without clear reasoning.
Why it's wrong: When everything is important, nothing is important. People can't optimize their effort or maintain focus.
The better way: Be ruthless about prioritization and communicate the reasoning behind choices.
🔧 The Feature Factory
What it looks like: Measuring success by how many features you ship rather than customer outcomes or business impact.
Why it's wrong: You're optimizing for output, not value. More features often create more complexity without solving real problems.
The better way: Focus on customer problems and measure results, not just deliverables.
🏃 The Hero Dependency
What it looks like: Relying on specific individuals to handle critical tasks because they're the only ones who know how, or celebrating firefighting as heroic.
Why it's wrong: You've created single points of failure and perverse incentives. Heroes often create the problems they solve.
The better way: Build systems and shared knowledge so anyone can handle routine issues.
🎪 The Innovation Theater
What it looks like: Hackathons, innovation labs, or "disruption" initiatives that generate excitement but never ship or integrate with real work.
Why it's wrong: You're treating innovation as separate from daily work instead of building learning into your regular processes.
The better way: Create continuous improvement cycles and empower teams to experiment within their regular work.
📊 The Metric Fixation
What it looks like:
Why it's wrong: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. You're incentivizing the wrong behaviors.
The better way: Measure what matters and regularly question whether your metrics still serve their purpose.
🗂️ The Process Sprawl
What it looks like: Creating detailed procedures for edge cases, or requiring the same process for both routine and exceptional situations.
Why it's wrong: You're optimizing for the worst case and making everything harder. Most processes should handle the 80% case elegantly.
The better way: Design simple processes for common cases and clear escalation paths for exceptions.
🎳 The Responsibility Diffusion
What it looks like: Having so many people involved in decisions or outcomes that no one feels truly accountable for results.
Why it's wrong: Shared responsibility often becomes no responsibility. Clear ownership is essential for good outcomes.
The better way: Use models like RACI to clarify who's responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.
⏰ The Synchronous Assumption
What it looks like: Defaulting to meetings for all communication, or requiring everyone to be available at the same time for routine coordination.
Why it's wrong: You're interrupting focused work and assuming everyone has the same schedule and communication preferences.
The better way: Use asynchronous communication as the default and meetings only when real-time interaction adds value.
🏗️ The Technical Debt Denial
What it looks like: Always prioritizing new features over system maintenance, or treating refactoring as "not real work."
Why it's wrong: Technical debt compounds like financial debt. Ignoring it makes everything else slower and more fragile.
The better way: Allocate regular time for system health and make technical debt visible to stakeholders.
🎪 The Urgency Addiction
What it looks like: Operating in constant crisis mode, or treating poor planning as unavoidable urgency.
Why it's wrong: Constant urgency prevents strategic thinking and leads to burnout. Many "urgent" things aren't actually important.
The better way: Distinguish between urgent and important, and invest time in prevention rather than just reaction.
🎨 The Vanity Project
What it looks like: Pursuing initiatives because they're interesting, prestigious, or personally important to leadership rather than because they serve customers or the mission.
Why it's wrong: You're spending resources on internal preferences rather than external value. Someone's pet project rarely creates lasting impact.
The better way: Align all work with clear customer outcomes and business objectives.
When you spot these patterns, you’ve identified opportunities to improve how work gets done. The goal isn’t to shame people but to name the dysfunctions so we can address them systematically.