Time flows like water through our fingers, precious and impossible to grasp. Yet in the modern workplace, we've become masters at something peculiar: transforming this flowing river into stagnant pools of administrative tedium.
I'm reminded of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" - an infinite library containing every possible book. Our digital age has created something similar: an endless labyrinth of data entry, calendar updates, and CRM maintenance. We've become librarians of our own infinite administrative library, cataloging endless variations of the same information.
"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."
- Mary Oliver
What strikes me most isn't the time we lose, but the moments of brilliance we never gain. Each hour spent updating spreadsheets is an hour stolen from the kind of deep, creative work that moves the world forward. Like Kafka's office workers, we've normalized our own transformation into mere processors of information.
Yet there's hope in this recognition. By naming our condition, we begin to imagine alternatives. We're working on something that might help chart a path through this labyrinth, but that's a story still taking shape.
Perhaps it's time to ask ourselves: What would we create if we were freed from the gravity of administrative tasks? What symphonies of innovation remain unwritten because their composers are trapped in the endless loop of digital maintenance?
The answer lies not in working harder, but in liberating ourselves from work that machines should do, so we might focus on work that only humans can do.
