The cursor blinked on field number thirty-five. A patient, rhythmic pulse of black against a sterile field of white. Sarah’s jaw was tight, a dull ache radiating from her molars. She’d been navigating this digital labyrinth for what felt like an eternity, but the clock on her screen insisted it had only been fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes to log a single, five-minute phone call. Each click was a tiny, metallic sound, a percussive beat in a symphony of inefficiency she was forced to conduct every day. Field 35: ‘Secondary Stakeholder Influence Score (1-5)’. She typed ‘5’. It didn’t matter. Nobody read these fields. They existed only to be filled, a ritual of data entry to appease the great, slumbering beast of the Enterprise CRM.

Her boss, Dave, who saw the world through dashboards drenched in forest green and cautionary amber, had sent an email that morning. The subject was ‘Admin Time Analysis’. A chart showed her team’s ‘non-client-facing activity’ had spiked by 125% in the last quarter. He was concerned. He suggested a new productivity plug-in, an AI assistant that would, he promised, streamline their workflow. He was trying to solve the problem by adding another gear to the machine that was already grinding itself, and its operators, to dust. He couldn’t see that the machine was the problem. The expensive, all-in-one, industry-leading solution he’d spent a staggering $5,755 per seat to implement was the anchor dragging them to the bottom.

It’s the belief that process, enforced by software, can replace trust and judgment. We build digital cages with 45 mandatory fields and then wonder why our people feel trapped, why their creativity and agility have vanished.

The Art of Productive Friction

I’ve been thinking a lot about my friend Stella R.J. Her job title sounds like something from a science fiction novel: she’s a video game difficulty balancer. She doesn’t write code or design characters. Her entire role is to play a game over and over, tweaking invisible numbers until the experience feels just right. Too easy, and players get bored. Too hard, and they quit in frustration. Her art is the art of friction. She obsesses over the precise amount of resistance a player should feel. She knows that a well-placed challenge makes victory sweeter, but a poorly designed one-a ‘grind wall’-just feels like punishment.

Stella’s first question would be devastatingly simple: “What’s the one thing the user is trying to accomplish here?” The answer: log that a call happened. Everything else is noise. Stella’s job is to eliminate the noise that players hate, so they can focus on the challenges they love. Her current project was a simulation game set in a vibrant coastal city, a world away from the grey cubicles she was imagining. The design brief was to capture the feeling of exploration and leisure, something akin to the relaxed discovery you might find on a site like 나트랑플레이, not the rigid, soul-crushing checklists of enterprise software.

We, in the business world, have become terrible game designers. We implement systems that maximize friction in all the wrong places. We create user experiences that feel like punishment. And then we act surprised when our teams become masters of the workaround. The unofficial spreadsheet, the shared document, the group chat where the real work happens-these aren’t signs of rebellion.

I say all this with the bitter taste of experience. I was Dave once. Years ago, I led a small creative team of five people. I became convinced we needed a ‘real’ project management system. I sold my boss on a platform with Gantt charts, resource allocation modules, dependency mapping, and multi-layered permissions. It cost us $575 a month. I was so proud. I’d brought order to our creative chaos. Or so I thought. Within weeks, we were spending nearly as much time feeding the system as we were doing the actual work. Team meetings devolved into audits of who had updated their task cards. The beautiful, complex charts were always out of date. The system that was meant to give us clarity only created a new, full-time job: managing the system. After three months of declining morale and productivity, we staged a quiet coup. We went back to using a simple, shared text file. It was ugly. It was unsophisticated. And it worked.

The expensive solution wasn’t just unnecessary; it was actively harmful.

This whole dynamic reminds me of trying to make small talk at the dentist’s office. There’s an inherent power imbalance. The dentist is leaning over you, holding sharp, metallic tools. Her assistant is there with a suction tube. And then, with a mouth full of cotton and metal, she asks, “So, got any fun plans for the weekend?” You’re expected to perform a basic human task-communication-in a context deliberately engineered to make it almost impossible. You grunt something incoherent. Everyone politely pretends it was a real conversation.

I will admit, however, that I’m being a little unfair. There’s a contradiction here I have to acknowledge. For a global corporation with 25,000 employees, complex compliance requirements, and business units that genuinely never speak to each other, a beast like Salesforce isn’t just a good idea; it’s a necessity. The granular control, the endless customization, the fortress of permissions-these are features, not bugs, when you’re operating at the scale of a small nation. The true failure isn’t in the software itself. It’s in the profound lack of self-awareness in the companies that buy it.

A five-person startup doesn’t need the same logistical toolkit as the US military, yet we constantly see them trying to wield it. They buy the sledgehammer to hang a picture frame. They buy the industrial cargo ship to cross a stream.

Enabling Flow, Not Fighting Friction

We need to adopt the mindset of a game balancer like Stella. We need to look at every process, every tool, every mandatory field and ask: Does this create productive friction or destructive friction? Does this challenge my team in a way that leads to growth, or does it simply punish them for trying to do their jobs? The goal isn’t to buy more power. It’s to enable more flow.

It’s about building a workflow that feels less like a dental exam and more like a conversation. It’s about trusting people enough to let them use a simple text file if it gets the job done.

Back at her desk, Sarah stared at field number thirty-five. She had ten more to go. She moved her mouse to the top right of the browser window. She clicked the small ‘x’. Then she did the same for the other sixteen tabs the CRM had forced her to open. She opened a plain text application on her computer. She typed the client’s name, the date, and two sentences summarizing the call. It took her less than 25 seconds. The real work always happens outside the cage.