I’ve genuinely enjoyed working at every job I’ve held. I like solving problems. I like designing courses. I like the feeling of making something clearer, better, more usable, and easier than it was before. Doing the work I was hired for has never been an issue. The issue has always been what work eventually evolves into. Every role I’ve had came with a project management tool. Sometimes more than one. When you first join an organization, these tools are helpful. They give structure. They clarify expectations and help you learn about the work. When you first join an organization, having a checklist feels like a relief. But over time, this scaffolding has always turned into overhead. As I became fluent in the actual work, my responsibilities naturally increased and eventually, the tool stopped being a guide and started becoming a chore. Updating it wasn’t hard, but it was something that had to be done. Marking stages. Checking off sub-steps. "Just make sure you update Asana/Airtable/ServiceNow!" Why? Everyone knew I was getting my work done. No one thought I wasn't. This easily became the most annoying part of the job, especially during busy times. Imagine a looming deadline, stopping what you're doing, and updating a tool. Eventually, it started to take up more and more of my time. Five percent. Sometimes closer to ten. The project management tool lagging was a frustration I had never experienced before. Incomparable. A non-trivial amount of time at work not spent working, but spent documenting that I was working. The tool had outgrown its usefulness and become burdensome. These tools do two things at once. They remind me of what I need to do, and communicate updates about my work to others. Both of those are reasonable, necessary needs for an organization. It's helpful for me too to have a single place that shows what I need to do. But the cost is subtle and persistent. After working for long enough, the frustration outweighs the benefit. Keeping the tool updated starts to feel like a whole another job layered on top of my real one. Doing the work stops being enough. I also need to keep a system updated that does nothing to help me finish the actual work. But I don't think I want project management tools to disappear. I just don't want to update them anymore. This is where I am misunderstood. It's not that updating the tool feels like micromanagement. It's not that they want me to update the tool because they don't trust me. The frustration is about being made responsible for satisfying an organizational need that had nothing to do with the work itself. The organization needs visibility into my work. That's reasonable. But keeping it updated shouldn't be my job. And I feel that this is where project management quietly goes wrong. When coordination becomes manual labor. When skilled work is slowed down by the requirement to constantly narrate itself. It starts to feel unnecessary. We have calendars, documents, commits, drafts, messages, artifacts—trails of real work everywhere. The idea that I still need to stop doing real work and update a separate system to say “I am here now” feels dated. I would be perfectly happy to never update a project management tool again. I still want to know what I need to do. I just don't want to be the one constantly telling the system where I am. These tools should exist in the background—observing my work, not interrupting it. A one-way street: they give me information; I give it nothing but the work itself. If project management is truly about enabling progress, then the best version of it is invisible. Requiring constant manual project updates is a form of waste that organizations have normalized, and we now have the technical capacity to stop normalizing it.