Technical leaders waste time chasing fabricated problems; recognize anxiety-driven detours, reset, and focus on the few high-impact tasks that truly validate product value.
We spend most of our workday on noise, mistaking easy-mode tasks for progress. The author shows how Parkinson's Law inflates work to fill time and how the brain seeks comfort by inventing low-value problems when uncertainty spikes. He cites his own backlog of distractions - pricing, SOC2 compliance, color branding, and animation courses - that appear urgent but do not move the core hypothesis forward.
When uncertainty about a high-effort, high-risk problem rises, the mind creates tractable but irrelevant work. This pattern appears both in early-stage startups and large companies, where incentive structures and fear of unsolvable upstream issues push teams toward safe, low-value tasks. The piece calls out "delusional" problem solving: building out feature flags or security hardening before any users exist.
The practical antidote is to treat the urge to drift as a signal, take a reset - a walk, cooking, journaling - and then narrow the focus to the single unknown that blocks progress. By breaking that unknown into tiny sub-tasks, momentum returns and real value can be delivered.
Ultimately, the article argues that recognizing and rejecting fabricated problems is a discipline that protects teams from burnout, improves decision-making, and keeps product development aligned with genuine customer value.
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