I once spent three weeks of my life setting up a Jira board for a team of exactly two people. It was 2019, I was working at this mid-sized logistics firm in Chicago, and I was convinced that if we just had the right ‘infrastructure,’ our little side project would take off. I spent $450 on plugins and roughly 40 hours of my actual life configuring workflows, transition triggers, and custom fields for a project that, in the end, required about four emails to complete. We didn’t need a system. We needed to just talk to each other. But I was terrified of having none. No system, no safety net, no digital paper trail to prove I was ‘working.’
We are obsessed with filling the void. In every software dropdown, every career crossroad, and every weekend plan, we feel this physical itch to select an option. Any option. But lately, I’ve realized that ‘None’ is usually the only honest answer on the board. It’s the one we ignore because it feels like failure, but it’s actually the only way to keep your sanity in a world that wants to sell you a subscription for your own thoughts.
The $4,000 mistake and the cult of ‘Something’
Let’s talk about Notion. I know, I know—everyone loves it. It’s the darling of the productivity world. But I’m going to say it: I think Notion is a trap for people who want to feel productive without actually doing anything. I spent most of last year building a ‘Life Dashboard.’ I had databases for my books, my workouts, my meal plans. I even had a database to track my databases. It was beautiful. It was also completely useless. I spent about 12 minutes a day actually exercising and 45 minutes logging the exercise.
I call this the ‘Something Bias.’ We think that doing something—anything—is inherently better than doing nothing. It’s why managers call meetings that could have been an email, and why people buy $2,000 Pelotons that eventually just become expensive clothes racks. We’re terrified of the blank space. I remember sitting in my home office last Tuesday, staring at a blank Google Doc for a project I didn’t even want to do. I could have just closed the laptop and gone for a walk. That would have been the ‘None’ choice. Instead, I spent two hours ‘researching’ competitors, which is just a dignified way of saying I was scrolling Twitter with a guilty conscience.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. We use tools to hide from the fact that we don’t have a plan. If you don’t know what you’re doing, no amount of ‘leveraging’ (god, I hate that word) a CRM is going to save you. I’ve tested this, by the way. Last quarter, I tracked my actual output. For six weeks, I used a complex project management suite. For the next six weeks, I used absolutely nothing but a 99-cent spiral notebook from Walgreens and a Pentel EnerGel 0.7mm pen. My billable hours went up by 14% when I used the notebook. Why? Because there were no notifications. No ‘suggested tasks.’ Just me and the void. It was terrifying. It was perfect.
The hardest thing to do is nothing, especially when everyone is watching you to see what you’ll do next.
I might be wrong about this, but Jira is for people who hate their coworkers
I’m serious. I have a genuine, perhaps irrational, hatred for Jira. I think it’s a product designed by people who want to turn humans into interchangeable parts. If you work at a company that insists on every single thought being a ‘ticket,’ you are being robbed of your humanity. I refuse to work with clients who demand I join their Jira boards now. I don’t care if they’re paying $200 an hour. It’s a dealbreaker. It’s like trying to have a conversation through a series of bureaucratic forms. It kills the vibe. It kills the work.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that we choose these ‘somethings’ because they feel professional. ‘None’ feels amateur. If I tell a client, “I don’t have a project management portal, just email me,” they look at me like I’m a caveman. But then I deliver the work three days early because I wasn’t busy updating my ‘In Progress’ status for the third time that morning. We’ve professionalized friction.
I know people will disagree. They’ll say, “But how do you scale?” Maybe you don’t. Maybe scaling is the lie we tell ourselves so we don’t have to admit we’re bored. I’ve seen companies grow from 5 people to 50 and suddenly they spend 80% of their time talking about how they work instead of actually doing the work. They traded ‘None’ for a system, and the system ate their soul. Total disaster.
The math of doing nothing
I did some rough math on my last three years of ‘tooling.’ Between SaaS subscriptions, ‘masterclasses’ I never finished, and apps that promised to automate my life, I spent roughly $3,200. That’s not even the bad part. The bad part is the time. I estimate I spent 214 minutes a week—that’s over three and a half hours—just managing the tools themselves. Over a year, that’s 182 hours. That is four full work weeks spent talking to software.
- Subscription fatigue: I had 12 active subs for ‘productivity’ at one point.
- Context switching: It takes about 23 minutes to get back into ‘deep work’ after checking a notification.
- The Lie: Thinking that buying the tool is the same as starting the work.
If I had chosen ‘None’ of those tools, I would have had an extra month of vacation every year. Think about that. A whole month of sitting on a beach or reading a book or staring at a wall. But no, I needed a ‘second brain.’ My first brain was perfectly fine; it was just crowded with garbage I didn’t need to remember in the first place.
The part where I admit I’m a hypocrite
I’m sitting here writing this on a MacBook, using a specialized writing app (Ulysses), while drinking a $6 latte. I am the problem. I used to think that if I just found the perfect setup, the words would just pour out of me like water. I was completely wrong. The setup is just a fancy way of procrastinating. I’ve written some of my best stuff on the back of receipts in the checkout line at the grocery store. The environment doesn’t matter. The ‘None’ matters.
I’m trying to get better at it. Last month, I had an offer to consult for a tech startup. Good money. Interesting-ish product. But when I looked at the requirements, it was all ‘strategic alignment meetings’ and ‘stakeholder syncs.’ I realized I didn’t want the job. I didn’t want the money enough to deal with the noise. I chose ‘None.’ I stayed home and worked on my garden. I felt like a loser for about two days, and then I felt the lightest I’ve felt in years.
Choosing ‘None’ is a muscle. You have to train it. Start small. Next time you’re at a restaurant and you can’t decide between two mediocre entrees, choose neither. Get an appetizer and leave. Next time you’re looking at a software trial, just don’t click ‘Start.’ See how long you can go without it. You’ll realize that 90% of what we think is essential is just clutter designed to make us feel busy.
It’s a weirdly aggressive stance to take, I know. My wife thinks I’m becoming a hermit. Maybe I am. But there’s a certain power in being the person who can look at a buffet of options and say, “I’m not hungry.” It makes people uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable. But it’s the only way to find out what actually matters.
I don’t have a neat way to wrap this up. I’m still struggling with it. Every time a new app launches on Product Hunt, I feel that familiar tug. “Maybe this one will be different,” I tell myself. It never is.
So, what are you currently doing that you could just… stop? Not replace. Not optimize. Just delete. What would happen if you chose nothing? I’m genuinely curious if anyone else feels this way, or if I’ve just finally burnt out for good.
Just try it once. Choose none. See what fills the gap.
