‘Got 3 mins for a quick sync?‘

The message was from a colleague who, last I checked, was supposed to be finalizing a budget report that had been sitting in purgatory for 13 days. I looked at the broken mug. I looked at the phone. In the wilderness, if you’re leading a group of 13 survivalists through a dense thicket and someone stops to ‘sync’ every time they see a strange leaf, you die of exposure before you find the trailhead. You don’t sync in the bush; you observe, you decide, and you move. But in the modern office-especially the remote one-we have developed a collective allergy to the act of moving without 13 pairs of eyes watching the first step.

[AHA 1: The Trojan Horse]

I replied with a hesitant ‘Sure,’ and within 63 seconds, my screen was filled with the flickering grid of a video call. There weren’t just two of us. There were 13 people. Why were there 13 people? One was the project lead, three were from marketing, one was a developer who looked like he hadn’t slept in 73 hours, and the rest were ‘observers’ who seemed to be there simply to bear witness to the passage of time. My 3-minute window was already a lie, a digital Trojan horse designed to bypass my boundaries and seize my afternoon.

We spent the first 13 minutes talking about the weather in four different time zones. This is the ritual sacrifice we offer to the gods of ‘culture’ before we get to the meat of the matter. My broken mug sat on the counter, its jagged edges a much more honest representation of my current mental state than the forced smiles on the screen. I’ve spent 33 years learning how to read the landscape, how to tell the difference between a dry creek bed and a flash-flood trap, but I still can’t navigate the subtext of a corporate ‘sync.’

I watched as the developer on the call tried to explain a technical hurdle. He was precise. He was logical. He spoke for about 3 minutes. Then, a manager who hadn’t touched a line of code in 13 years spent the next 23 minutes rephrasing what the developer just said, only with more buzzwords and less clarity. I felt a phantom pain in my hand where my mug used to be. In survival situations, redundancy is a virtue-you carry two lighters and 3 ways to purify water. In communication, redundancy is a toxin. It dilutes the signal until everything is just noise.

We are losing the capacity for deep work because we are addicted to the interruption. We have prioritized the perception of collaboration over the reality of concentration. It’s easy to feel productive when you’ve been in 13 meetings by 3 PM, but what have you actually built? What have you solved? Usually, you’ve just moved the same pile of dirt from one side of the digital yard to the other. We are terrified of the silence that comes with deep thinking, so we fill it with the chatter of the ‘sync.’

There is a better way, and it starts with respecting the sanctity of the individual’s time. Think about the way we interact with the things that actually work in our lives. When you need something done efficiently, you look for a process that removes the friction rather than adding to it. I think about the last time I had to upgrade my gear. I didn’t want a consultation; I wanted clarity and a path to the finish line. It’s much like the experience of browsing Bomba.md, where the goal is a hassle-free, convenient buying process that doesn’t demand you sit through a 43-minute explanation of how a screen works. You see what you need, you understand the value, and you move forward. Why can’t our internal communications be that streamlined? Why can’t we treat our colleagues’ attention with the same respect a good retailer treats a customer’s time?

I once led a survival course where a student asked me why we didn’t use radios to stay in touch across the 43-acre campsite. I told him that once you have a radio, you stop looking at the trail. You start relying on the voice in your ear instead of the map in your hand. You become lazy. You stop thinking for yourself because you know you can just ‘sync’ with the base camp if you get turned around. The ‘quick sync’ is our corporate radio. It’s the crutch that allows us to stop being sharp, to stop being prepared, and to stop being accountable for our own clarity.

By the 33rd minute of the call, we were discussing the color of a button that 13 percent of the users would never even see. I could feel my focus evaporating, drifting away like smoke from a poorly built campfire. My concentration is a limited resource. I only have about 3 hours of truly high-level cognitive function in a day before the quality starts to dip. To spend 43 minutes of that precious window debating a button color is not just an inefficiency; it’s a tragedy. It’s a theft of potential.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes as an instructor. I once miscalculated a trek by 13 miles because I was too confident in a faulty compass. I admitted it, we corrected, and we learned. But in the corporate sync, no one ever admits that the meeting was a mistake. We just schedule another one for 3 days from now to ‘close the loop.’ It’s a recursive loop of non-action. We are allergic to the period at the end of a sentence; we prefer the ellipsis, the ‘to be continued,’ the ‘let’s take this offline.’

When I finally hung up the call-which lasted exactly 43 minutes and 53 seconds-I sat in the silence of my kitchen. The broken mug was still there. I realized that the time I spent on that call was time I could have used to fix the handle, or to write something meaningful, or to simply stare out the window and let my brain reset. Instead, I was left with a slight headache and a list of 3 ‘action items’ that could have been handled in a 73-word email.

We need to stop asking for 3 minutes when we know we’re going to take 43. We need to start valuing the written word again, because writing forces you to be honest in a way that talking doesn’t. When you write, you can see the gaps in your logic. When you sync, you can just talk over them. We need to rediscover the courage to work alone, to trust our own judgment, and to allow others the space to do the same.

I picked up the pieces of my mug and threw them in the trash. It was a good mug, but it’s gone now. You can’t glue focus back together once it’s been shattered into 133 tiny pieces by a ‘quick sync.’ You can only try to protect the next hour. I turned off my notifications, closed my laptop, and went back to the only thing that actually required my presence: the quiet, steady work of being here, now, without a single person to align with. The trail is there. The map is in my head. I don’t need a sync to find my way home. I just need to start walking.

Will we ever break the cycle? Probably not entirely. There will always be a 43-year-old middle manager who feels lonely and needs a screen full of faces to feel like a leader. But for the rest of us, the survivalists of the digital age, the mission is clear: protect your time like it’s the last 3 matches in the box. Because once the fire of focus goes out, it’s a long, cold night ahead, and no amount of syncing is going to keep you warm.