Early retirement whys: Pointless workplace loopback tasks

If there’s one thing about doing my job — both current and past — that I hate, it’s pointless inefficiencies. And there is no bigger outrageous inefficiency than doing something, having another go at it in a different way, and then going right back to where you first started.

I don’t know how it’s ever acceptable to work on a task by tearing it up, starting all over again, fiddle-farting around for days, weeks or months at a time, and then a higher-up says something like this…

“ This isn’t right. How about we try that instead?”

You think to yourself, “Yeah, that does make sense. There is a reason why this isn’t working.”

But the problem is: that is where you started. There was a reason why you went with that in the first place.

In fact, this explicitly wasn’t done originally for widely identified reasons. We didn’t just go with that initially for a laugh.

The tragedy is that I’ve seen this happen to other people countless times, and been involved far too many times myself. And it’s especially jarring if you’re working in the public sector, where you’re just wasting taxpayers’ money.

It’s time for another in our series of early retirement whys. Today we talk about the infuriating ordeal of…