The indicator’s been blinking for three kilometres.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Your coffee’s gone cold in the cup holder. The sun’s already too bright for January optimism. And the radio host is laughing about how “traffic seems to be moving… eventually.”
You lift your foot off the brake.
Two seconds later, you’re back on it.
No accident.
No cones.
No flashing lights.
Just a long, slow parade of confused humans staring into the abyss of each other’s brake lights.
Someone sighs in the car next to you like they’ve been personally betrayed by society. A delivery bike slips past, smug. Your phone lights up with a meeting reminder you were supposed to be early for. You do the math in your head. Again. Optimistically. Wrongly.
This isn’t congestion.
This is a mystery.
Because nothing happened. And yet… everything stopped.
By the time traffic starts moving again, you pass the scene of the crime.
There is none.
No crash.
No breakdown.
No rubbernecking tourist photographing a pigeon.
Just road. Clean. Innocent. Mocking you.
Somewhere, someone tapped their brakes for half a second. Someone else reacted a beat too late. Another followed a little too close. And like a bad game of telephone, the message turned into: everyone panic, immediately.
It’s absurd.
It’s infuriating.
It’s deeply human.
And if you’ve ever gone back to work early in January, it probably feels familiar.
They start quietly. Too quietly.
A file that’s “almost ready.”
A dataset that’s “basically final.”
A tiny hesitation: “Let’s just start, we’ll fix it as we go.”
At first it’s subtle. A follow-up email. A clarification. A re-export. Then another. Then someone waits. Someone rushes. Someone works late trying to “catch up” to a problem that never had a single, identifiable cause.
Stop. Go. Stop. Go.
Frustration creeps in sideways. You miss a workout. You eat dinner faster than you’d like. You say “after busy season” so often it starts to sound fictional.
Clients feel it. Reviewers feel it. You feel it.
All because of something so small it barely deserved attention at the time.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth behind phantom traffic jams and phantom audit chaos:
Systems under pressure amplify tiny inconsistencies.
On the road, it’s braking a fraction too hard.
In audits, it’s starting without true readiness.
The lesson isn’t “work faster.”
It’s “smooth the flow.”
One practical tip to steal this season:
Don’t move until the front is genuinely ready.
Before fieldwork starts, define one non-negotiable “ready” checkpoint. Not perfect. Just stable. Data complete. Structure agreed. No “we’ll clean it later.” Because later is where the jam lives.
Eventually, traffic clears. It always does. You arrive where you were going, slightly later, slightly more tired, wondering how something so small stole so much time.
That’s the danger of “nothing.”
Nothing feels harmless.
Nothing feels ignorable.
Until it costs you your evening.
The road will always be busy. January will always come. The only real choice is whether you tap the brakes… or leave enough space to keep moving.
Until next time,
Christiaan
P.S. Ever been stuck in a jam with no cause or an audit that felt exactly the same? Hit reply. I promise this is a judgement-free lane.
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