It’s 6:00 PM on a Tuesday. You are driving home in the pouring rain, severely under-caffeinated, staring blankly at the taillights ahead, and completely consumed by an internal debate over whether a hotdog is technically a sandwich.
Your hands simply take over. You take the third exit off the roundabout. You navigate the familiar suburban streets, pull into the driveway, walk up to the front porch, and confidently smack your key into the lock.
It doesn’t turn.
You aggressively jiggle it. Harder this time. Because physics.
Still nothing. You look up. The door, which used to be white, is now painted a horrifying, aggressive shade of teal.
You look through the living room window. A bloke named Gary who looks like he has survived three wars and a retail Black Friday is sitting on your sofa, eating a bowl of cereal, staring out the window at you with sheer, unblinking confusion.
Then, the absolute horror washes over you.
You don’t live here anymore. You haven't lived here since November 2024. Your actual house is four miles in the opposite direction.
You didn’t consciously decide to visit your old landlord. You didn’t miss the drafty windows or the squeaky floorboards. Your brain simply realised you were profoundly tired, immediately shut down the critical-thinking department, and handed the steering wheel directly to muscle memory.
You phantom-commuted.
And let me tell you, this exact neurological glitch is happening at our audit desks every single day.
We had a collective epiphany that we do way too much useless work. We promised to stop over-complicating things. We swore an oath to simplicity.
But humans are biologically wired to conserve energy. Thinking is expensive. When the reality hits, your inbox is a warzone, and your cognitive battery is flashing 1%, philosophy dies.
Your exhausted brain looks for a familiar groove.
Why are you doing this?
Because it feels safe. It is the comfortable, familiar trauma-response of the last five years. You don't want to think, you just want to do.
You parked in the old driveway.
We mistakenly believe that SALY (Same As Last Year) is a conscious choice; a bad attitude we can just "decide" to drop after an inspiring firm-wide training session.
It isn't. SALY is a professional autopilot. It is the invisible gravity of our own bad habits.
You cannot beat autopilot with willpower alone, because willpower is a battery that dies right around lunchtime. If you put yourself in front of a messy data dump and a blank Excel grid, you will always default to your worst, most time-consuming habits, because those habits require absolutely zero new thought.
If you want to break the loop, you can't just tell yourself to "work smarter." You have to change the environment. You have to make the old route impossible to take.
You do this by refusing to start the journey in a haunted spreadsheet.
True simplicity isn’t a motivational poster on the breakroom wall. It’s a daily, structural rejection of your own muscle memory.
And the only way to win that daily battle is to build a system that navigates for you when you are too tired to drive.
Watch out for the old exit.
Until next week,
Christiaan
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