The Poached Egg Decision
For months, my mornings followed the same pattern.
Avocado on toast. A poached egg. And a small but guaranteed disaster.
I owned a microwave egg poacher that, with impressive consistency, caused the egg to explode. Not metaphorically. Literally. The microwave would be covered. Half the egg would be lost. The rest would be salvaged with irritation. I would clean up, mutter something under my breath, and carry on with my day.
And then I would do exactly the same thing again the next morning.
This went on for an embarrassingly long time.
What’s important here is not that the egg exploded. It’s that the frustration was predictable. Reliable. Almost scheduled. I had come to accept that this was simply part of the process. Want the egg? Endure the process.
Until one morning, somewhere between wiping the microwave and questioning my life choices, a thought appeared—quietly, almost apologetically:
“There might be another way of doing this.”
I bought a different poacher. It cost about five pounds. The problem disappeared immediately.
Nothing else changed. Same breakfast. Same desire. Same outcome.
Just without the mess, waste, or irritation.
This is how many decision problems actually work.
We often don’t realize there’s a decision to be made—we mistake a familiar inconvenience for an unchangeable fact.
When friction stops looking like a problem
Not all problems arrive with drama. Many arrive as mild, repeatable annoyances: things that “aren’t ideal,” but also don’t seem important enough to fix.
Things that:
waste a bit of time
drain a bit of energy
irritate just enough to notice
but not enough to act on
So we adapt.
We build routines around the friction. We complain about it casually. We treat it as “just how things are.” Over time, the friction stops being visible as a choice and starts feeling like a fact of life. Something we must endure.
This happens everywhere (not just in my kitchen).
Teams put up with:
processes everyone dislikes but no one questions
meetings that exist because they always have
reports produced out of habit rather than need
tools people work around instead of with
In life, it appears as:
habits we keep because they’re “good for us,” even when they drain us
routines inherited from family or culture that no longer fit
compromises that made sense once, but haven’t been revisited
The common thread is not laziness or lack of intelligence.
It’s familiarity quietly turning choices into habits.
The decision to keep them is rarely explicit. It’s made through silence.
Where friction comes from
Some friction is inherited.
Ways of working passed down from previous managers or colleagues. “This is how we do things here.” No one remembers why—only that challenging it feels risky.
Some friction is self-imposed.
Like the green smoothie you drink every morning because you believe it’s the right thing to do, even though it brings you no joy and slightly ruins your day before it begins.
And some friction is simply outdated.
A response to old constraints. A workaround for a problem that no longer exists. A solution frozen in time while circumstances quietly moved on.
The danger is not friction itself. Some difficulty is meaningful. Some effort is worth it.
The danger is unexamined friction—costs we keep paying long after they’ve stopped earning their place
Why organisations struggle to see it
In companies, especially large ones, these frictions accumulate silently. People at the edges feel them most. People at the top often feel them least.
This is not malice. It’s distance.
The higher you are in an organisation, the less directly you experience the small inefficiencies, irritations, and workarounds that shape everyday reality. What looks neat on a slide can feel very different on the ground.
Which is why one of the most useful things a manager can do—especially a senior one—is deceptively simple:
Bring people together and ask them what is quietly making their work harder than it needs to be.
Better yet, give them the option to say it anonymously.
Create a space where frustration can be expressed without being labelled negativity, resistance, or a lack of resilience. Where people can speak plainly about what doesn’t work, without fear of punishment or subtle consequences.
Most people aren’t asking for radical change.
They’re asking for small improvements that remove constant drag.
They want a better egg poacher.
The real lesson
The point of the story is not about eggs.
This isn’t a story about productivity for its own sake.
It’s this:
Decisions aren’t only about WHAT we choose to do.
They’re also about HOW we choose to do it.
We often endure unnecessary difficulty because we mistake familiarity for necessity. We go the hard way not because it’s right—but because it’s known.
Progress doesn’t have to come from pushing harder.
Sometimes it’s to remove the blindfold and ask a gentler, more practical question:
“Does this actually need to be this difficult?”
Often, the answer is no.
And when that becomes visible, the solution isn’t dramatic.
It’s practical. Often trivial. Just like my new and “life-changing” egg poacher.
Agnes Trocinska