You ever work in a place where you just like have endless meetings but nobody ever writes anything down or agrees to do anything so then nothing actually happens? And then you have the same fucking meeting the following week?

Maybe you constantly rehash the same information through your chat app of choice or, god forbid, email 🤮. Then you’re like, “oh, let me go search through my personal single source of truth, aka Outlook, to find that file again” or “remember when I Slack’d you that thing like 60,000 messages ago, think you can send it to me for the thirtieth time?!”

Maybe you have thoroughly defined scorecard metrics or “OKRs” which inevitably becomes gaming the system and shitting all over everybody in your path because you’re “RESULTS ORIENTED!!1!” to achieve some dumb bullshit that doesn’t actually make an impact. Christ, I’m jaded.

Best case scenario, your team has a project management system to track its work…as does every other team in the company. Except, none of them connect with one another and none of the work actually connects to your organization’s higher level and inspiring goals like “generate more revenues”.

Or, maybe you’re a goddamned Neanderthal and use paper for everything.

<aside> 💡 Which, for the record, I’m all for everybody having their own personal process that works for themselves, whether that’s a notepad file, piece of paper or smearing shit on a mirror. However, an organization should have a comprehensive system that is accessible to all team members.

</aside>

If any of the above sounds familiar, congratulations, you’ve been a victim of one of the greatest crimes against business: metawork.

So, imagine if there was, like, a project management system that didn't totally suck ass. That considered the cross functional workflow and the management of such work. There you go…Functional Management System.

<aside> 💡 I never claimed to be good at naming things

</aside>

And to be fair again, many project management systems could be good if they had the culture to support them. But, unfortunately most people ultimately don't really give a fuck about making more money for some rich asshole or helping them launder their profits through a nonprofit that's actually just a unglorified political campaigning apparatus, so we all become losers of the prisoner’s dilemma.