I made an offhand comment on a call yesterday that has been rattling around in my head ever since.
“This plane ride should have been an email.”
It got a laugh, mostly because everyone has lived some version of that experience. Two airports. Almost eight hours of travel. A hotel. Ubers. Expense reports. All for a meeting that lasted less than a day before everyone packed up and headed home.
To be clear, I’m not saying the meeting wasn’t valuable. It was. I enjoyed interacting with people I don’t usually spend time with, and there are some conversations that really are easier to have sitting across the table from someone.
But I’ve been wondering whether we ask that question often enough.
Not whether a meeting could have been an email—we’ve all joked about that for years—but whether everything surrounding the meeting was necessary. Did we need everyone there? Did we need to travel? Was being in the same room the thing that created the value, or was it simply the way we’d always done it?
The more I thought about it, the less I realized I was talking about air travel and the more I realized I was talking about organizations.
We spend an incredible amount of time debating the wrong things. Should people work remotely or come back to the office? Is AI good or bad? Is sustainability about recycling, renewable energy, or buying carbon offsets?
Those are all reasonable conversations, but they usually begin with an assumption that I don’t think gets challenged often enough: that the systems we’ve built are already the right ones.
I’m becoming much more interested in questioning the systems themselves.
Every organization consumes resources. Some are obvious—money, electricity, cloud infrastructure. Others are harder to see. People’s attention. Their time. Their trust. Their ability to focus. Those are resources too, and in many cases they’re the ones we waste most casually.
I’ve started thinking about that accumulated waste as organizational carbon.
I don’t mean that as a replacement for actual carbon emissions. Those matter. What I’m talking about is the friction organizations create simply because no one has stopped to ask whether a process still serves a purpose.
It’s the weekly meeting where nobody can remember why they’re there, but everyone keeps showing up.
It’s the approval step that made sense after an outage five years ago but now delays every deployment.
It’s the dashboard that’s meticulously maintained even though nobody uses it to make decisions.
It’s the office that sits half-empty while people spend hours every week commuting because leadership feels more comfortable when they can see everyone working.
None of those things are catastrophic on their own. That’s part of what makes them so easy to ignore. They accumulate slowly, becoming part of the background until we stop noticing them altogether.
Engineers have a name for something similar: technical debt. No single shortcut destroys a system. The problem is that enough small shortcuts eventually make everything slower. Every change takes a little longer. Every deployment becomes a little riskier. Eventually you’re spending more time managing complexity than building anything new.
Organizations collect debt the same way.
Every unnecessary meeting, every extra approval, every context switch, every process that exists because “that’s how we’ve always done it” adds a little more friction. We don’t usually measure that friction, so we rarely think of it as waste. We just accept it as the cost of doing business.
I’m not sure it has to be.
That line of thinking has changed how I look at sustainability.
Most sustainability conversations focus on things we can easily see: recycling programs, electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings. Those things matter, but they’re all downstream of a bigger question.
Are we using the resources we already have wisely?
For me, sustainability is really about stewardship. It’s about recognizing that everything we rely on is finite. Electricity is finite. Compute capacity is finite. People’s time is finite. Their attention is finite. Once you start looking at organizations through that lens, a lot of decisions look different.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve become such a believer in remote work.
People often assume it’s because working from home is more comfortable, or because employees like the flexibility. Both of those things are true, but they’re not why I’ve spent years building remote teams.
The biggest benefit is that remote work forces organizations to become intentional.
When people aren’t sitting in the same building, you can’t rely on hallway conversations to spread information. You have to document decisions. You have to communicate more clearly. You have to define expectations instead of assuming everyone absorbed them by osmosis.
Most importantly, you have to stop confusing visibility with productivity.
When you can’t see everyone sitting at their desks, you’re left with a much more interesting question: are we accomplishing what we set out to accomplish?
That shift—from measuring presence to measuring outcomes—changes more than where people work. It changes how organizations think.
Better documentation reduces duplicated work. Asynchronous communication gives people longer stretches of uninterrupted focus. Trust replaces supervision. Decisions become easier to revisit because they’re written down instead of trapped in someone’s memory.
Those are good management practices whether your team is remote or not. Remote work just makes it harder to avoid them.
I see the same pattern in engineering.
My team spends a lot of time trying to eliminate waste that most people never notice. Idle servers. Inefficient database queries. Development environments that nobody remembers to shut down. Infrastructure that’s dramatically oversized because no one has revisited assumptions made years ago.
None of those things are especially exciting. They’re certainly not the sort of work that makes conference keynotes.
But millions of tiny efficiencies add up in ways people rarely appreciate. They lower costs. They improve reliability. They reduce operational complexity. They make future work easier instead of harder.
That’s good engineering.
I think it’s also good stewardship.
AI is forcing us to have that conversation again.
Every interaction with an AI model consumes resources. Some of those costs are financial. Some are environmental. Some are simply the opportunity cost of solving one problem instead of another.
That doesn’t make AI a bad idea.
It just means we should apply the same discipline we apply everywhere else.
If AI gives therapists more time to spend with patients instead of paperwork, that’s meaningful. If it removes repetitive work from engineers or helps support teams solve problems faster, that’s meaningful too.
If it’s creating work instead of eliminating it, or consuming enormous amounts of compute to produce something nobody really needed, then we should be willing to ask why.
I keep coming back to the same question, whether I’m thinking about a plane ticket, a software architecture, an AI model, or a daily commute.
What value did this create, and was it worth what it consumed?
I don’t think that’s just an engineering question.
I think it’s a leadership question.
And maybe it’s the most useful way I’ve found to think about sustainability—not as a checklist of environmental initiatives, but as a commitment to respecting finite resources, especially the human ones.
Some meetings deserve a plane ride.
Some absolutely don’t.
The trick is knowing the difference and being willing to ask the question before we’ve already booked the flight.
