At The Overlap

The obvious fix

Remember those resolutions or intentions you made back in January?

The ones that sounded simple at the time.

Exercise a bit more.
Eat better.
Be more organised.
Stay on top of things.

Nothing unrealistic. Reasonable things. So you acted on them.

You picked better meals.
Planned your workouts.
Set up a system to stay organized.

And for a while, it worked.

But what happens when things start sliding? People usually start adjusting in the same place:

The visible one.

Tweaking what you eat.
Changing when you exercise.
Trying a different way of organizing things. (I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit…)

Because what’s being adjusted is the surface: what you do.

Not what it depends on: time, energy, capacity, and how the day actually unfolds. So things improve slightly. But not enough to really change the outcome.

It’s not that we usually start in the wrong place. We just stop too early.

It’s a bit like the streetlight effect. We look for the problem where it’s easiest to see instead of where it actually is.

And nowhere makes this more obvious than in the kitchen.

In the kitchen

Most people have had that moment when something doesn’t quite work while cooking. The dish is close. Not bad. Just… slightly off. Perhaps the tomato sauce looks right. The texture is fine. But it doesn’t quite come together.

So we adjust the obvious things first. A bit more salt. Maybe some acid. Maybe some sugar.

Adding seasoning feels productive because it’s immediate. And yes, sometimes, it helps. But sometimes… nothing really changes. And then you keep adding seasoning, other spices, other ratios.

It keeps almost working, which is exactly what makes the situation misleading. Because the issue is often not the seasoning itself.

It’s when things were added, what’s missing, or whether the structure of the dish ever worked in the first place.

To be fair, this is also where the limitation shows up. We don’t just fix what is visible. We fix what is still possible to change.

You can adjust seasoning at the end. You can’t undo timing, missing ingredients, or how the dish was built. Fixing those would mean starting again or planning differently next time.

But usually, you’re trying to make this version work. Which is also why hindsight feels so obvious afterward. Later, the problem can seem clear. In the moment, the only things available are the ones you can still change.

But here’s the thing: The obvious fix often works. Just not on the thing that’s actually broken.

Where it actually changed something

I used to run into a version of this with meal planning all the time. Plan meals for the week. Pick recipes. Try to be organized.

On paper, everything made sense. In reality, something was off almost every day. Missing ingredients, not enough energy, bad timing, meals that no longer fit the mood or schedule once the week actually started unfolding.

But the real change didn’t come from improving the plan. A big shift was removing some decisions from the system: a repeatable grocery list and dishes that matched this. And honestly, changing who was actually doing the cooking helped a lot too.

That’s the point when something really clicked.

The issue was never just the plan itself. It was everything the plan depended on. Because no plan works particularly well if the conditions underneath it keep shifting every day.

You can optimize the plan forever. Or you can change what the plan is sitting on.

And that’s usually where the deeper issue lives: constraints, timing, dependencies, assumptions about how things are supposed to work.

The problem is rarely isolated to one neat location. Which also means the fix usually isn’t either.

The same pattern at work

The same thing shows up at work. Not surprisingly since work is often about fixing or optimizing things. A process feels slow or unclear. So it gets “improved.”

But often the same underlying structure stays exactly as it was: same handovers, same unclear ownership, same hidden assumptions, same dependencies nobody fully defined in the first place. The process just becomes better documented or more efficiently executed, often because it is digitized. Since digitizing a process definitely doesn’t fix it. It just makes its weaknesses easier to scale.

Because the actual problems often sit around the process rather than inside the visible steps themselves.

What these changes often do is stabilize the surface. The tools change. The process looks clearer. Stable. Just like the meal plan changed to fit the ingredients that were in the fridge.

But stability isn’t the same as reliability. Something can look highly organized and still break the moment the underlying conditions shift slightly.

Why this keeps happening

In almost every example — meals, work, even simple routines — the things that determine the outcome often sit one level deeper: constraints, capacity, timing, assumptions about how things will unfold.

Those things are harder to see and even harder to change. They also tend to move quickly, which means that they rarely feel like the problem.

Not just that, but changing them is usually a lot more uncomfortable than the the visible parts.

On the other hand, fixing this visible layer feels like productivity. And it often is, just enough to keep you from questioning it. It’s easier to improve something you can see than to question something you depend on.

That’s why small fixes are so convincing.

What this is really a signal for

When something needs constant small fixes, it’s usually not under-optimized. It’s under-designed.

So the better approach is usually pretty simple, even if it is uncomfortable: start with the obvious fix

But if the same issue keeps returning, step back instead of repeating the adjustment over and over.

Look at what the situation depends on.

Not just the visible layer sitting on top of it.

Closing

Most things don’t fail where they’re easiest to adjust.

That’s just where we get to feel useful first.

The real shift is recognizing when adjustment stops helping — and having the patience to look deeper.