The three little grey dots are dancing again, pulsing with a rhythmic, taunting energy in the corner of my screen. I have been staring at them for exactly 15 minutes. Someone on the other end is engaged in a frantic ballet of backspacing and re-typing, laboring over a response that should, by all rights, be a binary choice. I asked a simple question. I needed a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to move a project into the next phase. Instead, I am a spectator to a digital monologue that never actually reaches the stage. This is the central paradox of our current existence: we have perfected the art of instant delivery, yet we have never been slower at actually arriving.

I realized this morning, with a start that nearly sent my coffee into my keyboard, that my phone had been on mute for the last 5 hours. When I finally checked it, I saw 15 missed calls. Fifteen people who needed a sliver of my attention, a fraction of a second of my willpower, or perhaps just a confirmation of their own existence. The irony is that while I was ‘unavailable,’ the world didn’t stop, but the friction increased. We live in a state of hyper-connectivity that has, quite perversely, created a massive backlog of decision debt. We are reachable 25 hours a day, but we are available for meaningful resolution for perhaps 5 minutes of that time.

The Frictionless World of Precision

Greta K.-H. understands this better than any project manager I’ve ever met. Greta is a watch movement assembler, a woman whose entire professional life is measured in the tension of hairsprings and the microscopic alignment of 35 jewels. I visited her workshop once, a place that smelled of 5 distinct types of industrial oils and the cold, sharp scent of precision-cut steel. Greta doesn’t use Slack. She doesn’t ‘circle back’ to a gear. If she is placing a balance wheel, she places it. There is no ‘draft’ phase. The decision is physical, immediate, and final. If she were to hesitate the way we do in a group chat, the delicate metal would fatigue, the timing would drift, and the $1255 instrument in her hands would become nothing more than a very expensive paperweight.

In the corporate world, we have divorced the act of talking from the act of deciding. We use tools like Slack and Teams to create an illusion of velocity. We send 125 messages a day and feel exhausted by the ‘speed’ of it all, but when you look at the actual output, the needle hasn’t moved. The project is still stuck in the same ‘pending’ state it was in 45 days ago. We have replaced progress with presence. As long as the dots are pulsing, we feel like we are working. But the dots are just a placeholder for courage.

This anxiety isn’t just a byproduct; it’s the fuel for a new kind of exhaustion. When I see that someone has ‘seen’ my message, a timer starts in my brain. It’s a 15-second countdown to frustration. Why haven’t they replied? They have the information. They have the tool. What they lack is the internal mechanism to commit. Our technology has outpaced our psychology. We can send a signal across the Atlantic in 5 milliseconds, but it still takes 5 weeks to get a VP to sign off on a change that everyone knows is necessary. We are using 21st-century lightning to power 19th-century bureaucracy.

Greta once showed me a gear no larger than a grain of sand. She told me that if there is even 5 microns of dust on that gear, the entire watch will eventually lose time. Our decision-making process is currently covered in the ‘dust’ of unnecessary communication. We CC 15 people on an email because we want to dilute the responsibility of the choice. We schedule a ‘quick sync’ to discuss the ‘next steps’ of a meeting that was supposed to determine the ‘final direction.’ We are polishing the dust instead of cleaning the gear.

There is a specific kind of violence in the ‘circle back’ culture. it suggests that time is an infinite resource and that delay is a neutral act. But delay is never neutral. Every 5 minutes that a decision sits in a ‘seen’ but ‘unanswered’ state, the energy of the team atrophies. People stop caring about the ‘what’ and start obsessing over the ‘when.’ I’ve seen 5-person startups turn into sluggish giants in the span of a single year simply because they moved from shouting across a room to ‘documenting everything’ in a digital abyss.

The Luxury of Uncompromised Speed

This is why, in environments where speed is the only currency that matters, the tools we use must be as direct as Greta’s tweezers. When you are operating in a high-stakes market, like the luxury landscape of the Middle East, you cannot afford the luxury of the ‘three pulsing dots.’ In a city that was built on the premise of turning ‘impossible’ into ‘done’ in record time, your logistics and your lifestyle needs must be met with the same uncompromising precision. Whether you are arranging a complex trade or simply ensuring your personal preferences are met, like sourcing

Heets Dubai, you aren’t looking for a conversation. You are looking for the end of the transaction. You want the friction to disappear so you can get back to the actual work of living.

I find myself thinking back to those 15 missed calls on my muted phone. How many of them were actually urgent? Probably none. But how many of them were symptoms of someone else’s inability to move forward without my ‘blessing’? Probably all of them. We have created a chain of dependency where no one feels empowered to turn the screw unless they have a digital trail of 5 people saying ‘looks good to me.’

If we want to reclaim our time, we have to start treating our digital interactions with the same gravity Greta treats a mainspring. We need to stop ‘checking in’ and start ‘checking off.’ We need to realize that a ‘No’ delivered in 5 minutes is infinitely more valuable than a ‘Yes’ delivered in 5 weeks. The former allows you to pivot; the latter just confirms that you’ve wasted a month of your life waiting for the inevitable.

I finally saw the dots in my chat window disappear. The person stopped typing. My heart rate slowed for a second, expecting the resolution. And then, the message appeared: ‘Let’s chat about this more in our 1:1 on Thursday.‘

Thursday is 5 days away.

I looked at the message, then at my muted phone, then at the clock. It was 22:05. I felt a strange urge to call Greta, just to hear the sound of something ticking correctly. In her world, time is a physical reality to be mastered. In mine, it’s a social construct used to avoid making a choice. We are surrounded by the ‘appearance’ of movement-notifications, pings, vibrations, and status updates-but it is all just noise if the gears aren’t actually turning.

We need to find our 5-micron focus again. We need to put the phone on mute not by accident, but by design, so we can actually do the work that requires our full presence. We need to stop being the dots and start being the gear. Because at the end of the day, no one remembers how many Slack messages you sent, but they definitely remember if the watch stayed on time. The next time you see those three dots dancing, remember Greta. Don’t wait for the dance to end. Pick up the tweezers and make the move yourself.