Reason #47: You Mistake Motion for Progress

You stay “slammed” all week and nothing actually changes. The calendar fills itself: morning stand-ups, DFMEA reviews, risk burndown updates, and “quick” cross-functional huddles about issues you remember from last quarter. Each meeting generates action items, each action item spawns a new email thread, and every thread ends in a fresh invite. The loop is so smooth that you start to confuse circulation with progress (See Reason #26). You already saw how the pipeline was built to reward movement instead of outcome; (See Reason #25) for the wider machinery behind that.

As the week drags on, your “real” mechanical work gets squeezed into scraps of time between ceremonies. You close ECOs to clear the queue, update Jira tickets so status boards change color, clean up BOMs so the ERP report looks tidy, and reply-all on three different chains about the same tolerance stack. One task flows into the next so neatly that you hardly notice you are doing the same things you did last year, just with a different project code. In a healthy system, this would be the noise around the signal of actual design work. In mechanical engineering, the noise becomes the signal, and your value is measured in how many loops you can keep spinning at once (See Reason #33).

Management reads motion as health. If supplier portals are updated, test schedules are “on track,” and the tracker shows every cell filled, then everything must be fine. So you learn to feed the appearance: schedule a “touch base” instead of making a hard decision, split big issues into smaller tickets to show throughput, tweak dates so nothing looks overdue. How often do you finish a week like that and realize the product itself has not moved an inch? By now you understand that “The Process Owns You” was not just about paperwork; it was about an entire culture that treats activity as proof of competence.

Meanwhile, the physical world remains stubborn. The plant still trips the same interlocks, the warranty data barely moves, and that chronic vibration problem keeps coming back under a new code. Your title does not change, your pay creeps along, and the big design problems quietly roll forward to the next quarter, the next engineer, the next reorg. What advances, reliably and on schedule, is the churn itself. You will be very, very busy, and your career will stay exactly where it is.