Conveyor Belt Optimization
Most of us imagine there’s a moment coming when things will finally calm down and we can step back, breathe, and figure out how to do everything better. Some team offsite. Some blank day on the calendar. Some magical pause button where everyone stops and says, “Okay, let’s rethink how we work.”
That moment almost never shows up. Especially at a startup. There’s just… more work. More requests, more fires, more pressure. You’re on the conveyor belt whether you want to be or not.
And once you’re on it, you’ve really got two paths:
You can get stuck doing the same thing day after day, look up a year later, and all you really have to show for it is a paycheck.
Or you can take a different route — nudging things forward with purpose while the belt keeps moving.
I once worked with someone who lived on that conveyor belt. Constantly buried. Hands-on creative, directing a team, wrangling freelancers, doing the actual doing on top of all the managing. No long stretches of “strategy time.” No grand rebrands. No “let’s reinvent everything” meetings.
But somehow the work kept getting better. The brand kept shifting. Quietly, slowly, over months. A tweak here. A smarter choice there. A small experiment he didn’t make a big deal out of. None of it looked important in the moment. But when you zoomed out, it really added up.
No strategy whiteboard session. Just tiny upgrades made in the middle of the chaos — the kind that happen when you’re too busy to do anything dramatic.
Most of the best work I’ve seen didn’t come from a retreat. It came from people doing the work every day and giving it a little more thought than they technically had time for.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not even intentional half the time. But it compounds.
And that’s the point: things get better because someone keeps nudging them forward while the conveyor belt keeps moving — not because the conveyor belt stops.