When something breaks, the natural response is to fix it and move on.
The pain stops. The crisis passes. You get back to work. This feels like progress—and sometimes it is.
But most fixes aren't fixes. They're patches. They address the immediate symptom while leaving the underlying condition intact. The problem isn't gone. It's dormant. And it'll be back, wearing a different face, asking for another late night or another workaround.
The alternative is to solve it once. Not manage it. Not reduce it. Eliminate it—so you never spend time on that problem again.
Patching vs. Resolving
A patch makes the symptom stop. A resolution changes the condition that caused it.
Patches look like:
- Staying up late to hit a deadline you were never going to hit at normal pace
- Adding another reminder because things keep slipping through
- Manually fixing the same data error every time it appears
- Promising yourself you'll "be more careful next time"
Resolutions look like:
- Changing the system so the deadline collision can't happen
- Reducing what needs remembering so reminders become unnecessary
- Fixing the upstream process that creates the bad data
- Building a constraint that makes "careless" impossible
One buys time. The other buys freedom.
The tricky part is that patches work. The pain stops. You move on. The cost is invisible—paid later, in repeat work you'll never track, solving the same problem under different names.
"I Kept Fixing the Same Deadline Problem"
For years, my response to slipping deadlines was tactical. I'd rescope. Push dates. Stay up late to "catch up." Promise myself tighter focus next time.
Each fix worked. Briefly. The deadline would land. The pain would stop. Then a month later I'd be solving the same problem again under a different project name.
The real fix wasn't better time management. It was changing what counted as a commitment.
I built a rule: no more than a small, fixed number of active projects. Everything else went into a clearly named holding state—not "soon," not "after this," but explicitly inactive.
That killed the problem. Not reduced it. Not managed it. Eliminated it.
I stopped missing deadlines because I stopped creating systems that guaranteed deadline collisions. The late nights and heroic pushes weren't discipline—they were symptoms of a structural flaw I kept patching instead of fixing.
"I Patched Mental Overload With More Tools"
When I felt scattered, I added systems. More reminders. More notes. More checklists. Every failure produced another alert, another app, another process to maintain.
This looked like progress. Things stopped falling through the cracks—for a while. But the system got noisier. Maintenance increased. The cost of staying organized kept rising, and I was spending more time managing the management layer than doing actual work.
The real fix wasn't better reminders. It was reducing the number of things that needed remembering.
I consolidated decisions into templates. Standardized defaults. Removed entire categories of recurring choices. Instead of tracking more, I eliminated the need to track.
Once the system required less memory, the failures stopped appearing—and the reminders became unnecessary.
The pattern: patching adds complexity to compensate for a problem. Resolution removes complexity so compensation isn't needed.
Why We Patch
Patching isn't stupidity. It's efficiency—in the moment.
Patches are faster. They're local. They let you move on to the next thing. The deadline is tomorrow; you don't have time to redesign the project intake system. The data is wrong now; you don't have time to fix the upstream process.
So you patch. And patching works. And the cost—the repeat work, the accumulating fragility, the slow bleed of time—is invisible because it's distributed across future you, who will solve this again without remembering how many times it's already been solved.
The bias toward patching is rational in the short term and brutal in the long term. The only defense is noticing when you're doing it.
The Discipline
A useful question isn't "Did this fix it?" It's "Will I ever have to solve this again?"
If the answer is yes, you probably applied a patch.
Other tells:
- You've "handled this before"—same problem, different instance
- The fix requires ongoing vigilance or memory
- The solution lives in effort, not structure
- You feel competent for solving it, rather than annoyed it existed
Resolution usually feels boring. It removes a category of work instead of showcasing competence. There's no heroic late night, no satisfying scramble. Just a problem that quietly stops appearing.
That's the goal. Not to be good at solving a problem—to delete it from the list of problems you have.
When Patching Is Correct
Not everything deserves a permanent fix.
Some problems are rare. Some resolutions cost more than the recurrence. Some systems are stable enough that occasional manual intervention is cheaper than building automation.
I still patch certain things on purpose. Short-term overload during rare crunch periods, for example. I could redesign everything to eliminate those weeks entirely—but the cost would be permanent slack in a system that's usually stable. So I patch. Temporarily. Consciously. Then return to normal.
The difference is intent.
A patch is acceptable when:
- The problem is genuinely rare
- The cost of full resolution exceeds the cost of recurrence
- You're choosing it, not rediscovering it every time
What's dangerous isn't patching. It's patching the same thing repeatedly while telling yourself it's temporary. It's solving a problem for the fifth time and not noticing you've been here before.
The Standard
Every time you fix something, ask: Is this the last time?
If not, you have a choice. Patch it now and accept the recurrence. Or pay the cost upfront, fix the condition, and never see it again.
Both are valid. But only one is solving it.
The goal isn't to be good at firefighting. It's to stop having fires.