Stop Doing CRaP Work

Whether you're salaried, fractional, or founder-mode — the work that keeps you paid in 2026 looks nothing like what kept you hired in 2020.

Amazon’s finance team coined one of the most brutally honest acronyms in corporate history: CRaP — Can’t Realize a Profit. Their internal label for products that cost more to store, ship, and support than they ever earned back. Low margin. High overhead. Zero strategic upside.

Amazon’s response? Cut it. Stop promoting it. Eventually, delete it from existence like an ex’s number after therapy.

And I heard that and thought — oh no. Because I immediately started doing the math on my own work. What CRaP work am I doing? How do I eliminate it? Because here’s the thing: the same way Amazon’s team was hunting for inefficiencies in their product catalog, your company is doing the exact same audit — except the products are you.

Sobering? Yes. Rude? Also yes. But stay with me.

When Amazon CRaPs a product, it doesn’t mean the product is bad. It just means the effort to keep it alive outweighs what it gives back. That math applies to people too — not in a dehumanizing way, but in a very “your badge still works... for now” kind of way.

Think about your week. Honestly. Some of your work is high-visibility, high-impact, clearly connected to what leadership actually cares about. And some of it is... gestures vaguely at inbox... that. Inherited tasks nobody ever bothered to redesign. Reports that get emailed into what I can only assume is a digital void. Meetings you attend because you’ve always attended them.

That’s CRaP work. And the cruel twist? Doing it well can actually hurt you.

Why? Because when organizations start tightening budget freezes, restructures, those ominous “efficiency initiatives”, they don’t cut bad performers first. They cut people whose work doesn’t clearly map to what the organization needs to survive. If 60% of your week is spent on activities no one can connect to a strategic priority, you are, functionally, a human CRaP product.

And nobody wants to be a CRaP product. That’s not even a good insult. It’s just accurate, which is worse.

Graeber Already Told Us This

The late anthropologist David Graeber wrote a whole book about this — Bullshit Jobs — and the title alone deserves a standing ovation. His argument was provocative but simple: a huge percentage of modern work is, by the admission of the people doing it, essentially pointless. Not hard. Not easy. Just... unnecessary. Jobs and tasks that exist because organizations generate bureaucratic weight the way ships accumulate barnacles — gradually, without intention, until one day the whole thing is dragging and everyone’s like, “Why are we moving so slow?” I don’t know, maybe it’s the 47 approval layers we built for a process no one can explain?

Graeber identified several species of pointless work, and they’re painfully recognizable. There are the box-tickers — people whose role is to demonstrate that something is being done rather than to actually do it. “Did we complete the compliance checklist?” “Yes.” “Did anything change?” “Absolutely not.” “Excellent.”

Then there are the duct tapers — folks whose entire job is fixing problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Their LinkedIn headline should just say “Professional Symptom Manager.”

The taskmasters — managers who manage people who don’t need managing. You know the type. They schedule a meeting to discuss when to schedule the next meeting, and somehow both meetings run over. We are seeing a big shift to Individual Contributor (IC) roles.

And my personal favorite: the flunkies — roles that exist primarily to make someone higher up look important. Though honestly, I think flunkies might be the first to go. The metric for “great leader” has shifted from “how many people do you manage” to “how efficiently does your team operate,” and it turns out having someone whose job is to carry your laptop to the conference room doesn’t scream operational excellence.

But here’s what’s striking about Graeber’s taxonomy. It’s not the cynicism — it’s the fact that most people in these roles already know. There’s a flavor of professional misery that comes from being competent at work you privately know doesn’t matter. You show up. You optimize the process. You color-code the spreadsheet. And somewhere underneath all the busyness, a voice in your head is screaming: None of this is real. Are you really going to sit here and wiggle your mouse for another eight hours?! THIS IS YOUR ONE LIFE.

That voice is not ingratitude. That voice is data.

CRaP work and bullshit work overlap almost completely. Both consume real resources. Both are nearly impossible to defend in a room where actual priorities are on the table. And both make the people doing them almost impossible to promote — because “she manages the weekly status report beautifully“ has never, in the history of organizations, gotten anyone a raise. Nobody is cutting a bigger check because your formatting is immaculate. I’m sorry. It’s true.

What CRaP Work Actually Looks Like

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow gives us useful language here. Our “System 1” thinking — the fast, automatic, pattern-matching part of the brain — keeps pulling us toward familiar tasks. The inbox. The deck you’ve built a hundred times. The process you could do blindfolded while reciting the alphabet backward. It feels productive because it’s frictionless. You’re moving. Things are happening. Dopamine is releasing.

But frictionless is not the same as valuable. A hamster on a wheel is frictionless too, and that hamster is not getting promoted.

CRaP work tends to share a few telltale traits:

It’s visible to you, invisible to leadership. You know exactly how much effort it takes. They have never once seen the output. It’s the work equivalent of cleaning behind the refrigerator — necessary-feeling, completely unwitnessed.

It’s reactive, not strategic. You’re responding to someone else’s urgency, not contributing to the organization’s actual direction. You’re a pinball. Ding ding ding. Very active. Going nowhere.

It can’t be explained in one sentence. If you struggle to articulate why this work matters, imagine your manager in a promotion calibration meeting trying to make the case. “She does... a thing... with the data... and then there’s a spreadsheet...” Meanwhile, someone else’s manager is saying “He increased enterprise retention by 12%.” Guess who’s getting the budget.

It’s not building anything. Not skills. Not relationships. Not reputation. Not results. CRaP work is a transaction with no receipt. You did it. It’s done. Nothing remains. Congratulations?

AI Just Changed the Entire Game

Okay, here’s where we pivot from diagnosis to oh, this is actually exciting.

We are living through a moment where an entire category of CRaP work is being automated out of existence. And the organizations paying attention are recalibrating what they expect from the humans on their payroll. Which means the bar just moved — whether you noticed or not.

Meeting notes? AI tools like Granola can transcribe, summarize, and pull action items in real time. You can actually be present in the meeting instead of typing like a court stenographer who’s three sentences behind and mildly panicking.

Polished drafts of routine documents — status updates, recaps, templated reports? Done in under a minute. Under a minute. That thing that used to take you 90 minutes on a Thursday afternoon while you pretended to care about formatting? A machine does it now, and honestly, the formatting is better. I know. I’m sorry.

Basic research compilation? Tools like Perplexity and Claude can synthesize across dozens of sources faster than you can open your seventh browser tab and forget why you opened the first one.

Data pulling and formatting? AI-assisted analytics handles it. Scheduling coordination? Already automated for anyone who’s been paying attention — have you seen Google Calendar’s latest updates? Epic is not a word I use lightly for calendar software, but here we are.

If these tasks are still consuming hours of your week, that’s not a badge of diligence. It’s a signal that your capacity is being spent in a lane where AI is already driving. And your manager — whether they’ve said it out loud or not — is starting to wonder why you’re still in the passenger seat pretending to steer.

Here’s the thing about Graeber’s bullshit jobs: they were tolerated for decades because the organizational cost was spread out and invisible. AI just handed everyone a magnifying glass. When a tool can do in thirty seconds what took you three hours, the three-hour version doesn’t look thorough anymore. It looks like you don’t know the tools exist. And that’s a different conversation entirely.

But — and this is the part worth sitting with — the people who automate their CRaP work don’t just save time. They create space. Space for the work that actually builds careers. The backlog that can finally be cleared or re-evaluated. The relationship that opens a door. The idea that reframes a problem. The facilitation that makes a room feel different after you leave it. That’s the stuff. That’s the actual job.

AI doesn’t replace the human layer. It clears the underbrush so the human layer can finally show up. And if you’ve been buried under CRaP work for years, let me tell you — your human layer is ready. It’s been in there the whole time, suffocating under a pile of status reports.

The Promotion Trap (or: Why Being “Helpful” Is Holding You Back)

Lois Frankel’s Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office makes a point that hits harder every time I come back to it: many of us were socialized to equate effort with value. Do more. Be helpful. Say yes. Never let anyone see you not working. If you have a free fifteen minutes, find something to do — don’t just sit there looking employable.

That conditioning is a liability. Because promotions don’t go to the hardest workers. They go to the most legible ones — people whose contributions are easy to point to, easy to defend, and easy to connect to what the business actually cares about.

When you fill your days with CRaP work, you make yourself nearly impossible to advocate for. Your manager might genuinely want to push for your promotion. They might love you. But in a calibration room full of competing priorities and limited budget, “she works really hard” loses to “he moved the needle on enterprise retention.” Every time. It’s not fair. But it is the game.

Hard work that no one can see — or worse, hard work on things no one cares about — is the professional equivalent of a product that costs more to ship than it earns. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a strategic misalignment. And the fix isn’t grinding harder. The fix is grinding on the right things.

Which, I know, sounds obvious. But if it were obvious, you wouldn’t still be spending Tuesday mornings on that report. You know the one.

The Audit (Do This Before Your Next Review Cycle, I’m Serious)

Here’s a framework. Run it quarterly. Run it before review season. Run it right now if you’re reading this and feeling a little attacked — that feeling is useful.