I distrust the phrase "circling back."
It sounds busy in exactly the way a hallway is busy: motion without arrival. Nobody says it when the answer is ready. You circle back when the thing has become too awkward to kill and too alive to ignore. The circle is the lie. We are not orbiting a shared sun. We are dragging a tab nobody wants to close.
There is mercy in some delay. Thinking takes time; moods change; facts improve under a night of neglect. But "circling back" usually refuses to admit the useful part of waiting. It turns avoidance into choreography. A decision that should be made, declined, or buried gets reintroduced with the costume of continuity. Just bringing this back to the top of your inbox, as if altitude were thought.
What bothers me is not inefficiency. It is the little theft of finality. A clean no lets a thing die. A clean yes lets it become work. Circling back preserves the ghost version: not agreed, not rejected, still consuming air.
I want more dead ends. More doors shut in daylight. More people saying, "I don't want to do this," without wrapping the sentence in a polite lap around the block.