This story is beautifully told in the Personal Kanban book. You can also come to our webinar or our workshop in December)

The thumbnail up there has a pic of me, my brother, my dad, and our dog Cookie. Likely taken in 1977.

Cookie was an expert food catcher and could catch nearly anything short of a whole turkey if you tossed it to her. She was extremely productive, effective, and efficient. But she had a capacity. She had a system you could work with, or break.

Throw her one cocoa puff? Caught it. Perfect.

Throw two? Caught both. Still winning.

Throw three? She’d get two, one would drop. Starting to struggle, but mostly okay.

Throw four? She’d catch one. Miss three. Now she’s frustrated.

Throw five? She might catch one, but might.

Throw a huge handful at her? Complete meltdown. She’d catch nothing, just wave her head like a Muppet, jaw wide open, overwhelmed while cocoa puffs bounced off her nose, forehead, or fly by. Then she’d make an annoyed snarf-sound and eat them off the floor.

This is you. This is all of us. We’re Cookie with too many cocoa puffs.

Jim and Toni (we) are really enjoying the engagement with Humane Work. It is reader-supported and we are grateful. If you are enjoying this, please becoming a paid subscriber.

Cookie Had No Boundaries

Cookie was suffering from too much work being forced on her by bosses that didn’t care about her overload. Or, in the case of my brother and I, actively amused. We’d actively test her. 1 … 1.. 1. … HANDFULL. When you are 12 and 8 this is endlessly funny. Well, the end was running out of cocoa puffs.

Later, my mother would be like, “Why do I keep finding cocoa puffs in the family room? Are you guys just throwing them around?!” Yes, yes we were.

So cookie didn’t have a system for managing incoming cocoa puffs. Neither do you.

Every day, commitments come at you:

* “Can you do this?”

* “We need you on this project”

* “Quick favor?”

* “One more thing?”

* Emails, messages, requests, emergencies

And what do we do? We say yes. Because:

* We don’t want to disappoint people

* We believe we “should” be able to handle it

* There’s no system evaluating whether we actually can

* Saying no feels like weakness

* We have no visibility into what we’re already juggling

So we say yes to everything. And then we become Cookie with a handful of cocoa puffs—catching nothing, finishing nothing, disappointing everyone.

Yes Beats No

If you want to annoy people, set up a Personal Kanban because you want to “say no” more effectively. We hear this often but that’s not actually what we want. We don’t wake up thinking “I wish I could disappoint more people.”

When you are overloaded, you’ll take all the work on, but like Cookie, you’ll be eating it off the floor and Jennifer will be annoyed with a Hoover full of cereal she bought and no one will eat.

If you want to make work better for everyone, say yes effectively.

To say: “Yes, I can do this. And here’s when I can realistically do it.”

Cookie Capacity Calculator

Your capacity is finite. Let’s say Cookie can catch 2-3 cocoa puffs reliably.

When she has 2-3 cocoa puffs in the air? She catches them all. High success rate. Repeat performance. Build reputation.

When she has 5+ cocoa puffs in the air? She catches maybe 1. Misses most. Looks incompetent. Loses trust.

Let’s torture this analogy like we’re still pre-teens: Cookie limiting herself to 2-3 cocoa puffs gets MORE cocoa puffs overall because she finishes what she catches. People trust her, they throw more, she keeps succeeding. We are figuring out the capacity.

Cookie trying to catch a handful gets ZERO cocoa puffs overall but people can’t process that. Surely you’d always catch a few? They will overload her for hours on end trying to figure out why Cookie “isn’t catching any anymore”.

This is your career. Your reputation. Your sanity.

Limited WIP (work-in-progress) = higher delivery = more opportunity = more success.

Unlimited WIP = catching nothing = disappointing everyone = burnout.

You Lie to You

When you are overloaded, you internalize that load and then compensate by doing more. People invariably respond to overload with overload. When you’re running way above capacity, it doesn’t feel like “catching nothing.” It feels like:

* Constantly working (checking email at 10pm)

* Always stressed (something’s always falling through cracks)

* Lower quality (you’re too fragmented to do good work)

* More mistakes (brain is juggling too many things)

* Inability to focus (constant context-switching)

* Guilt (you’re letting people down despite working constantly)

This feels like your personal failure. Like you’re not working hard enough. Like you should be able to handle this.

But this is systemic … it is the system (the 12 and 8 year olds) throwing work at you and you’re like “why can’t I catch this…food I shouldn’t be eating in the first place because I’m a dog and dogs aren’t supposed to eat Cocoa Puffs.”

You don’t have a gate. You have no way to evaluate incoming work against actual capacity. So everything gets added. And everything suffers.

What Changes When You Build Triggers

Triggers are things that cause you to act : It’s how you decide what comes in and when. Believe it or not, Personal Kanban is not about tracking your work. We designed it to tell you what to do about your work. It’s a triggering system. “What is the right thing for me to be doing right now? And What is Not?”

Step 1: See the load you’re already carrying

Write down everything you’re currently doing. Put it on a board or list:

* OPTIONS (things you’ve committed to but haven’t started)

* DOING (things you’re actively working on)

* DONE (things you’ve finished)

Now count what’s in DOING. That’s your current WIP.

Step 2: Set your realistic limit

Look at that DOING pile. What’s honest? Can you really juggle 5 things? Or are you Cookie with too many cocoa puffs?

Most people discover they’re actually at 10 to 18 things when they think they’re doing 2 or 3.

Set a real limit. Maybe it’s 2. Maybe it’s 4. Pick something honest.

Step 3: Manage the incoming

New request comes in: “Can you do this?”

No triggers to help us control our work means we say, “Yeah, yeah, sure” (adds it to the pile in DOING immediately)

With triggers that show what you are doing and what is coming up… “I’d love to. I’m currently working on X, Y, and Z. You’d be #4 in my queue. I can start on this [realistic date] and finish by [realistic date]. Does that work?”

Now people have real expectations. You have capacity. Everyone wins.

Step 4: Watch what actually happens

* You finish things (dopamine hit, momentum)

* Quality improves (you’re not fragmented)

* People trust you (you deliver what you promise)

* Stress decreases (you’re not drowning)

* You get more respect (limited delivery > chaotic chaos)

* Ironically, you get MORE opportunities (people trust you)

You’re not doing less. You’re accomplishing more because what you do is actually complete.

The Permission You’re Looking For

Humans can only do so much. You are human. You’re allowed to have limits. You’re allowed to have realistic capacity. You’re allowed to say yes in a way you can actually deliver.

Cookie knew this. She caught cocoa puff and was excited or she’d make the snarf-sound and cleaned them up. You can do the same with your commitments.

The only catch here is you have to build the system yourself. Your cocoa puffs won’t self-regulate.

Want to go deeper? Read Personal Kanban to learn the full system. Take the Personal Kanban class to build your gate system with support. Join the webinar or the workshop to understand WIP limits at scale.

Because unlimited cocoa puffs are a choice. And a bad one.

Choose better.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Or Attend the Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

The Conversation That Never Happens

It’s Monday morning. Your colleague seems off. Quieter than usual. Not their normal engaged self. But you don’t ask. They don’t tell.

Three months later, they’re gone. Stress leave or resignation. And everyone’s shocked.

“They seemed fine,” people say.

They weren’t fine. But the workplace created a culture where saying “I’m not fine” feels like weakness. Like admitting you can’t handle your job. Like confessing failure.

So they kept silent. And the stress compounded. And the team broke.

This is what happens when organizations ignore existential overhead.

What Is Existential Overhead, Actually

Existential overhead is cognitive load from life circumstances that has nothing to do with your work tasks. Tonianne DeMaria and I first wrote about it way back in 2009, when we were preparing to write Personal Kanban. Every year, it gets worse. Since 2016, it has become debilitating.

Existential Overhead isn’t on your to-do list. It’s not a project you’re managing. But it’s consuming your mental capacity 24/7. It is the stuff that keeps you awake at night. It’s the moments you find yourself looking at the screen, fingers not moving, arguing with relatives that aren’t even there.

It can look like so many things:

* Your parent’s health declining (constant background worry about whether to move them to care facilities, whether you’re abandoning them, whether the diagnosis is real)

* Financial instability (rent going up, unexpected medical bill, job market feeling fragile, wondering if you’ll have to move back with family)

* Your own health crisis (managing symptoms, attending appointments, processing the diagnosis, wondering if you’re really okay)

* Grief or loss (someone’s died, your brain keeps forgetting they’re gone, you reach for your phone to text them)

* Caregiving (your kid is struggling at school, your partner is going through something, you’re the emotional support for someone in crisis)

* Relationship breakdown (the marriage is failing, you’re figuring out how to tell people, you’re processing the end of a partnership)

* Trauma being triggered (something in the news, something in the workplace, something small that brings the whole thing back)

None of this shows up on a kanban board. None of this is listed in project management tools. This isn’t going to be part of your huddle. But all of it is consuming cognitive capacity. It’s consuming you.

People are Idiots about This Stuff

We all think existential overhead is a personal problem that needs a personal solution. Books are written about it. HR has a counselor so you don’t bother the team. But more often than not, we hide it, bury it, avoid it…and then pay for it when performance suffers or we’re “just not fun to be around anymore.”

So our fixes are all focused on avoidance:

* Better time management (doesn’t help when your parent is declining)

* Meditation apps (won’t fix financial terror)

* Mental health days (one day off won’t heal grief…and if you own your own company, mental health days are their own terror)

* Therapy (valuable, but doesn’t solve the underlying crisis)

* Productivity hacks (don’t work when your brain is partially offline)

These aren’t bad things, in fact most of them are recommended, but in this case they’re treating the symptom while ignoring the real need.

Which is…when people are under stress, they are processing that stress. That means less time to process work. Piling on work, piles on stress, and everyone suffers.

The Data Is Sorta Clearish

Toni and I don’t have perfect research on existential overhead specifically. But we have plenty of research on related problems:

On stress and capacity: Chronic stress impairs decision-making, increases errors, and reduces working memory function. When someone is managing serious life stress, their cognitive capacity genuinely is reduced. This isn’t opinion or laziness—it’s neurobiology.

On burnout: Over 80% of workers reported risk of burnout in 2024. Most of those people are dealing with compounding stress: life stress + work stress + pretending they’re fine = breakdown.

On turnover: The number one reason people leave jobs isn’t salary or title. It’s feeling unsupported during crisis. When someone is managing existential overhead and their organization responds with more pressure instead of flexibility, they leave.

«GOOD THING HERE» On performance: We’ve repeatedly seen that when teams acknowledge capacity changes (people are on fire some days, not so much others) and build flexibility (they see that variation and plan for it), they perform better over time. Not because people work less, but because the teams operates in reality instead of fantasy. The team pulls the right work at the right time with people that can actually complete it.

Why Ignoring Existential Overhead Destroys Team Performance

When teams operate as if everyone has unlimited capacity all the time, something has to give.

A Quick Blueprint for Building Slack for Human Reality

HUMANE DISCLAIMER: I really don’t want to call this a blueprint, but, frankly, it’s also been a hard few days here and I can’t come up with a better word right now. But what this is .. is a list of things to think about. You have the ability to care about yourself and others and, when you do that, make work, people’s lives, and the product better. These lists are some pointers, but, seriously, you will have to think about this. I mean, “WHAT IS YOUR CAPACITY” every day is not going to help anyone. Knowing how people are doing…that is helpful. So, having said that….

1. Normalize the Conversation About Capacity

* Make it standard practice to talk about available capacity.

* In planning meetings: “What’s realistic for everyone this month?”

* In stand-ups: “Anything affecting capacity I should know about?”

* In retrospectives: “When were we working outside our actual capacity?”

* This treats capacity as subject to variation like anything. It doesn’t shame people into or out of acting. It is just being professional.

2. Create Multiple Ways to Signal Reduced Capacity

Not everyone wants to talk to their manager. Not everyone trusts HR. People have different comfort levels with disclosure.

Give people options:

* Anonymous capacity flags

* Peer-to-peer conversations

* Flexible work arrangements that don’t require explanation

* Team agreements that normalize asking for support

* One-on-ones focused on “what do you need right now”

3. Plan With Actual Capacity, Not Optimistic Capacity

Most project planning assumes everyone has full capacity all the time.

Realistic planning assumes:

* Some people will be managing life circumstances

* Some sprints will hit unexpected crises (they always do)

* Sustainable work requires buffer capacity

* That your cycle time, throughput, or other metrics have variation for a reason.

Why This Matters Now

In 2024, over 80% of workers reported risk of burnout. That’s not because people got lazy. That’s because life stress is compounding with work stress in systems that refuse to acknowledge either.

We know how to build organizations that work with human reality. We’re just choosing not to.

The teams that will thrive in the next decade aren’t the ones pushing hardest. They’re the ones that acknowledge human complexity and build systems flexible enough to work with it.

That’s not soft. That’s strategic.

Because when you ignore existential overhead, you don’t make people more productive. You make them fragile. And fragile teams break.

The question isn’t whether your team is dealing with existential overhead. Someone is. The question is whether they feel safe enough to tell you.

If the answer is no, you’re running on borrowed time.

CTAs FTW!

* Join us for the workshop or the webinar. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

Most leaders, most people, believe that transparency creates accountability. The truth is the other way around, hiding work creates the need for accountability.

When you can’t see your work, your brain stops processing it. Your team stops self-organizing. Your leaders stop leading.

When this happens, everyone starts interrogating. And worst of all, you start blaming yourself and others for failures.

The exhaustion you feel, confusion you are enduring, and constant interruptions you are experiencing aren’t personal failures. They aren’t accountability. They’re signals of invisible work.

As leaders, team members, and just us…we need to understand that we’re creating these problems simply by not understanding what is really going on.

Your Brain Wasn’t Built For This

Your brain is not a filing cabinet. It’s a processor.

Your working memory can hold about 7-9 active items. Most of us are trying to actively hold 30, 50, or 100 invisible commitments in our heads simultaneously. Your brain literally cannot do this. So, it does what it can: it keeps checking in with itself. “Did I forget that? What about this? Is that deadline today? Who is most upset with me right now?“

All day. Every day.

That’s your brain. In your head. The one you use for everything. And right now a lot of your mental capacity is gone before you even start working. Your brain is just trying to remember, to keep up with, what you’re supposed to be doing.

This isn’t your fault, and it’s not “their” fault. It’s that you haven’t set up a way to easily find out what is going on.

Jim and Tonianne create Humane Work which is reader-supported. If you are getting value from this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

You Cannot Improve What You Cannot See

Toni and I have said many times that you cannot improve what you cannot see. We are all too busy to let others know what we are doing, we rely on late-to-the-game status meetings or huddles to make up for this. But most of our work is hidden, and we are doing so much of it that we forget. End up under-reporting and everything things (1) not much is actually happen and (2) that things take less effort to complete than they really do.

Regardless of if you are management or subjected to it, there is a universal painful passion play I see everywhere I go. Management cannot know what they cannot see. So they ask constantly. “Where are we on this?” “What’s the status?” Now the “worker” is doing the work PLUS constantly reporting on the work. Neither gets full attention. Now, think of how many people are stakeholders in any task or project. They are also asking. Over and Over again. Tons of overhead, just answering the question, “What are ya doin’...?”

Deming will tell you this is 85% system problem and 15% individual problem. Toni and I will tell you… when the system is invisible, you blame people 100% of the time. (You have no alternative.)

Deming’s insight essentially is “Show me a burned-out worker, and I will show you a worker operating in an invisible system.“

Making work visible isn’t soft. It’s the fundamental act of management competence.

Invisibility Destroys What You Value

If you value deep work, you should be terrified of invisibility.

Deep work requires focus. It requires the ability to work together or alone without interruption (yes, you can deeply work with other people). Invisible work requires constant additional and unnecessary communication: “What are you working on?” “Can you give me an update?”

When your work is invisible, someone must interrupt you to “see” where you are at. That’s 2-3 hours a day in communication that only exists because no one can see the work.

When we’ve set up kanban and obeyas for teams, they report significantly fewer interruptions. Depending on the work, they’ve gained back over half the work day. Context switching, fewer meetings, and knowing where information is (and actually finding it there) really does pay off. People’s focus and output increase dramatically. Less surprisingly, they also report feeling LESS watched and less stressed.

Why? Because visibility removes the need for constant checking.

A Permission Slip to be Professional

Making work visible is an act of professional vulnerability.

You’re saying: “This is what I’m doing. This is what I have capacity for. This is what’s blocking me.”

Shame loves invisibility. When work is hidden, even from yourself, shame has a perfect place to grow.

Shame, guilt, imposter syndrome, learned helplessness, self-doubt… the list gets really long.

High performers don’t carry everything in their heads. They externalize. They get it out so their brain can do what it was designed to do: think clearly.

You are not weak for needing to see your work. You’re human. You are professional.

The Board Makes It Possible

This isn’t complicated.

You don’t need software (but you might want to try out KanbanZone anyway, it’s what I use in the video). You don’t need certification. You don’t need budget approval. You need to appreciate what is actually weighing you down.

Write down what you’re working on. Organize it into three columns: OPTIONS | DOING | DONE.

That immediate organization, even just that simple, breaks out your work so you can appreciate your overload. And then…

What Happens when you DO see it?

You see capacity. That pile in DOING is likely exceeding your real capacity, but the discomfort when you see 10 things there? That’s your brain saying, “I’d like to adjust this, please.”

You see potential. That pile in OPTIONS is what you’re promising to do when capacity opens up. Here your brain might be saying, “Oh, I have promised too much, to too many people, in too short a time.” Your brain might also say, “I’d much rather do these promises than those promises.”

You see patterns. The same types of issues keep blocking you. When patterns are visible, you can start improving them. Your increasingly chatty brain asks, “What can I do to make my work be smoother?”

You see progress. Every time you move something to DONE, your brain gets a hit of completion. The more visible the completion, the stronger the reward. Your brain is back again, “When do I need to work with other people to avoid interruptions and make decisions faster so I have more time to focus?”

You see what’s actually blocking progress, completion, and revenue. For solopreneurs (for all of us, really), this is shocking: 60% of time in busywork, 40% in revenue work (if you are lucky). And here, your brain is, not surprisingly asking the MONEY question, “What is the most important thing for me to be doing right now?”

Our Professional Identity

Personally, I prefer to be happy with myself.

I will become overloaded and lose track of work from time to time. When this happens, I do what I said above, I get out post its and write down everything that’s going on. Then, I work with that reality. Reality is scary when you can’t see it. It’s generally manageable, even if it is annoying, when you can see it.

So, identity…we might start by making work visible to be more productive. That’s fine. But there’s a thing here where when we change our actions, we change our self-perception. That leads to behavior changes.

Every sticky note you move from DOING to DONE becomes evidence. Evidence of what? Evidence of who you ARE.

“I am the kind of person who finishes things.”“I am the kind of person who knows their limits.”“I am the kind of person who makes clear commitments.”

You don’t become productive by making work visible. You become a producer.

Productivity is a behavior. “I am told to do lots of whatever.”

A producer is an identity. “I make things.”

Behaviors are an outcome, derived and fragile. Identity is more durable. Once you see evidence that you’re the kind of person who finishes, who leads, who creates clarity…that becomes who you are.

Value Props for People, Teams, Leaders (leaders are also people… and team members)

Once work is visible:

You can finally answer: “What’s my actual capacity?”

You can finally lead without micromanaging, because the work speaks for itself.

You can finally focus deeply, because the mental noise stops.

You can finally say no, because you can see your yes pile.

You can finally stop blaming yourself, because you can see the system.

SOMETHING TO DO! A 15-Minute Experiment

I’m saying this again down here, in case I didn’t lean on it harder above or in case you are using an AI to summarize this and it didn’t catch it the first time….

Do this today:

* Pick ONE area of work

* Write each task on a sticky note

* Put them on a wall: OPTIONS | DOING | DONE

* Stop. Just look at it. Find the right thing to do right now.

What do you see that you didn’t see before?

Do this once, then look at it whenever you finish something. You’ll see things, know things, be able to communicate things about your capacity, patterns, and possibilities that you couldn’t before.

CTAs FTW!

* Join us for the workshop or the webinar. We’ll go deep on your actual limits, help build visuals that work for you personally, and create boundaries that work. Spend some time with us: Free Webinar | Deep Dive See Your Work-shop

* Read the full Personal Kanban book to understand the humanity behind the practice.

* Take the Personal Kanban class on Modus Institute

* Work with Jim and Toni for personalized guidance implementing visibility in your specific situation.

Like and subscribe and all that stuff. But … really, everyone is running way above capacity and it’s hurting us all. So, please … opt out of that pain.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

What Do You Need?

The image above is better explained in the video, it’s long so very hard to read here. But, I always want these videos to come with a letter. A write up.

The flow chart shows a breakdown in relationships due to normal reactions to cranky behavior. We have three actors, Red, Green, Blue. Three people who work together and, because they do, need to pay attention to each other even when people aren’t really up for being social.

Sometimes you have a bad day. I’ve been “Red” many times. A morning when everything broke. Coffee spills. Bad news. My mood shattered. I showed up to Green’s desk with frustration wrapped around a request, demanding (not asking) what I needed because everything sucked.

Or I’ve been Green, absorbing someone else’s stress like a sponge. Then complaining to others. And somehow, venting didn’t help me “get over it”, it convinced me that Red was a problem. Not a person needing help, but a problem.

Or I’ve been blue… getting that third-party stress from someone complaining about someone else, making me think less of both of them.

So this is also learned helplessness. But it’s not imposed on us from outside or a boss or power. We create it for each other, one interaction at a time.

Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria write Humane Work with reader-support. Help keep us going for the cup of coffee price of becoming a paid subscriber.

What Do You Need?

Watch the video. Red’s fractured mood arrives at Green’s desk (or slack or zoom or whatever). At this point, we have a choice. We as the person receiving the frustrated person, have a choice. We choose to absorb the stress and pass it along, and the cycle plays out. Infecting Blue with second hand toxicity. Blue never sees Red. Blue only sees Green’s complaint.

But what if Green pauses?

What if, instead of reflecting frustration back, Green asks: How can I help? Not transactionally. Actually. Green doesn’t absorb the stress. Green breaks the cycle. Red gets what they need. Green stays human. Blue never hears the warning. The cascade stops.

It won’t solve everything. But it stops the compounding.

What Do You Need?

People are more stressed now than ten years ago. That’s observable. The uncertainty feels relentless because it is systemic, embedded in popular culture, how we work, how we communicate. We can’t control the stress arriving at Red’s door.

But we can control what we do when stressed Red shows up at our desk.

This is where humane work begins. Not in frameworks or org charts, but in the moment when someone approaches you fractured, and you choose presence over transaction. When you ask, “What do you need?” and actually listen.

What Do You Need?

I know you see yourself in this. The roles are interchangeable. But our reactions, are changeable.

The next time this happens, regardless of where you are in the cycle, pause. Ask the question. Actually listen.

Because that’s how we break it. Not through grand declarations, but through the small, repeated choice to turn toward someone else with genuine care.

The rest will follow.

Modus Calendar is at lu.ma/modus | Modus Institute is here | Or subscribe to this with the button below.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Check out our calendar of events, classes at Modus Institute, or call just us.

Leadership books love to talk about people being our greatest asset. We all do.

Unfortunately, workplace stress costs nearly a trillion dollars a year in the US. $917 billion annually. Toxicity costs money.

Not a wellness issue.

A strategic failure.

Right now, rather than dealing with the issue, we are laying people off. Removing institutional knowledge, because we’ve simply given up.

Here’s what $917 billion looks like in a body:

It’s 3pm. You’ve context-switched all afternoon. Your brain is fog. Your shoulders are up around your ears. You can’t remember what you were doing at 2pm or why it mattered.

You pour another coffee and check your calendar: five more meetings before 5pm.

Your stomach hurts. You haven’t eaten lunch. You think about lunch the way you think about retirement…theoretical, not happening today.

By 5pm, you’re supposed to “transition to personal time.” Instead, you’re answering Slack while making dinner. Your partner asks about your day. You realize you have no memory of it. Just blur. But they want details.

This is what drag feels like in a body.

Not theoretical. Not economic.

Physical.

And your company is paying $16 billion annually in healthcare costs related to this feeling.

I know, because I live it too.

Why Drag Persists

Drag is anything that slows you or interrupts you from getting your work done.

It doesn’t happen randomly. It’s created by systems that incentivize the wrong things.

If your performance metric is “number of tickets moved,” managers start more projects than can finish. WIP explodes. Context-switching becomes default. Drag multiplies.

When budget is allocated upfront (use it or lose it), teams keep and multiple work “in progress” to justify expenses. Nothing finishes. Nothing delivers value. Drag becomes the system’s survival mechanism.

When career advancement rewards “looking busy,” people manage impressions instead of managing work. Status becomes performance.

These aren’t individual failings.

These are system designs your company has built that create, reward, and underwrite drag.

The fix isn’t motivational.

It’s architectural. You (leadership, middle management, team member) have to change what gets measured, what gets rewarded, what gets visible.

Humane Work is grateful to be reader-supported. We bring our experience and attention to making work better for everyone everyday. To receive new posts and support our work, become a paid subscriber.

Three Sources of Drag and How to Reverse Them

Drag Source 1: Context Demolition

Your desk. 2:47pm. You’re in deep focus, really in it, that place where thought flows and ideas connect.

Slack pings. Email notification. A question in chat.

You surface. Check messages. Fix something. Try to get back.

But your brain won’t go back. That thread is broken. Fifteen minutes rebuilding context, and another interruption lands.

Context-switching costs 40% of productive capacity or more because your brain can’t rebuild focus as fast as interruptions arrive. I’m saying or more because while studies show between 30 and 50%, I see people literally taken off line for hours by interruptions that result in little completion, but a lot of undocumented, uncoordinated conversation that very often results in nothing more than being asked the same questions again the next day.

When this happens, participation breaks down. Engineers stop suggesting improvements. Designer who stops seeing new opportunities. Team culture settles into “just get through it.”

A fix: Build and See Your Focus

A simple Kanban board that shows your workflow and has limits to force focusing and finishing. A “Focus” column signals deep-work time which includes concentration bubbles where interruptions are off-limits.

Limits in what you are doing now. Stop screwing around with 8 things at once. Take something, focus on it and finish it. Make it visible. Force choices.

Visual. Measurable. Immediate.

Drag Source 2: The Illusion of Progress

We were working with a major bank that was overloaded with bugs, customer complaints, and rework.

Every request was poorly defined. Every deadline arbitrary. Every developer overloaded. Nothing finished. Status meetings multiplied. Reports got longer. Throughput flatlined.

Everything that was “in progress” now, had been done a few weeks before. Poor quality meant more rework meant more work in progress with meant more bugs which meant even more rework.

The overload was self perpetuating, stressed workers made stressed product.

The business side had no idea. They just knew they needed things done. They just kept submitting requests. IT kept accepting them, because they had no choice. Both sides blamed each other.

A fix: What is your work to you?

So we did something simple: made the impact of overload visible.

Not just the work, we had the people in IT, their developers, mark every completed task with how they felt about their product. Great, good, okay, not so good, terrible… The better they felt, the higher the quality. And we started to see how overload made not-so-good or terrible work product and how, when we took time to focus and finish, finish meant good or great.

Collaboration replaced blame.

Drag dissolved.

People started truly finishing things. The act of completion stopped being just moving a card from “In Progress” to “Done”, but became an actual moment of realized success.

Drag Source 3: Perverse Incentives

A mid-size tech company when a senior leader I’d been mapping systems with opening his calendar. It was triple booked all day every day.

I laughed.

She said slowly. “Every day is like this. There’s just too much that needs my attention.”

Pause.

I asked, “What if you didn’t? What if you trusted people to do the work with out you?”

He was shocked to find that, as he put it, “every time I stop doing something, I actually get more power.”

What he was saying was that everytime he trusted others, they trusted him more. They weren’t afraid of his Monday morning quarterbacking.

Before that, they wouldn’t make decisions without him. If they were in the 2 meetings during his triple booking that he couldn’t attend, they would simply wait their turn.

$777.9B is the dollar figure businesses spend on employee disengagement. I can’t help but think that this company, with him missing 2/3 of all meetings where he was required to be part of the decision, was losing a lot … a lot … of money.

But the real cost is watching talented people slowly stop caring while you’re paying their salary. When they are sitting there, unable to act, they learn to not act.

You’re paying full salary for diminished output.

The ROI Is Immediate and Concrete

At a major construction company with projects worth billions. Their profit margins? Under 2%.

They can’t afford drag.

When they implemented visual management: Kanban boards, collaborative planning, WIP limits, no yelling in the trailer….

The result? Faster delivery. Fewer surprises. Calmer teams. Better retention.

Not because they got soft.

Because they eliminated drag and built flow.

At a major bank, IT was drowning. We visualized their work. Suddenly, non-IT colleagues could see that IT was the constraint. Collaboration became obvious. Drag dissolved. Flow returned. Throughput increased. Stress dropped.

The pattern repeats: visibility → accountability → behavior change → flow → performance.

Not a motivational speaker’s promise.

A systems design outcome.

Why This Matters Right Now

Companies that reduce stress through visual management don’t just have happier employees.

They have:

* Faster delivery cycles

* Lower turnover

* Higher profit margins

* Better decision-making (stress impairs judgment)

* More innovation (people have mental capacity for improvement)

* Sustainable competitive advantage

The business case isn’t “let’s be nice because it’s right.”

The business case is “let’s be nice because everything else is leaving money on the table.”

Visual management doesn’t create overhead—it eliminates drag.

Every bottleneck you spot early saves rework.

Every WIP limit you enforce prevents cascading failure.

Every retrospective you run turns drag into flow.

The Choice Is Simple

You can keep glorifying burnout. Keep measuring productivity by hours worked. Keep pretending stress is an individual problem instead of a system design failure.

Or you can build systems that:

* Make work visible

* Limit work-in-progress

* Enable real collaboration

* Create space for recovery

* Connect daily work to meaningful purpose

The choice isn’t between productivity and humanity.

The choice is between sustainable flow and expensive, exhausting drag.

Humane work isn’t the compassionate alternative to business success.

It’s the only path to it.

Build systems that let people act with confidence.

Make work visible.

Limit WIP.

Retrospect relentlessly.

Remove drag.

Build flow.

And watch stress—and its staggering costs—evaporate.

For more of what we do, check out our calendar of events, classes at Modus Institute, or call us to work with us directly.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Stop assigning people “jobs” and start recognizing patterns. Here’s how teams really work together.

Nobody shows up to work and says, “I’m a Scrum Master” or “I’m a Product Owner.” with anything other than fear and imposter syndrome. Strict roles just aren’t how work actually works. They are a convenient fiction. False certainty. Self-defeating.

Sure, you can give people those titles. You can write job descriptions. You can put org chart boxes around names. But on any given day, hell, in any given hour, you’re playing five or six different roles simultaneously, not because someone told you to, but because the work demands it.

Or because you’re inspired. Or because you notice something nobody else sees. Or because that’s just how you showed up today.

It’s easier for organization to call these roles. They’re archetypes. They’re patterns. They’re mindsets that create the ability for teams to operate together. When you make one person a role and only that role can provide a function, that person is an instant bottleneck.

And when you start seeing patterns of professional action instead of enforcing rigid job descriptions, you get fluidity. People step up when they’re needed, step back when they’re not, and the team moves like water instead of grinding like gears.

Flow requires fluidity…go figure.

So, 8 Archetypes then…Fêter le Vague

Here are 8 archetypes. They are rough, they are useful, they are incomplete. They are … necessary to get us out of the ruts in which we find ourselves, waiting … waiting … for permission, for information, for action. These are 8 archetypes for obeya, for kanban, for waterfall, for doing anything that people do. These are traits people have, no person is one archetype, all people are mixtures at different times.

1. The Host: Reading the Room

The Obeya Association calls this the “Obeya Host”. his is the person who tends to facilitate meetings, maintain psychological safety, and handle group dynamics.

Mindset: “How is everyone actually doing right now?”Interaction: Notices who’s speaking and who’s silent, addresses tension before it festersFocus: Social dynamics and psychological safetyBehaviors: Adjusts meeting formats when they get stale, checks in with quiet voices, names uncomfortable truths

The Builder: Curating the Space

Also from the Obeya Association. This is the person curating content and curating space.

Mindset: “What information do we need visible right now?”Interaction: Designs spaces so the right visualizations reach the right people at the right timeFocus: Information architecture and visual systemsBehaviors: Updates boards, creates new visual controls, rearranges physical/digital spaces to improve flow

The Sensemaker: Navigating Complexity

This is the person who notices when things get complex, and then helps guide the team through that complexity.

Mindset: “This is actually complex. We need to experiment.”Interaction: Helps teams recognize when they’re facing genuine complexity versus merely complicated problemsFocus: Structured thinking about messy situationsBehaviors: Proposes experiments, designs small tests, helps teams learn from ambiguity without premature conclusions

The Weaver: Connecting the Threads

We talk all the time about how teams need to understand corporate strategy, project direction, and interrelationships with other teams. The Weaver naturally does this.

Mindset: “How does this connect to everything else?”Interaction: Links daily decisions back to strategic direction and other teams’ workFocus: Context and alignment across boundariesBehaviors: References the X Matrix or strategic goals, talks to other teams, connects dots others miss

The Processor: Doing the Deep Work

The Processor is about deep thinking and having direct impact on how we visualize our work.

Mindset: “Let me think this through completely.”Interaction: Takes complex information and transforms it into clear, actionable visualsFocus: Cognitive heavy lifting that makes collaboration possibleBehaviors: Builds detailed visual systems, works independently on complex analysis, creates clarity from chaos

The Witness: The Long Payoff

This one’s subtle, and we get it wrong constantly. The Witness is quiet, reflective, but sees patterns nobody else notices.

Mindset: “I’m watching everything, processing deeply.”Interaction: Mostly observes, but speaks up at critical moments with pattern observationsFocus: Long-term pattern recognition across timeBehaviors: Sits quietly in meetings, does work alongside others, occasionally delivers devastating insights that shift everything

We tend to undervalue these people because they don’t participate “enough.” We have a bias toward action, so we focus on the people talking all the time and discount the people who are helpful yet quiet.

But the Witness is the long payoff, high return investment.

The Guardian: Noticing the Invisible

The Guardian notices when people are running out of energy. When someone’s getting uncomfortable. When something in the environment needs adjustment.

Mindset: “Is everyone really okay?”Interaction: Watches for burnout, discomfort, and environmental issues that affect team healthFocus: The human side of work between the meetingsBehaviors: Checks in privately with struggling team members, suggests breaks, notices subtle morale shifts, adjusts environment before problems escalate

The Navigator: Holding Course

The Navigator is always connecting plans to actions and actions to consequences.

Mindset: “Where are we, and where did we say we were going?”Interaction: Keeps team honest about commitments while clear-eyed about when circumstances demand course correctionFocus: Operational awareness and stakeholder communicationBehaviors: Tracks what was planned versus what’s happening, notices when things change, communicates shifts to stakeholders

Fluidity Over Rigidity

When you have all eight of these archetypes present, they aren’t assigned roles they’re just how people naturally respond to information, work, and change. When people get that their diversity is a strength for the team you get fluidity….you get them acting in needed and appropriate ways at appropriate times.

Nobody has to be locked into a single role. Everyone can step up and embody what the team needs in that moment.

The work demands a host? Someone hosts. The work demands sensemaking? Someone makes sense. The work demands someone to notice patterns? The Witness speaks up.

You can be a Guardian and a Host and a Witness and a Processor all at the same time, depending on what the moment demands.

After watching teams for decades now, I’ve seen a million project managers and maybe 100,000 of them had that title. People just did what was needed, or, if they couldn’t the team suffered. This is how successful teams actually operate. Through dynamic pattern recognition and fluid response (This is a fancy way of saying the see things that need to be done and they do them without fear or hesitation).

These eight archetypes give teams the ability to act with confidence because everyone knows: these patterns exist, these needs emerge, and collectively we can meet them.

Not because someone’s job description says so.

Because the work demands it, and we’re paying attention.

Want to dive deeper into Obeya and visual management? Check out our Modus Institute calendar for upcoming workshops on building teams that adapt instead of fracture.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Personal Kanban Class | PK Book | Modus Institute | Our Calendar

Why Stress Exists—And What It’s Telling You

Stress is a signal. It’s your brain telling you that how you are working is broken. When you don’t know what to do next, when work arrives undefined, when people aren’t available, when tasks are un-completable, when you’re forced to do work that obviously doesn’t need doing, when you are in more meetings than production, when you face toxicity and aggression…all of these create stress. They are drag, they are bottlenecks, they are a pain. ​

Humane Work is reader-supported. Jim and Toni are really pouring their hearts into this. Keep it going and join the conversation by becoming a paid subscriber.

Work should arrive defined and completable. If it doesn’t, you should have a system to explore, define and complete it. If there’s complexity, you should have a way to handle that complexity. That’s what flow is: not smooth, but predictable. Your river might have rapids and whirlpools, but you know the lay of the land. You understand how work moves through the system. When things are unexpected (truly unexpected, not just unplanned) that creates drag. That’s when you lose the ability to focus and finish.​

So how do you visualize stress? How do you define flow, identify drag, and actually do something about it? You build a board that makes the invisible visible.

Stress Is a Breakdown in How You Work

Here’s what research tells us: Stress isn’t about working hard, working hard can be pretty fun actually, but stress is more about working blind. When you can’t predict what’s coming, when you can’t control your inputs, when feedback is absent or delayed, your brain enters a state of chronic vigilance. You’re always on alert, never at rest.​

When you make work visible, categorize it by difficulty, and establish clear time horizons, you restore predictability. You create “perceived control”, the feeling (in this case actually built into the board) that you have agency over your work. Perceived control is one of the strongest predictors of reduced stress and increased performance.​

Flow requires three things: clear goals, immediate feedback, and a balance between challenge and skill. Today’s Kanban board gives you all three. It shows you what’s next (clear goals), where things are stuck (immediate feedback), and which work is easy versus difficult (challenge/skill balance).

Seeing, Finding, and Maintaining Flow

The “Finding Flow” board is a commitment device. It makes promises visible, converts vague intent into structured action, and turns surprises into manageable challenges.

Today’s board has three planning horizons: This Week, Next Week, After Next Week. Before that, work sits in “Ready for Planning,” where teams categorize tasks as Easy (fully defined, no surprises) or Difficult (complex, politically sensitive, requires unavailable people). From there, work flows through What (re-defining the work), Doing (solo), Collaborating (paired/team focus), Review, and finally the Afterburner (continuous improvement). See the video for a lot more detail.

Three Core Themes

Theme 1: Plan Before You Pull

You can’t just grab work and start. That’s how you get blindsided by your own blindness. Before pulling anything into Doing, teams gather and plan collaboratively. They look at upcoming work and ask:

* Is this fully defined? (Easy)

* Or will there be surprises? (Difficult)

Knowing up front that a task is Difficult means you pay more attention to it. You schedule extra time, involve the right people early, and don’t assume it’ll “just work out.” This categorization is about understanding what you’re getting into.​

Then, you set time horizons: This Week, Next Week, After Next Week. Why three buckets? Because people need to know when you’ll deliver. “Sometime in the next few weeks” creates anxiety and constant unnecessary check-ins. Unnecessary check-ins are more work. But when you say, “This is happening next week,” people relax and leave you alone to work.​ Setting expectations is important. Keeping them means people will trust you in the future.

WIP limits apply here too: maybe you only do two Difficult things per week, filling the rest with Easy work. That’s sustainable. That’s realistic. That’s how you avoid overload before it starts.

Theme 2: Define in the Flow, Not Just at the Start

Here’s where most teams screw up: they plan once, then assume the plan is perfect. But the moment you stop planning, you start drifting and drift becomes the plan.

So the board has a What column, a space to define work mid-flow. You pull a task, realize it’s not as clear as you thought, and move it to What to figure it out. Maybe it’s an “Easy” task that turned out to be complex. Maybe it’s a Difficult task that needs decomposition. Either way, you pause to plan again before continuing.​

This isn’t failure, it’s adaptive intelligence. Real work is messy. The goal isn’t to eliminate surprises; it’s to have a system for handling them when they appear.​

Theme 3: Collaboration Creates Concentration Bubbles

Solo work is interruptible. Collaborative work is not. When you work alone, anyone can Slack you, tap your shoulder, pull you into a meeting. But when you’re collaborating, truly focused with another person or team, you’re in a concentration bubble. Interruptions drop. Focus intensifies. Work accelerates.​

That’s why the board has separate columns for Doing (solo) and Collaborating. It signals to others: “These people are unavailable right now becuse they’re deep in shared focus.” It also reminds you to protect that time. Collaboration isn’t just “working together” it’s structured, uninterrupted co-creation.​

And when work moves to Review, it’s clear: someone else has the ball. You’re waiting, not stuck. That visibility prevents the anxiety of “Did I forget something?” and the endless “Where’s my thing?” requests.

Individual Value: Reduce Your Stress by Making Promises Visible

* Categorize before you commit: Is this Easy or Difficult? Knowing up front protects you from surprise stress.

* Use time horizons to set boundaries: “I’ll get to this next week” is a promise—and it stops the daily “Is it done yet?” interruptions.

* Move to What when needed: Don’t power through confusion. Pause, define, then proceed. Clarity reduces stress more than speed.

* Build Trust: Make promises you can keep and people will know you can keep your promises.​

Project Manager: Build Predictability Into the System

* Facilitate collaborative planning: Don’t let individuals plan alone. Bring the team together to identify Easy vs. Difficult work and set realistic time horizons.​

* Enforce WIP limits on Difficult work: Cap how many complex tasks the team takes on per week. Overloading Difficult work is a recipe for burnout.​

* Use the Afterburner religiously: Every completed task gets a 60-second retro: What went well? What slowed us down? What will we do differently? Patterns emerge. Systems improve.​

Leadership: Flow Is Money, Flow Is Retention, Flow Is Strategy

* Measure predictability, not just velocity: Can teams forecast when work will finish? That’s the real metric of health.​

* Protect collaboration time: If your best work happens in Collaborating, then interruptions during collaboration are theft. Design systems that respect focus.​

* Celebrate continuous improvement: Every Afterburner insight that becomes a process change is ROI. Flow improvements compound.​

Conclusion

Stress is a signal that the system is broken. Visualization is how you fix it. When you plan work collaboratively, categorize by difficulty, set time horizons, and continuously improve through retrospectives, you design stress out of the system.

Next Episode: We’ll make the business case for humane work—why companies that invest in flow and reduce stress outperform those that glorify burnout.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Modus Institute | Our Calendar of Events | Our Kanban Class

Why We Treat Ourselves Like Nobodies

We manage work like it’s just generic toil. Work becomes anti-human, a pile of tasks handed down by nobody and received as nobody. No context. No ownership. Just something to do.

No wonder people don’t identify with their work, don’t want to engage in continuous improvement, and don’t feel motivated to make things better. Then we’re shocked when morale tanks and quality slides.

The world is full of enough demoralizing nonsense. We don’t need to add more by building systems that ignore the human at the center of the work. We not only need to do this, it needs to be how we design our kanban or any other way we take on our work.

So ask! Wonder! PONDER!!! When you define (and see) who you are and what you want, how does it change how you act? How does it change how you take on tasks, how you say yes with conditions, or how you explain what you can’t do right now?

I keep saying things about using these tools to say no to work. Any can say no, and regardless of how many tools you have people will get tired of hearing it. So, forget saying no for the moment and figure out how to say yes intelligently…with a reason, with a timeline, with clarity. And if that timeline or those reasons are too difficult, then you have a conversation.​

Humane Work is reader-supported. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You Don’t Value Yourself as a Stakeholder

We humans don’t prioritize things that help us grow because we don’t value ourselves as stakeholders in our own lives. We put everyone else’s urgencies ahead of our own development. Growth gets shoved aside for “just one more task,” and then we wonder why we’re burned out, stuck, and resentful.​

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow looks at why we get good work done in ways that don’t stress or hurt us. This doesn’t mean there’s no emergencies or unexpected, it means that we just handle them well. Flow is a state of optimal focus where we’re fully immersed, energized, and performing at our best. This requires a balance between challenge and skill, clear goals, and immediate feedback.

When we treat our own growth as optional, we never develop the skills needed to handle increasing challenges. We stay stuck in anxiety (challenge exceeds ability) or boredom (ability exceeds challenge). We never reach that place where work feels both effortless and meaningful. By refusing to invest in ourselves as stakeholders, we sabotage our own capacity for flow and with it, our ability to do work that matters and feels good while we are doing it

That’s not humane. And it’s completely fixable.​

Board done in KanbanZone (our Kanban Partner), Get 3 Months Free.

Today’s Kanban

Your Work, Your Life, Your Vision

The “My Work, My Life” board isn’t just another task tracker or vision board. We are solving a problem here of a gap between overload making you do many unrewarding things quickly, and you knowing exactly how you can get work done well in an appropriate amount of time.

The board starts with your personal vision, which frankly worries me because so many people say stupid things about personal visions. What we want here is your work to be in context of who you want to be. If it is not, your work will always be at odds with who you can be. That’s self-defeating and I am not a fan.

Personal Vision Panel (Left Side of Board)

Before you touch a single task, you declare your ground rules:

The bullet points here are examples. Not the answers….

What do I want to be?

What state to you want to be in at any point in time?

* Calm

* Informed

* Ready to help

Where do I want to be?

What is the environment you want to be in?

* Surrounded by thoughtful people

* In meaningful conversations

* Present in the work

How do I want to be?

How are you wanting to present yourself?

* Open-minded

* Patient

* Consistent

Why do I want to be this way?

Well…why?

* To build lasting relationships

* To actually improve things

* To grow, not just perform

When you write these down and put them on your board, something shifts. Suddenly, taking on a task that makes you not calm becomes visible self-sabotage. Working with a client who isn’t thoughtful becomes a values-conflict you can address. You’re not just reacting, you are structuring your work so you can be the most effective.

And yes, I know you won’t always have a choice. I know you will have crap pushed on you. Everyone has to do their taxes. ​

Work Context Lanes (Middle Section)

Work doesn’t arrive in neat categories. But you can contextualize it so you understand what you’re actually carrying:

Planned Work (Projects)

* The main work: strategic, committed, expected

* Example: “Design rebrand for key client”

Unexpected / Growth Work

* Half of these are surprises; half are things you need for your own development

* Critical insight: Growth work is urgent and important—not because someone’s waiting, but because you matter as a stakeholder

* Example: “Learn new AI tool” or “Respond to New Customer Request Quickly”

Administration

* Necessary but low-energy work

* Example: “Submit timesheet,” “Organize files”

The Doing Columns (Right Section)

Once work is contextualized, it flows through:

This board has three workflows centered around planned, unplanned, and crisis. Crises can come from any of the three context columns. We do want to see how much of our work flows through the planned and unplanned work and….

The Crisis section is its own set of triggers. Crises always trigger immediate action and retrospectives. If something was an emergency, you need to ask why and figure out how to prevent it next time. This turns reactive firefighting into proactive system improvement.​

Even non-crisis work can move to the Retro/Kaizen column if it didn’t go smoothly. The board becomes a learning system, not just a tracking system.​

Value for the Individual: Claim Stakeholder Status

* Anchor work to your vision: Before saying yes, check: Does this align with calm, informed, ready to help? If not, negotiate or decline.

* Prioritize your own growth: Move learning and development into “urgent/important”—because you are waiting for it, and you matter.​

* Use crises as data: Every emergency is a chance to learn and improve the system so it doesn’t happen again.​

Value for the Project Manager: Design for Agency

* Make vision visible for the team: Encourage everyone to define their personal ground rules and share them. Suddenly, task assignments become conversations about fit and alignment.​

* Track work by context, not just status: Planned vs. Unexpected vs. Crisis reveals patterns—and helps teams advocate for sustainable loads.​

* Turn crises into action: Build a culture where emergencies are quickly resolved, examined, and prevented.​

Value for Leadership: Build Systems That Value all Stakeholders

* Stop treating people like task robots: When individuals can articulate their values and align work accordingly, engagement skyrockets.​

* Measure team growth as a metric: Track how much time teams spend on development vs. firefighting. Growth is ROI, not a luxury.​

* Model the behavior: Share your own vision. Show that grounding work is a strategy.​

Conclusion

You’re not nobody. Your work isn’t random. And when you anchor every task to a clear vision of who you want to be, work stops feeling like an assault and starts feeling like progress. The “My Work, My Life” restores agency, builds meaning, and turns every crisis into a chance to get better.

Stop being nobody. Be somebody who chooses their work, their growth, and their future.

Next Episode: We’ll explore how visual management transforms abstract chaos into tangible, shared understanding—and why that changes everything.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Personal Kanban Book | Our Popular Kanban Class | Modus Institute

Humans are driven by productivity, wanting to fill every minute with action. We’re wired to want to be useful, stay in motion, and prove our worth. We prove to ourselves, our colleagues, and our managers that we are useful. Multitasking promises that we can do more, faster, and please the managers and upper managers who are all demanding it. Job descriptions ask for multitasking, even though it’s been shown time and again the only thing multitasking does is multiply your tasks.

As Tonianne DeMaria and I wrote years ago in Personal Kanban, no matter how hard we try, we’re not designed to juggle flaming torches, let alone eight projects. Yet much of the praise in the modern workplace goes to the “master jugglers,” burning out in the pursuit of false efficiency.

Efficiency is not how many things you can show someone you did, it’s removing obstacles to doing the right thing at the right time.

Humane Work is reader-supported. Our paid subscribers and community members keep this going. Consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Science is stubborn. It just keeps looking at things, even when it finds things we don’t expect or are uncomfortable with.

In a Stanford study on multitasking, frequent multitaskers performed worse than their focused peers on every metric. They scored lower on the ability to pay attention, to remember what they did, and to filter distractions. They lost control of their time, working on multiple tasks at once, without taking time to plan or improve. When they multitasked, they increased their cognitive load, allowed distractions, and made errors more likely and completion less likely. Quality wasn’t even part of the conversation.​

It doesn’t matter if you’re a programmer, a project manager, or a CEO, if you do more work than you can handle, your performance drops. I’ve spoken with many CxOs who are frustrated that “no one want to work any more.” But when we’ve gone deep on just their workload, they see how much they leave unfinished or delegate with vague directives that they could have sworn (and do repeatedly swear are “quite clear”). It takes them a while to realize that their directives are deliverables and those deliverables were low quality. They were multitasking, feeling productive, creating mayhem.

The majority of “multitasking” is just frantic task-switching. This gives the illusion of productivity, which provides a false sense of security (I’m productive everything is fine). But in the end, we all fall prey to the Zeigarnik Effect, a psychological bear trap, which keeps unfinished business looping in our brains, adding more anxiety to the pile. Every task we start, we keep thinking about until its finished. Our brains only have so much space, and we break down our ability to process. We forget things, we rush things, we become testy, we start to avoid things.

We convince ourselves we’re busy, but the real outcome is overload and our teams, our companies pay the price in missed deadlines, quality slips, and employee churn. We individuals pay the price in stress, sick days, and less tolerance for literally everything around us.​

The Fix: Building a Board to Fix Overload

This series uses Personal Kanban as a tool to see work, align with team members and stakeholders, and calm our workloads. If you are unfamiliar with it, here is the book.

We’re going to start with the assumption that people don’t want crappy work done late with surprising changes. We further assume that we all, at every level, want people to do the right thing at the right time and to quickly note when our plans aren’t going to work.

So, in this board today we are going to focus not on priorities, not on limiting work in process, and not even on quality. We are simply going to make sure people know why we are doing what we are doing and when something important happens.

For You: Dismantling Multitasking Stress

* You see what people want from you. Both tasks and strategies. You see which goals each task supports, and you’re empowered to say, “if this is client relationship work, let’s include them now.” Suddenly, quality and partnership take precedence over frantic solo delivery.

* WIP limits and visible board congestion are conversation starters, not personal failures; they create context for realistic planning, self-advocacy, and ideas of how to make the strategies work.

* Agency is built in. Instead of being crushed by work you didn’t consent to, you can point to the board and have transparent conversations about what’s possible.

For the Project Manager: Delivery through Effectiveness

* Boards tie every backlog item to strategic focus, ensuring that it’s not just “next on the list,” but valuable to upper management, clients, and team.

* When too many tasks are in “Doing,” this form urges the team to collaborate, prioritize, or escalate before the flood causes quality to drop and shows people throughout the company what is happening and why. (You don’t have to come up with a slide deck apology.)

* Instead of defaulting to more status meetings, project managers (and everyone else) use the board as a lens for spotting where help is needed, and where throughput is about to stall.

Leadership: ROI and Strategy were Murdered by Multitasking … not any more

* Metrics show not just dumb-speed, but how smart-strategy is moving / evolving / succeeding. You see how real work (not just work units) is flowing.

* You can now participate as part of the company. Your own overload is lessened as projects stop having bad surprises, territory wars diminish, and in general, people start working with you and not waiting for corrective action.

* The whole company owns the relationships, the planning, and the strategy.

A Shared Mission Beyond Just the Board

In the video, Julie’s team learned that working in this way is about more than “throughput.” It is possible to build and maintain a culture of context, collaboration, and conversation. Instead of optimizing for doing more (productivity), the board and the people optimize for “doing more that matters” (effectiveness). When every ticket on the board tracks back to a real goal, and everyone can finish right.

Next Episode: We’ll unpack how overload forms feedback loops that sabotage us and what to do about it.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe

Jim, Kevin, and Jesse talk practical work.

Continuous improvement is hard work and it isn’t just something you do .. and it is “done.” That’s part of what continuous means. It’s what Deming, Ohno, Goldratt, Shook .. everyone has warned us about. That we are engaged in continuous refinement, learning, and making things work better for the customer, the company, and the people doing the work.

This is always adjustment.

Kevin and Jesse deal with this every day in different ways. I always enjoy talking to them because they are truly thoughtful and always looking for ways to make work … work.

We walk about…

Visual Management as a Transformational Tool:How making work visible can fundamentally alter how teams operate and move from confusion and overload to transparency and shared understanding.

Navigating Transformation and Maintaining Progress:Progress is rarely permanent. Teams might reach new levels of collaboration or efficiency, only to risk backsliding over time. We talk strategies for sustaining these gains, emphasizing the importance of renewing focus and adapting as needs evolve.

Making Problems Tangible, Not Personal:You can’t understate the benefit of depersonalizing problems. Visual management allows teams to see issues objectively rather than associating them with individuals. This shift from personal blame to collective problem-solving reduces tension and fosters a sense of unity.

Fostering Participation and Shared Ownership:Involving everyone from leaders to frontline team members in shaping processes and solving problems is the only way to Create psychological safety and healthy feedback.

Behavioral and Cultural Barriers to Change:New tools and ideas can be difficult to adopt because people come to work every day with longstanding beliefs and behaviors. Addressing these behavioral barriers requires patience, empathy, and ongoing encouragement for new habits to take root.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit humanework.substack.com/subscribe