Humane Work Podcast

Work Used to Be Toil: Work used to be about making everything super predictable. How many of this one thing can we pump out repeatedly that look exactly the same. Today’s work has automated a great deal of that and AI threatens (currently with a modicum of credibility) to automate even more.

We are at a Flex Point: Now things are more inventive, the rate of change is faster, the types of change more pronounced. This is not a death sentence, it is a point of change. AI certainly isn’t ready for prime time, despite the hype, but it will get there and we will adjust.

Work will become more distributed. We will be individuals, in teams, creating value, but the teams will become more spread out. People at home, in other cities or countries, and we’ll need to communicate much better than we have in the past (The “good news”: we were always pretty bad at communicating, so we have only upwards to go).

“There is no point trying to impose certainty on a situation which contains high uncertainty.” ~ Goldratt

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Replace Problems with Opportunities. As we work now solo business and creative work, we will need to improve how we improve. In the past , we spent a lot of time talking about problems. We examined how to fix them, how to avoid them, how to survive them. But the real story of the future of work, and of meaningful, humane work, is about opportunity: how do we set ourselves up to spot, seize, and shape the opportunities that matter most to us? How do we take a problem or found complexity and turn it into something we can (personally and as our team) and make it not an interruption (problem) but part of daily work done better than yesterday (opportunity).

This video explores how to keep your direction clear, your routines resilient, and your learning visible. Especially when the world around you is full of surprises which it is every day. The post here summarizes the video and extends it.

What’s in the Video: True North, Goals, and Standard Work in a World of Surprises

Hell is other people. ~ J.P. SartreSo is heaven. ~ Jim Benson

The more distributed we are, the more overhead we have. You can’t call IT and tell them to replace your printer, that’s on you. You can’t have finance handle taxes, it’s also on you. If you need some training, again…you.

Believe it or not, there was a reason we worked together in the same building and there are some pretty compelling reasons to continue to do so. That’s for a different post. Here, we are talking about how to get clarity, drive completion, and enjoy the daily work when you are distributed, a solopreneur, or otherwise “on your own.”

* Your True North is Who You Want to Be

* Before you chase opportunities, ask: Who do I want to be?

* True North isn’t a task list or a job title or a platitude. Your True North defines who and what you want you and your product to be. This guides every decision, big or small.

* In practice, most people think they know their True North, but when pressed, struggle to articulate it. It takes real reflection and conversation.

* Put your True North where you can see it. Make it a visual reminder when overload tries to make you focus on short term gains that will hurt your real aspirations.

2. Define Your Goals

* Your goals are the outcomes that flow from your True North.

* Whether you’re working solo or with a team, it’s easy to assume you know what you want. Until you try to write your goals down and really look at them, you will not “have goals”.

* Goals can be for today, this week, this month. They are a reason to invest your time in one activity over another. They must be intentional.

* Real clarity about goals comes from dialogue, not just internal monologue.

3. Build Your Standard Work

* Standard work is your best-known way to move toward your goals through the work you do every day. It’s a current, temporary, improvable routine that makes the unpredictable manageable.

* For example, my standard work for creating videos (currently) is:

* Generating ideas

* Sketching visuals

* Talking through the concept

* Shooting and editing

* Publishing and promoting

* Engaging with the community

* Within this standard work there are editing techniques that are standard, tools that are standard, ways I generate and store ideas, etc. I change them daily.

* This routine evolves over time, adapting to new tools, lessons learned, and the inevitable weirdness of daily life.

* If you don’t regularly improve your standard work, you have an increasingly ineffective rut.

4. Embrace Variation

* No matter how well you plan, variation is unavoidable. This doesn’t mean it should not be controlled, but it means that, now, we live in a world where change is more pronounced, more likely, and requires more reaction on our parts.

* Variation might be mundane (Tech fails, clients panic, family needs arise, and inspiration striking at odd hours). Our success lies in our ability to deal with these things elegantly.

* The trick isn’t to eliminate variation, but to build routines and systems that absorb it, so you can keep moving toward your True North through achieving goals and learning and improving even when the unexpected happens.

Extending the Practice

Making True North Tangible

* Keep it visible: Write your True North statement at the top of your board or workspace. Review it weekly. Make it the background on your monitor. Tape it to the dog.

* Make it collaborative: Don’t just define it alone. Discuss it with customers, friends, peers, mentors, or your community. Shared language builds shared direction. Hear yourself talking about it with others.

Setting and Reviewing Goals

* Limit your focus: Choose 2-3 weekly goals that align with your True North. Don’t overload your plate. But track them, see how you are making progress. Opportunities that you convert into completed goals are the very definition of success.

* Check in often: With each ticket ask: Are my actions moving me closer to these goals? If not, adjust the goals, adjust your tactics, look for options. Don’t just push harder.

Evolving Standard Work

* Document your routine: Write out your standard process for key actions. (Mine are content creation, sales, and working with students / clients). Update them as you learn.

* Build in learning: After each ticket, reflect: What worked? What didn’t? What will I change next time? (Check out the video on the afterburner for how to make learning continuous).

* Capture solutions: When you solve a recurring problem (like a tech glitch), record the fix—build your own FAQ.

Dealing with Variation and Interruptions

* Expect the unexpected: Design your day with buffer space for surprises. Don’t schedule yourself to the brim.

* Visualize interruptions: Track major disruptions on your Personal Kanban. Over time, you’ll spot patterns and can build better defenses.

* Practice self-compassion: When things go sideways, remember: variation is normal. The goal isn’t perfection, but steady progress.

Building a Resilient Workflow

* Choose tools that serve you: Use platforms and apps that fit your workflow, not the other way around. If a tool causes more pain than progress, it’s time to switch. Also remember, every tool is flawed, some are useful. Be neither beholden to your tools or switch so often that you build no standard work.

* Connect with community: Share your struggles and solutions. Someone else has faced your challenge before and sharing builds collective wisdom. If you work with tools often, find their user groups on Facebook or LinkedIn and leverage them.

Opportunity Overload and Humane Work

The real challenge here is opportunity overload. When you have no standard work then everything is changing or a surprise. You are reinventing the obvious. This means your attention is split by surprises you could have avoided and you risk missing the benefits of real surprises and opportunities.

By making your direction, your goals, and your routines visible, you create the space to notice, seize, and shape opportunities, even when they come in frustrating or stressful packages.

If you want to go deeper, explore Modus Institute’s courses on Personal Kanban, Cleaning Toxic Waste, and the x-matrix (on setting your strategy). Upcoming workshops in summer 2025 are: Personal Kanban Evolved and the True North Workshop

And as always, keep making your work visible. When you can see it, you can shape it.

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Solopreneurs, microbusinesses, and those of us looking for new work face challenges are looking for progress. We need to balance creative passion with relentless administrative demands, unpredictable tech issues, and the emotional labor of client relationships. The video talks about solopreneurs, but it doesn’t take much of a stroll through LinkedIn to see that so many of us are also looking for work and that can be a lonely job in its own right.

This article builds on the video above, providing the structure and power of a Kanban board designed for solo business owners. I create not only a flow of work from yesterday’s video, but include an “Afterburner” column to make sure that our overwhelm isn’t in such control that we can improve our way out of it.

Each section below summarizes a major theme from the video and extends it with practical insights from the Modus Institute and Humane Work knowledge base.

Visualizing the 5Ps: Making our Real Work Visible

From the Video:Our work isn’t just tasks, it should have some direction, it should have some structure. But for those working alone, it all feels like a deluge. Tasks, taxes, attacked by interruptions.

To bring calm to this, the video provides a Personal Kanban with five swim lanes: Process, Provision, Platform, People, and Personal. This structure makes visible the true landscape of solo work:

* Process: The core flow of your business (content creation, service delivery, etc.).

* Provision: The administrative overhead (taxes, compliance, and all the “must-dos” that are easy to procrastinate).

* Platform: The tech and tools that support your work, including their (endless) maintenance and troubleshooting.

* People: Clients, collaborators, and anyone you interact with, highlighting the importance of relationship management.

* Personal: Your own well-being, energy, and growth.

Humane Work is reader-supported (And a lot of work). Please consider becoming paid subscriber and receive access to exclusive content, phone calls, and other perks. Toni and I appreciate it.

Extension:Overwhelm lives in the invisible. By mapping not just tasks but categories of expectation, you can instantly spot imbalances. You can see admin overload or neglected client follow-ups. You need to track these or you’ll lose them, using visual cues (colors, icons) to highlight urgent or neglected areas, and reviewing your board daily to rebalance your focus. Build your system, lose less, and feel progress.

Standard Work and Creative Flow

From the Video:Standard work is repeatable routines for admin, tech setup, and daily tasks. It’s how you do the things you do. Having it frees up bandwidth for creative, high-value work. By making these routines explicit and easy to follow, we can reduce friction and decision fatigue. More importantly, we can better understand how much effort something is going to take and are better prepared for the eventuality that sometimes it does not.

Extension:Standard work is not about rigidity or making you do the same thing every day. It is how you ensure that when you do things you know how you do them, what results you want, and how to improve them. When we create predictable space for work, we are also creating emotional space for the unpredictable. You know things are going to happen to knock you off your game, make sure your game is strong enough to resist those efforts. And when the weird does happen, you are able to respond elegantly.

In Personal Kanban and making work visual we want to see the routine parts of our day so we can respond flexibly to creative opportunities and unexpected challenges. Regularly review your routines in the “Process” lane to refine them for efficiency and ease. Then, use the afterburner, to fine tune.

Which brings us to the afterburner.

The Afterburner: Turning Completion Into Learning

Stuff from the Video:The Afterburner is a place, a set of columns, were we can analyze completed work for quality, completeness, and satisfaction. Instead of simply moving tasks to “Done” and forgetting about them, we learn, we reflect:

* Was this work up to your standards?

* Did it energize or drain you?

* What would you do differently next time?

* (You can ask more questions than these three…what’s important to you?)

The afterburner in the video uses visual cues (smiley faces for wins, snakes for pain points) to make it easy to spot patterns, celebrate wins, and see our impact.

Extension:The Afterburner reminds you that completed work isn’t “your past to be forgotten”. We want to constantly make our small business more successful and we can only doing that by doing more of the right things and less of the not-right things. We can only doing that by adjusting how we work, what we choose to spend our energy on, and how we respond to demands on our time.

This ensures your Personal Kanban is a work tool and a learning engine. Improvement is impossible without reflection. Setting aside time to reflect is good, but in the end it means you only reflect when it is time. Scheduled reflection is at best musing, but more likely it is time you cannibalize to do something other than reflect.

With the Afterburner and the emojis, reflection is happening constantly. You see and are reminded what you’ve done, how that relates to what you are doing, and allows you to routinely ask “What went well with that last time? What needed fixing?” and making those insights immediately actionable, you build a system of continuous, humane improvement. You review your Afterburner every time you touch your work. Learning will always be fresh.

Actionable Improvement: From Insight to Change

So, to be clear and really drive this point home, the Afterburner isn’t for idle reflection, it is for immediate action. When you spot a recurring pain point (like a tech tool that always fails), you can decide to research alternatives, seek advice, or automate the task. When you notice a satisfying project, you can plan to do more of that kind of work or with those nice people.

At Modus Institute, we think this real-time action is the heart of “visualized improvement.” Don’t let lessons learned fade into memory, wait weeks or months to discuss what went right, Do..It…Now. Turn these insights and inspirations into new cards, experiments, or changes to your standard work.

Share persistent challenges with your network; often, someone has already solved the problem you’re facing.

Close this up… Sustainable Solo Business

The video closes by urging solopreneurs to leave their business a little better each day, using the Afterburner to avoid repeating mistakes and to reinforce what works. Humane Work is about more than getting things done—it’s about making your work visible, manageable, and meaningful. By visualizing the full scope of your commitments, reflecting honestly on outcomes, and acting on what you learn, you create a resilient, adaptive solo business. This isn’t just hooey hustle culture; it’s sustainable progress, grounded in clarity and self-compassion. You started your business for a reason, remember it, respect it, and re-invigorate it.

Next Steps

* Visualize your own 5Ps: Adapt the swim lanes to fit your unique business landscape.

* Build your Afterburner: Make reflection and improvement a visible, regular practice.

* Go deeper: Explore Modus Institute’s Cleaning Toxic Waste and Personal Kanban Evolved courses for hands-on tools and a supportive community.

Every day, make your learning visible. Every day, invest in making your business more humane. You seriously owe it to yourself and everyone you serve.

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

Podcast Description:

Join Jim Benson, Mike Burrows, and Karl Scotland as they dive into the evolving world of visual management, strategy, and organizational alignment. This episode explores why defining a clear True North is so challenging, how non-prescriptive and outcome-oriented approaches foster better engagement, and why granularity—breaking down strategy and planning into actionable, context-specific elements—matters for real progress.

Key topics include:

* True North is required to have a confident, directed, team

* The power of non-prescriptive, context-rich language for shared vision

* How granularity in planning and strategy leads to more robust, adaptable outcomes

* The importance of collaborative conversations over top-down prescriptions

* Balancing freedom and constraint to enable both confidence and flexibility in teams

* Visual tools like the X-Matrix and Obeya for organizing and socializing strategy

Listeners will hear practical insights on making strategy more humane, actionable, and resilient—moving beyond rigid plans to a more granular, conversational, and emergent approach to change.

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

We Overload Ourselves

Why We Voluntarily Drown in Work (And How to Stop)

Too many commitments, scrambling to keep up, secretly prideful of our “busyness.” “Oh, I am soooo important!”

At the same time, we complain about too many meetings, unreasonable demands, and never any time to “just work.”

Overload is pushed (bosses give it to us) sure, but it turns out that the root of overload isn’t just external demands—it’s our own instincts.

Some Definitions: WIP and Martyrdom?

WIP (Work-in-Progress)noun

* The total amount of work (tasks, projects, or commitments) that has been started but not yet finished, actively consuming attention, time, or resources.

Work-in-Progress (WIP) are the things we’ve started but not finished. Like a highway, our brains have limited bandwidth for active work. Exceed that capacity, and everything slows down.

In the video we talk about a specific type: Martyr WIP where we voluntarily take on more than we can handle. It’s not just about saying “yes” to others or even fear of punishment for “no,” it’s about craving validation, fearing irrelevance, or equating productivity with worth.

In the video I say, “We sign up for it, we basically just say ‘abuse us.’”

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The Overload Tug of War: We Pull Just as Much as We’re Pushed

Overload isn’t just about others dumping work on us. We actively pull it in through:

* The “High Score” Trap: Chasing metrics like tasks completed, speed of delivery, or hours worked, even when they don’t align with real priorities.

* Illusion of Progress: Starting a bunch of tasks to avoid disappointing anyone, (Have you started my task yet?) then spending more time managing them (having meetings, updating on status) than actually doing the work.

* Identity Attachment: Becoming “the person who handles X,” which locks us into servitude.

“I’ve got all this professional desire, personal desire, and so I’m voluntarily drowning.”

Why Overload Backfires

Overload crushes us because our brains just can’t handle it. It creates cycles where we hate it, crave more of it, and in the end build systems that keep piling it on.

The Zeigarnik Effect: Unfinished tasks haunt our brains, increasing anxiety and reducing focus.

Collaboration Erosion: Do you hate silos? Martyrdom breeds silos. When we hoard work, we deny others growth opportunities and create single points of failure in ourselves. We make ourselves little silos of one.

The Stanford Multitasking Myth: Research shows chronic multitaskers perform worse on all tasks due to cognitive overload.

Breaking the Cycle: A 4-Step Framework

Step One: Visualize Your Real WorkWe want to build a Personal Kanban that shows the types of work that we have and gives us triggers to deal with it in less self-harmful ways. Start by create a simple Personal Kanban board that uses columns to call out they types of work: Backlog → Teaching | Deciding | Complex | Me → Doing → Done.

* Teaching: Tasks that upskill others (e.g., “Document this process with Julie”).

* Deciding: Tasks requiring input from stakeholders (e.g., “Finalize budget with Finance”).

* Complex: Tasks needing collaborative problem-solving (e.g., “Redesign onboarding workflow”).

* Me: Tasks only you can do (keep this list ruthlessly small).

Step Two: Focus Your WIP on Working With Every Category:Pull work that gets you to share work, to train people, to work with others, and to work alone. Balance your workload and get your ‘martyr fix’ by helping other people be better.

Step Three. Never Stop CollaboratingFor every task, ask: “Who else needs to understand this?” Redefine your value from tasks done to people helped. (If that seems the same as Number 2, sit with it a while.)

And Step 4. Conduct a Weekly “Overload Autopsy”Review tasks that spilled into the next week. Were they truly urgent—or self-inflicted?

The Path Forward

Martyrdom isn’t a badge of honor; it’s a recipe for burnout. By designing systems that prevent overload (like the Kanban framework above), we shift from reactive chaos to intentional flow.

Watch the companion video for a deeper dive into how Martyr WIP creeps into our routines—and how to spot it before it’s too late.

Want more? See the Personal Kanban book. Or Explore Modus Institute’s Personal Kanban Class. Or, if you are feeling like you are ready for the next level, check out our Visual Management Certification to master visual management and humane productivity.

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In every Personal Kanban class we teach, we cover Pomodoro. Like Personal Kanban, the Pomodoro Technique is very simple to learn, but its impacts are deep.

The short form:

* Define the task you want to focus on

* Create a space where you can focus on that task for 25 minutes

* Work for the 25 minutes focused only on that task

* At the end of the 25 minutes take a 5 minute break, let your brain catch up, and relax a bit.

When we work this way, alone or together, we get a tremendous amount done because we are momentarily limiting our work in progress to one single task, we are closing out external interruptions, and we are achieving both flow and deep work.

It’s all sorts of goodness. In the little TikTok video above, I show how to create space in your Personal Kanban for your Pomodoro. Why? Because when you make physical space for something you create a system and are more likely to do it. When you look at your board you will always ask yourself if something should go into that column.

The Pomodoro column helps us not just focus, but it is a commitment device, something that we set up to specifically visualize and promote a way we would rather live. A way we would rather work. A way we would rather be.

It is so easy to think “I should do more Pomodoros”. Pomodori?

But it is another thing to actually do it. When we build our Personal Kanban, it’s not enough to just think “I’ll just focus on that one ticket in my In-Progress column.” We need to focus on the behaviors we want to promote. The behaviors we want to achieve.

For more: Personal Kanban Book | Personal Kanban Class | or just chat here.

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