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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.

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