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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.

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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.

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