Make the Invisible Workload Visible

This week has been about invisible workload — the work that keeps a business running without ever showing up as a task. Today, the practical bit: what I actually did about it in my own business this week.

I gave myself one day to just notice. Not to fix anything, just to catch, in the moment, every small thing I did that nobody had asked me to do and nobody would have noticed if I hadn’t. By the end of the day I had a strange little list. I’d remembered a client’s preference for Monday calls over email. I’d double-checked an invoice date because I had a feeling it was due sooner than logged. I’d mentally flagged that a supplier hadn’t confirmed and made a note to chase them Thursday, not Friday, because Friday would be too late.

None of that was on any task list. All of it was real work, and all of it was living only in my head.

Three things stood out enough to actually deal with. The client preferences — who likes calls, who hates being cc’d, who needs a reminder two days out rather than one — went into a proper note against each client file, instead of relying on me remembering correctly forever. The invoice date check became an actual recurring reminder instead of a feeling I got sometimes and sometimes didn’t. And the supplier chase pattern, the built-up sense of “this one needs following up early” — that one I wrote down as an actual rule, so it doesn’t depend on my instinct being switched on that particular week.

None of this took long. Under an hour, for three things that had been quietly running on memory and gut feeling for months. That’s usually how invisible workload goes — the fix is rarely as big as the feeling of carrying it.

Your turn: what’s one thing you’re holding only in your head right now — and what would it take to get it out of there this week?