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…
When I worked in Employee Engagement at Amazon, one of the harder things to explain to leaders was why someone with a completely reasonable workload on paper could still be burning out. Their task list looked fine. Their hours looked fine. But talk to them for ten minutes and you’d find out they were also…
For a while I was the office manager at an NGO, which is a job title that meant almost nothing about what I actually did. On paper it was reception, some admin, ordering supplies. In practice I was also doing the accounts payable, half the procurement, and quietly keeping track of which grant reports were…
The first process I ever wrote down properly wasn’t for a client. It was for myself, in the first few months of running YVO, after I caught myself doing the same client onboarding steps slightly differently every single time and hoping I’d remember what worked. I sat down one afternoon and just wrote out what…
Someone once described my desk at the NGO as “organised chaos,” and I took it as a compliment at the time. Everything had a place, even if that place made sense to nobody but me. I could put my hands on any document in under a minute. I thought that made me good at my…
At my old NGO job, I was the person who knew where things were. Not officially — nobody put that in my job description — but if you needed last year’s grant report, or wanted to know which version of the budget spreadsheet was the real one, or needed the code for the store cupboard,…
There was one task at Amazon I never handed over, not once, in years of managing a team. Told myself it was too important, too sensitive, too easy to get wrong. Looking back, that wasn’t true. I just hadn’t taken the twenty minutes to write down what I actually wanted, and it felt safer to…
A client told me straight out last week: I know I should hand this over. I just don’t want to. She wasn’t being stubborn. She was being honest, which is rarer, and more useful. It wasn’t about trust. She knew I was capable — she’d already handed over harder things without a second thought. This…
My first year managing a team at Amazon, I made the same mistake most people make when they start delegating. I picked people I trusted and figured that was the job done. Hire well, hand things over, everything’s fine. It wasn’t fine. Things got done, but not the way I’d have done them, and I…
When I got made redundant from Amazon, I had, for the first time in years, an empty calendar and no meetings to run to. So I did something I’d never made time for while I was in the job: I sat down and mapped out exactly where communication had broken down over the previous year….
