You Can’t Delegate What No One Can See
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 due when, because the program officers were too stretched to hold it themselves.
None of that showed up anywhere. There was no line on an org chart for “the person who remembers everything.” If you’d asked me at the time what my job was, I’d have listed the visible bits — the parts with a job description attached — and left out the actual work, which was holding a hundred small threads together in my head so nothing dropped.
I didn’t think of it as workload. I thought of it as just being on top of things. It wasn’t until I left — first that job, later Amazon, after redundancy — that I understood what that kind of work actually costs. Because someone has to pick it up, and when they do, they realise for the first time how much there was.
That’s invisible workload. It’s not the tasks on your to-do list. It’s the noticing, the remembering, the anticipating — the work that keeps everything else running, that nobody assigns to you and nobody thanks you for, because most of the time nobody even knows it’s happening. You only see it clearly from the outside, once, in the gap after the person doing it has gone.
Running YVO, I hold this for other people now. Deliberately. The client who needs a nudge before they forget, not after. The supplier who won’t confirm unless you chase twice. None of it is glamorous. All of it is real work, and all of it is invisible by design — because if it were visible, it would usually mean something had already gone wrong.
The trouble with invisible workload is that you can’t fix what you can’t see, and you’re usually the last person to see your own. It just feels like Tuesday. So the actual starting point isn’t delegating it — you can’t hand off a thing you’ve never named — it’s noticing it in the first place. Writing down, just once, everything you’re quietly carrying that nobody asked you to carry.
Your turn: what’s the invisible work in your week that you’ve never actually written down — and what would it look like on paper?