The Invisible Work You Don't Give Yourself Credit For

There are about a dozen sleep aids on and around my bedside table.

Sprays. Tablets. Patches. Things that were supposed to help quiet my brain. They accumulated gradually. One when nights got difficult, another when that stopped working, another after that.

I even had a ‘sleep kit’ to take to hotels with me.

At some point I realised I couldn't remember acquiring most of them. They'd just appeared. A physical inventory of something I struggled to name.

I remember when my mobile could first take work emails. I thought it was progress. I could now stay across it all. I welcomed it.

Both things were symptoms of the same miscalculation.

I was measuring my workload by what was visible. The meetings attended. The decisions made. The outputs delivered. That was the work. Everything else? That didn't count. That was just... how it was.

But I got it wrong.

The problems turned over in the shower? That's work.

The thinking before the meeting that makes the meeting useful? That's work.

The mental rehearsal of a difficult conversation that never gets logged anywhere? That's work.

The overnight interrogation of a decision that looks instantaneous to everyone else? That's work.

The hidden price of senior leadership isn't in the visible work. It's in everything that has to happen for the visible work to exist.

None of it appears on a job description. None of it gets factored into a workload assessment. And because it's invisible to everyone else, it gradually becomes invisible to you. You stop counting it and stop giving yourself credit for it.

The sleep aids multiplied because I kept treating the symptom without naming the cause. The phone felt like efficiency but it dissolved the last boundary between the work that was counted and the work that wasn't.

The invisible work doesn't stop being work because nobody sees it.

It just stops being something you acknowledge.

When did you last give yourself credit for the thinking — not just the doing?

The Invisible Work You Don't Give Yourself Credit For