The Tuesday after Labor Day, I opened my calendar and found two new standing meetings on it that I had not agreed to. Two new accounts had been added over the long weekend. There was a Slack message about it with a rocket emoji and the phrase great visibility for you.
That puts me at six.
This is the season for it. Fiscal planning lands, somebody redraws the staffing sheet, and the people who did not leave this year absorb the work of the people who did. Teams have been cutting headcount all year and then discovering, right about now, that the work did not leave with the person. It got quietly redistributed across whoever was still sitting there.
And it always arrives dressed as a compliment.
Being staffed on six projects is not a promotion, it is a math problem somebody decided to solve using your evenings.
Here is the part that gets lost. Strategy is not a deliverable you produce, it is a thing you arrive at, and arriving takes unstructured hours. Reading the category until it stops being a list of competitors. Sitting with the customer interviews long enough to notice the one sentence that changes the brief. Being bored on purpose. None of that fits in the eleven minutes between two standups, so what comes out instead is a well formatted restatement of what the client already told you.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Thin work never announces itself. It looks like work. It has a title slide and a framework and three pillars. It just does not contain a decision, because nobody had a quiet hour in which to make one.
The second cost is authorship. On six accounts you are a contributor to six things and the author of none. When review season arrives, nobody can point at the piece of thinking that was yours. Including you.
So what do you actually do. You make the tradeoff visible instead of absorbing it in silence. Not I am overloaded, which reads as temperament. Instead: here are the six, here is what each one needs in order to be good, that totals more hours than exist, so which two are we choosing to make thin. Put the number in writing. Let the person who built the staffing sheet own the answer, because the answer is genuinely theirs to own.
Sometimes they fix it. Sometimes they say do all six anyway, which is also useful information about where you work.
Thin work never announces itself. It looks like work.
I made it to karaoke in Southeast on Friday, late, and sang one song badly instead of three songs badly. The host called me baby and said one is plenty when you mean it. He was talking about the song. I have decided he was not only talking about the song.