Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort become a source of anxiety—it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.

An email arrives that informally represents a new responsibility for you to manage; because there’s no formal process in place to assign the work or track its progress, you seek instead the easiest way to get the responsibility off your plate—even if just temporarily—so you send a quick reply asking for an ambiguous clarification. Thus unfolds a ga