I Was Still Hitting My Numbers. Sort Of.

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The work went out. Deadlines got met. Nobody chased me for anything.

It was taking me five times as long to get there.

That part doesn't show up anywhere. There's no field for it in a performance review, no line on a dashboard, no question in an engagement survey that would have caught it. The only person who knew was me, and I wasn't telling anyone.

What went first

Not output. Slack.

The work still landed and it used everything I had. Nothing left over. I stopped volunteering for the extra thing. Stopped staying behind after the meeting to sort out the thing that needed sorting. An email that used to take four minutes took twenty, because I read it three times and still checked it once more before sending.

None of that moves a number. I looked the same on paper as I had the year before.

When it got expensive

Decisions started costing more than they were worth.

Small calls I used to make on my own started going up a level. From the outside that looks consultative. It was depletion. I'd take the option that ended the meeting instead of the one that was right, because ending the meeting was the only thing I had capacity for that afternoon.

Big tasks got pushed aside. Not skipped. Moved. Broken into pieces small enough to survive. Something that should have been one afternoon became six half-hour attempts across a week, and each attempt started from the beginning because I couldn't hold where I'd left off.

I'd sit down to read something and be up again ten minutes later. Not distracted. The words stopped resolving. Same paragraph three times and nothing came out of it, like a page in a language I don't speak.

I stopped going to the team lunch.

Here's how that quarter read from the outside: seems a bit disengaged. Maybe checked out. Might be looking.

I wasn't looking. I was underwater and covering it.

What stopped sticking

Memory went next, and it went quietly.

I stopped reading books and started listening to them. Five minutes was about all my eyes could hold. Comprehension near zero.

Song lyrics I'd known for thirty years, gone.

I tried learning guitar around then. I knew the chords. I could not hold the order they went in. The parts were all there and the sequence wasn't.

Holding a thought for ten seconds was work. Like being drunk or stoned without the buzz, and the after-effects lasted a lot longer than any hangover.

The thing people get wrong is thinking discipline fixes this stage. It doesn't. You can want it badly, plan around it, show up early, and none of that gives the capacity back. It returns on its own schedule. When mine came back it came back fast, but not because I outworked it.

Now put that person on four projects and assume they'll remember what was agreed last Thursday.

What it cost the company

Nothing they could see. That's the problem.

No sick days. I took almost none. The deliverables went out. Every metric anyone was tracking held.

What they paid for was a year of someone burning five times the input to produce the same output, while being reviewed as though nothing had changed. Presenteeism is the word for it. Someone is there and can't be there, and payroll doesn't distinguish.

Then eventually there's a resignation, or a mistake big enough to notice, or a person who never quite comes back to what they were. And the manager says it came out of nowhere.

He's telling the truth. From where he was standing, it did.

Where it could have been caught

Not at the exit interview. Not at the point I was forgetting guitar chords.

At the beginning, when I stopped volunteering. That was the whole tell, and it's the easiest one in the world to explain away as attitude.

What a manager needed to do there was narrow. Notice the extra effort disappearing, and open a conversation he wasn't qualified to finish. Nobody was asking him to diagnose anything. The job was to get me from "something's different" to the professional support the company already paid for. It's a specific skill and most managers have never been taught it.

And here's the part that makes it human work. What was happening to me had nothing to do with the job. It was at home. It had arrived and it wasn't leaving, and it walked into the building with me every morning at eight.

No dashboard detects that.

The thing I'd say now

If I'd been asked directly, early, by someone who wasn't scoring me, I don't know that I'd have told the truth the first time.

I think I'd have told the truth the third time.

Nobody asked twice.