Energy Vampires

On a factory floor, you knew whether you'd had a good day the parts moved down the line or they didn't. Knowledge work took that away and left a constant, low-grade question in its place: what am I supposed to be doing, and how would I know if I'd done enough? The systems we work in aren't neutral. They carry judgment. "I got 500 unread emails" and "I have 500 emails" are the same inbox one's a verdict, one's an observation. And the judgment is the part that's actually hurtin

Most organizations don't promote great coaches. They promote fire starters — the ones who swoop in, take credit for putting out the fire, and never fix the thing that caused it. The best managers? You rarely hear about them. Their teams are stable, their people get promoted, and there are no disasters because there are no disasters to manage. But "no disasters" is invisible on a performance review. And so the org keeps rewarding the arsonists.

“Hey, what’s up Toby? We made it another week.” And if your week included insane weather, unhinged headlines, and a football game that made you question your life choices… welcome to the club. But here’s the thing. When the news gets loud, it’s easy to get pulled into the politics of it all. This week, I want to do something different. I want to look underneath the argument and ask the question we ask on this podcast every week: What process produced the outcome we’re starin

If your work constantly feels urgent, reactive, and exhausting, the problem probably isn’t effort, it’s process debt. This episode digs into why solving for stress is easy, solving for service is hard, and how small shifts can radically reduce long-term friction.

We joke that “this meeting could’ve been an email,” but Charlie Munger would flip that logic on its head. In most organizations, the real failure mode isn’t too many meetings — it’s hiding work inside emails no one ever truly acknowledges. A good meeting, with a shared agenda and a visible workflow, creates something email never can: confirmation, context, and community. Reduce your emails by having better meetings. That’s how you start paying down process debt.

Forget the meme that “this meeting could’ve been an email.” The real fix is an acknowledgement cycle: tiny Looms, one change at a time, a weekly “did you do the thing?” scoreboard, and pull-based habits over notification spam. Transport information and confirm that it has become a shared understanding.

The birthday paradox fools our intuition, and so do bloated meetings. Complexity doesn’t need more bodies; it needs more clarity, tighter roles, and decision rights closer to the work.

We don’t have a balance problem—we have a prioritization problem. Pick three outcomes, protect white space, and pay down the principal on your personal process debt.

Culture is how work really happens when nobody’s looking. You can ship with perfect swimlanes and still sink if the behaviors underneath reward speed over honesty, heroics over ownership, or silence over clarity. Cultural debt is the invisible interest on those choices, tiny tells like re-announced timelines, leaders taking credit, and teams getting quiet, until the bill arrives. The fix isn’t slogans; it’s visible habits, built-in checks, explicit assumptions, and stories te

AI made input cheap and expectations sky-high, but our human throughput hasn’t changed. Without clear “done” definitions and a verify step, we ship polished artifacts that miss the mark and burn out in the process. Slow down, cap WIP, and build tiny rituals that prove the work actually worked.

Reorgs and shiny tools can anesthetize pain without solving root causes. Here’s a practical framework—Vision → People → Process → Tools to turn motion into measurable outcomes and pay down process debt.

If you’ve ever set a New Year’s resolution you didn’t intend to keep, you already understand the hidden economics of meetings. We tell ourselves the ritual will make us better. Then we realize the ritual mostly made us feel better. I see it every January. We vow to be healthier, write daily, get organized. Then life sneezes on us during a flight and the plan stalls. That’s fine for personal goals, but in business we do the same thing with meetings. We schedule them to relieve

Trust is the invisible “buffer stock” of knowledge work. We unpack how blind trust hides bad processes, why low trust kills momentum, and how to design zero-trust workflows alongside high-trust communities.