Solving for Stress Is Easy. Solving for Service Is Hard.

Chris Terrell
Jan 23
3 min read

We’re a few weeks into the year now. Long enough for the starting blocks to still be visible… and long enough for them to start collecting dust.

Most of us didn’t set New Year’s resolutions. We set intentions. And then reality showed up. A sick kid. A ringing phone. A calendar that filled itself while we weren’t looking. Intentions crashed straight into the wall of daily life.

That collision is what got me thinking about stress—and more specifically, how often our processes are designed to reduce immediate stress instead of delivering real, long-term service.

Stress Is a Terrible Product Manager

One of the most expensive forms of process debt shows up when we solve for stress instead of service.

Stress is loud. It demands attention. It tricks us into thinking that urgency equals importance. So we react.

A client pings you at the last minute asking for photos from a finished project. You scramble, send the pictures, and everyone exhales. Stress resolved.

Except it isn’t.

Because next month, the same request comes in. Same scramble. Same stress. Same outcome.

Solving for service would have looked different. It would have sounded like:“Here’s where you can always find the latest project photos.”

That response doesn’t just solve today’s stress. It prevents tomorrow’s.

Craftsmen Don’t Run Around With Their Hair on Fire

This line of thinking led me to something else I’ve been noodling on: craftsmanship in knowledge work.

When you picture a craftsman—someone truly good at what they do—you don’t imagine chaos. You don’t imagine panic. You don’t imagine someone sprinting around yelling that everything is on fire.

You imagine intention.

Craftsmanship implies service. Service to the client. Service to the work. And importantly, service to your future self.

The moment you adopt that posture, stress stops being the thing you optimize for.

Instead, you start asking better questions:

Is this a one-off or a repeatable pattern?
Are we going to be doing this in three months? Three years?
If this is recurring, is this really the best way to handle it?

Those questions are uncomfortable when you’re already stressed. But they’re also how you stop paying compound interest on bad process decisions.

Kindness Isn’t Always Fast

There’s a nuance here that matters.

Sometimes solving for stress is the right move—especially when it’s about being kind. When someone’s having a brutal day, telling them “it’s in SharePoint, go find it yourself” might be technically correct and emotionally destructive.

Service isn’t cold automation. It’s discernment.

But here’s the trap: when everything becomes a concierge moment, you quietly train the system to depend on interruption instead of structure. You turn yourself into a stress sponge—and eventually, you pass that stress downstream.

That’s how stress multiplies. One unclear handoff becomes three confused people. One rushed delegation becomes five follow-ups. The vortex grows.

Delegation Is Where Stress Hides

Delegation is one of the clearest places this shows up.

The stress response says:“ I’ll just hand this off quickly and deal with it later.”

Service says:“ Where does this work live? How does it come back? How do we know it’s done?”

Most managers don’t lack trust. They lack a system that supports trust.

So work gets dropped into homeless inboxes, half-formed messages, or vague “can you look at this?” requests. The stress goes away—for now. But the work doesn’t.

Predictability Beats Heroics

The professionals we admire most aren’t the loudest or the fastest. They’re the calm ones. The ones who don’t get tossed around by every gust of urgency.

That calm isn’t accidental. It’s built.

Sometimes it’s as simple as checking client-specific inboxes every morning. Sometimes it’s building an intake process that forces clarity. Sometimes it’s saying no to turning a McDonald’s drive-through into a steakhouse because one special request showed up.

Elegance in simplicity takes work. Removing variation is hard. But it’s the only way scale doesn’t turn into chaos.

This Week’s Challenge

Do one small thing that serves your future self.

Not the fastest thing. Not the thing that makes the stress go away for five minutes. The thing that makes the next version of this problem easier—or disappear entirely.

That’s what reducing process debt actually looks like.

Most organizations don’t burn out because they work too hard. They burn out because they keep solving for stress instead of service.