The hire came last The pressure came first.

For nine months in 2021 I had two jobs. Not two projects. Two jobs, each with its own reporting line, its own weekly rhythm, and its own set of people who reasonably expected me to know what was going on.

How it happened is boring, which is how these things usually happen. The first role was mine. Then the second one opened up and I was the person standing closest to it, so it became mine too, on the understanding that this was temporary and we would sort it out properly soon. Soon is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

What I wrote at the end of that year was that I knew it was not sustainable. I want to be precise about the order of what happened next, because I have told this story wrong before.

The obvious move was to ask for a hire. That is the legible fix. It goes in a budget request, it shows up in a headcount plan, and everybody in the room understands it immediately. It was also the one I could not get, because the case for it was that I was tired, and tired is not a business case.

So I did the unglamorous thing instead. I wrote down what I actually did each week. Not a job description, which is a document about a role. A list, which is a document about tasks. And once it was a list, some of it was obviously handable to somebody who was not me, and some of it obviously was not, and the boundary between those two piles was the thing I had never been able to see while I was doing all of it at once.

Then a volunteer came on to take the small weekly things. Then, because there was now a documented body of work with a person visibly doing it, the hire got approved. Then the hire took the whole role.

Read that order again. The process came first. The volunteer came second. The hire came last.

Why I keep getting this backwards

Here is the version I told for about two years: I was drowning, so we hired someone. It is not a lie exactly. It compresses correctly. But it puts the hire in the causal position, and the hire was the last domino, not the first.

That matters because the compressed version is unrepeatable. If the story is “get overwhelmed, receive help,” there is nothing in it you can do on purpose. The actual version has a move in it: make the work legible, and the resourcing argument makes itself.

I am wary of turning this into a method, though, and here is the part I have not resolved. I did not do any of it because I was wise. I did it because I was under enough pressure that I could not keep going the way I was. What I wrote at the time was that being put under the pressure of managing two roles for nine months pushed me into streamlining my tasks and training the person who would take them.

Pushed. Not chose.

So I do not actually know whether this is a method or just what happens to a person when the alternative is failing in public. I have never run it from a calm start. Every time I have done it, something was already on fire.

What I would look for now

The tell is not workload. Workload is always high and everybody’s is. The tell is when you cannot answer the question “what would somebody else take off you tomorrow” without going quiet for a while. If the answer needs a week of thinking, that is not a staffing problem, right? That is a documentation problem wearing a staffing problem’s clothes.

Which leaves me somewhere uncomfortable, because the most useful thing I did that year was write a list, and nobody has ever asked me about the list. What would have happened if I had shown it to someone before I needed it?