A really quick Personal Kanban in Kanban Zone
You're trying to focus on the quarterly report, your brain keeps circling back to your parent's diagnosis. Or the argument with your partner last night. Or the news that won't stop being terrifying.
You tell yourself to focus. You work longer hours to compensate. You feel like you're failing because you can't just "push through" like you used to.
This is a good news / bad news moment. Or maybe a company in misery. You’re not alone in this one, even though it very much feels like it. You're not failing.
This is what we call Existential Overhead in the PK book. Stuff is happening outside of work, it’s still in your brain and that reduces your capacity. And pretending it isn't makes everything worse. And everyone pretends.
Your Brain Isn't a Machine
When Tonianne and I wrote Personal Kanban, we put existential overhead right at the beginning of the book. Not as an afterthought. As a fundamental reality of being human. And right now, that existential overhead is at a level we’ve never seen before.
It’s everything happening in your life that's consuming cognitive capacity but isn't on your to-do list:
Family health issues
Financial stress
Your own health
Grief or loss
Housing instability
Relationship breakdown
Trauma being triggered
Workplace toxicity (also rising because of this)
Global chaos creating constant background anxiety
None of this shows up on your personal kanban, but all of it is consuming your mental bandwidth.
The Math Everyone Pretends Doesn't Exist
Your working memory can hold roughly 3-4 new pieces of information at once. On a good day, maybe 7-9 if the information is familiar.
But here's what nobody talks about: You don't start Monday morning with a clean slate.
Before you open your laptop, you're already carrying those stresses listed above. They all create this background noise, fear, uncertainty, doubt…anger, frustration. Any emotion that distracts your ability to focus and finish, it’s there.
All of it using up your mental “focus-slots”. You have maybe 2 or 3 slots left for actual work.
Your manager expects 9, your team expects 9, you…expect 9.
The math doesn't work. It never did. But you blame yourself for not being able to handle it. And, sigh, that blame is even more existential overhead. And we get a downward spiral.
What Happens When You Ignore Existential Overhead
You work longer hours to compensate.
Not sustainable. Your brain is already fragmented. You are working more hours just means more fragmented hours.
You make more mistakes.
Executive function is partially offline. You miss things you'd normally catch. You feel like you're losing your edge.
You lose creativity.
Innovation requires cognitive availability. When you're managing existential overhead, you're in survival mode. Deep thinking disappears.
You can't help others.
No overflow capacity means you can't be the team member you want to be. You feel isolated and inadequate.
Eventually, you burn out or quit.
Because you can't keep operating at 150% of your available capacity forever.
The Solution Isn't "Try Harder"
This isn’t easy, but it also isn’t complicated. The I am personally tired of productivity advice assuming you are ready to change your whole life and adopt crazy new behaviors. Build better habits! Just focus more! Just manage your time better!
So, for right now, we need to get ahold of our existential overhead. Big solutions won't work, because you are already overloaded. . You can't habit-hack your way out of grief. You can't time-manage away financial terror.
So, to start, let’s Let’s just see and confront the overhead.:
1. Acknowledge It Exists
Stop pretending you should have unlimited capacity. You're human. Life affects you. This is biology. It’s how we humans interact with the world around us.
2. Make It Visible (At Least to Yourself)
On your Personal Kanban board, you don't have to put "parent's cancer diagnosis" as a task. But you can acknowledge that existential overhead is consuming capacity. That some things suck.
Some people create a visual indicator: "High overhead week" or "Reduced capacity" or just a color-coded signal that reminds them: I'm operating with constraints right now. One woman we worked with used to have a thinking ticket…a ticket on her board she would pull to give herself permission to pause and reflect.
3. Adjust Your WIP Limits
Years ago, we worked with someone who lost her father. We lowered her work-in-progress to one thing a day. Not zero—we didn't want her to feel useless. But one meaningful task that she could complete, feel good about, and then go process her grief.
That's not lowering standards. That's working with reality.
When you're dealing with existential overhead, your WIP limit needs to reflect your actual available capacity, not your fantasy capacity.
4. Communicate Without Confessing
You don't need to explain your entire life situation to work effectively. But you do need to be able to signal reduced capacity.
"I'm at 60% capacity this week" is sufficient.
"I need lighter load for the next month" is sufficient.
"I can't take new commitments right now" is sufficient.
No diagnosis. No confession. Just operational reality.
This works best if your team has psychological safety. But most teams need to create that safety. That starts with you acknowledging your own capacity honestly and adjusting accordingly. Others see this, will appreciate it, and will try to respond in kind.
5. Plan With Reality, Not Optimism
Most people plan their week as if they have unlimited capacity and nothing will go wrong.
Then life happens. And they feel like failures.
Realistic planning asks:
What's my actual available capacity this week?
What existential overhead am I managing?
What's truly essential versus what's just urgent?
What can I defer until I have more bandwidth?
What This Looks Like in Practice
Instead of: "I should be able to finish this project by Friday"
Try: "I want to help, but given my current capacity (show them on your board), finishing by next Wednesday is realistic"
Instead of: "I'm going to work evenings to catch up"
Try: "I'm going to adjust my commitments to match my available capacity"
Instead of: "Why can't I focus like I used to?"
Try: "I'm managing significant existential overhead. My focus is reduced. That's normal."
Instead of: Hiding struggle until breakdown
Try: Signaling reduced capacity early and adjusting workload
Why Your Team Needs to Know This Too
When you're managing existential overhead and hiding it, you're not just hurting yourself. You're creating problems for your team:
They can't adjust to help you because they don't know
They misinterpret your reduced output as lack of commitment
When you eventually burn out or leave, there's no transition
Your struggle becomes invisible, then suddenly catastrophic
Want to go deeper?
Read deeper articles on our Substack - Why Seeing Your Work Matters and When Work Hurts
Join the free webinar - Seeing existential overhead and why it destroys teams
Take the Personal Kanban class - Learn the full system for managing work and life sustainably
Join the workshop - Build team systems that work with human reality instead of against it
Read Personal Kanban - The book that started it all, with existential overhead right at the beginning