"I am generally curious about the concept of legibility of work. Look around in your workplace. You can find documents, messages, presentations, design files. Evidence of people's work. While it may look like a lot, there is a whole other type of work that is very hard to see. The invisible work. When a big project starts, one or two people usually take the lead. They set up the Slack channels. They write the doc that gives the thing shape."
"They schedule the daily syncs so the work has a pulse, something that keeps people moving together instead of drifting. When a new person joins late, they get them up to speed. Anyone could do this stuff, in theory. It's just logistics. But I've noticed that the people who do it tend to be the same people who end up doing much more later."
"Because as usual, the project starts to get complicated with time. Scope creeps because a senior stakeholder had a great idea in a meeting. Stakeholders multiply because people don't want to be left out of something that might matter. The original idea dilutes a little as it passes through more hands. Timelines slip, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. I've seen this happen so many times it feels like gravity. Projects just drift toward chaos unless a person is actively holding them together."
Invisible work includes coordination, onboarding, and logistical labor that is not captured by visible artifacts. A small number of people usually initiate projects by creating communication channels, drafting shaping documents, and scheduling regular syncs to maintain momentum. Those people also bring late joiners up to speed. As projects grow, scope creep, multiplying stakeholders, diluted ideas, and slipping timelines push work toward disorder. A few individuals then perform harder work: clarifying with concise one-pagers, closing stakeholders' context gaps, building trackers across many workstreams, assigning tasks proactively, and preparing reviews. That labor requires judgment, patience, and care to keep projects together.
Read at Hardik Pandya
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