There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up on any productivity tracker or wellness assessment. It’s not the tiredness that comes from a long day or a demanding week. It’s subtler than that, and in many ways more stubborn. It’s the weight of everything you haven’t decided yet.
Think about what you’re currently carrying. The conversation you know needs to happen but keeps getting pushed. The decision that surfaces every time things get quiet and then gets buried again when they get busy. The email sitting in drafts because you’re not quite sure how to say what needs to be said. These things don’t announce themselves loudly. They just circulate, quietly and persistently, in the background of everything else you’re trying to do.
And here’s the thing — the people carrying this weight are not, as a rule, disorganized or avoidant. They’re often the most capable, most conscientious people around. Parents managing households and careers at the same time. Leaders holding responsibility for teams and outcomes. Healthcare professionals carrying the weight of other people’s wellbeing alongside their own. They’re very good at getting things done. And yet certain things stay undone — not because they lack the ability or the intention, but because something else is going on.
Here’s what’s going on: every unfinished decision draws on the same limited reservoir of mental and emotional energy that’s already being stretched thin. Every open loop requires a small but ongoing portion of your attention to maintain — held in place, unresolved, until you’re ready to deal with it. For someone already running on a depleted battery, that cost is not trivial. It’s cumulative, largely invisible, and genuinely exhausting.
Burnout is most commonly framed as a doing problem. We took on too much, gave too much, moved too fast for too long. The prescription is usually to do less, rest more, set better boundaries. All of that matters. But there’s another dimension of burnout that gets far less attention: the cost of everything we haven’t done. The deferred choices, the avoided conversations, the decisions we keep meaning to make that never quite get made. The weight of the undecided is real, and for a lot of people it’s a significant and overlooked contributor to how depleted they feel.
Why We Stall
When energy is low and uncertainty is high, the path of least resistance is almost always to wait. We tell ourselves we need more information before we can decide. We need a better moment, a clearer head, a window of time that isn’t already spoken for. We need to feel ready. And so we defer, with every intention of returning to the thing when conditions improve — or until something forces our hand entirely: a deadline, a consequence we can no longer avoid, a moment where the cost of not deciding finally outweighs the discomfort of deciding.
The problem is that readiness rarely arrives on its own. It’s almost always created by actually engaging with the thing, not by waiting for it. In the meantime, the unresolved decision keeps circulating, and it keeps costing.
It’s worth being clear about what stalling actually is, because it gets mislabeled a lot. It looks like procrastination. It gets treated as a time management problem or a discipline issue. But for most high-functioning, high-responsibility people, it’s neither of those things. Stalling is what happens when uncertainty meets depletion. The obstacle is almost never logistical — it’s internal. Something about the outcome feels unclear, risky, or hard to come back from if it goes wrong. And until that something gets named, the loop stays open and the weight keeps building.
The way through is not to push harder or wait longer. It’s to get specific about what’s actually in the way.
A Question I’ve Been Asking Myself for Years
When I was writing my book, Cultures that BLOOM: Take your organization from burnout to balance, doubt was a constant companion. Not the dramatic, paralyzing kind — more the persistent, low-grade background noise of “what if this doesn’t work?” It showed up in quiet moments, on early mornings, in the spaces between tasks. And left unexamined, it had real power to slow things down.
What I found myself doing, almost instinctively, was asking one question whenever that doubt surfaced: what’s the worst that could actually happen here?
And then — and this is the part that mattered — I would actually answer it. Not brush past it with reassurance, not tell myself it would probably be fine. Actually name it. Nobody buys the book. Nobody connects with the ideas. People criticize the work publicly and loudly. I let myself sit with each of those possibilities long enough to make them specific and real.
Then I’d ask the second question: if that happened, what would I do?
The answer was rarely clean or confident. It was more honest than that — something closer to: I don’t fully know yet, but now that I can see what I’m actually worried about, I can think about it. I can start to plan for it, even if only partially. And something about that process — naming the thing instead of continuing to circle it — changed everything. It went from a shapeless, ambient weight to something with edges. Something I could actually look at. And that made it possible to move forward.
I didn’t learn this from a book or a workshop. It was an instinct that developed out of necessity. Which made what I came across recently all the more interesting.
From Energy to Momentum — and What Comes Before
Getting unstuck has been a thread running through my work for a while. In a piece I contributed to forbes.com as part of the Forbes Coaches Council, I wrote about how systems thinking can help professionals who feel stuck find traction again — specifically, how mapping where your effort actually leads to influence or visibility, and shifting even a small percentage of your energy toward those high-leverage points, can create real momentum without piling more onto an already heavy load.
That piece was about redirection. It assumed some momentum already existed, even if it was misdirected. What it didn’t address was the earlier, harder question: what do you do when you can’t get started at all? When the thing that needs doing keeps sitting there, unchosen and unresolved, quietly draining you every time it comes up?
That’s the gap worth looking at — because for a lot of people, that’s exactly where they’re stuck.
There’s Actually a Name for This
A few weeks ago I was listening to the second episode of The Curiosity Shop, the new podcast from researcher Brené Brown and organizational psychologist Adam Grant. Early in the episode, they introduced a concept called the pre-mortem — and then ran one on their own newly launched partnership, live on air. It got real pretty quick.
The pre-mortem was introduced by researcher Gary Klein in a 2007 Harvard Business Review piece. The idea is simple but counterintuitive: before beginning a project or committing to a decision, you imagine it has already failed. You project yourself forward — a year from now, six months from now — and ask: what went wrong? What did we miss? What were we not being honest with ourselves about at the start?
In its most common form, the pre-mortem is a strategic planning tool for teams. It surfaces blind spots, challenges overconfidence, and creates space to anticipate obstacles before they become crises. It’s a way of taking the possibility of failure seriously right from the beginning, so you’re not blindsided by it later.
Listening to them talk about it, I recognized something immediately. The question I’d been asking myself for years — what’s the worst that could happen, and what would I do then? — was a version of this. An informal, personal, instinctive version, applied not to a project plan but to the internal experience of being stuck. Same mechanism, different application. And for the kind of stuck that most people run into day-to-day, that personal version might actually be the more useful one.
The Personal Pre-Mortem: A Tool for Getting Unstuck
The formal pre-mortem asks: what could go wrong with this plan?
The personal version asks two questions, in sequence — and the sequence matters.
The first: what’s the worst that could actually happen? Answer it specifically. Not with a vague sense of unease, but with actual named outcomes. The conversation goes badly and the relationship is strained. The decision turns out to be wrong and there are real consequences to manage. The work gets criticized publicly. The change doesn’t go the way you hoped and you have to recalibrate. Specificity is the whole point — vague unease is hard to do anything with, but a named outcome has edges. It can be examined.
The second: if that happened, what would I do? This is where the shift happens. This question moves you out of rumination and into something closer to planning. It doesn’t require a complete or confident answer — just honest engagement with the possibility.
Think about a leader who’s been putting off a difficult performance conversation. The obstacle isn’t really the conversation itself — it’s what might come after. The team member gets defensive. The dynamic shifts. Things get harder before they get better. A personal pre-mortem names those possibilities and then asks: if that happened, what would I do? Almost always, what emerges is that there’s a path through it. It’s not comfortable, but it exists. And as a bonus, you now have a contingency plan — a considered response ready for everything you thought could go wrong, should any of it actually happen.
Think about a parent who knows a boundary needs to be set with a teenager but keeps finding reasons to delay. The concern isn’t the boundary itself — it’s the reaction. Anger, withdrawal, damage to the relationship. Name those possibilities. Then ask what you’d do if they happened. More often than not, the answer is that you’d manage them. You’ve done harder things. The relationship is more resilient than the anxiety suggests.
Think about a professional considering a big change — a career pivot, a new direction, a step that feels uncertain and large. Underneath the uncertainty, there’s usually one specific concern doing most of the work: a financial worry, a question about how it will be perceived, a doubt about whether it will actually succeed. Name it. Then ask what you’d do if it happened. What seemed impossible when it was vague becomes manageable once it has a name. This isn’t positive thinking. It’s not telling yourself everything will be fine — that kind of reassurance rarely sticks anyway. It’s actually the opposite: looking directly at what might not go well, examining it honestly, and discovering that you can handle it anyway. That’s a different kind of confidence. Not assumed. Earned.
Pick One Loop
This doesn’t require overhauling everything at once. The invitation here is much smaller than that.
Pick one thing. One decision, one conversation, one thing that’s been sitting unresolved and quietly costing you. It doesn’t have to be the biggest or most pressing thing on your list — just something that’s been circulating long enough that you notice its weight.
Ask the first question: what’s the worst that could actually happen? Write it down if that helps. Make it specific.
Ask the second question: if that happened, what would I do? Write that down too. You don’t need a complete answer — just enough of one to see that the outcome, however difficult, is something you could navigate.
In the forbes.com piece on systems thinking, the core idea was that small moves in high-leverage places create ripple effects — you don’t have to change everything to change how things feel. The same is true here. Closing one loop doesn’t solve everything. But it begins to lift the weight. And as the weight lifts, something shifts — not just in what gets done, but in how everything else feels. That’s where real momentum starts. Not from pushing harder, but from finally putting down what you’ve been carrying.
