In 2012, a maintenance supervisor at the plant stopped bringing doughnuts to the Friday morning safety meeting. He'd done it every Friday for six years, two dozen glazed from the same shop, and nobody said a word when they disappeared. Four months later he resigned. In his exit interview he told me he'd been running on fumes since spring, and that he'd figured somebody would notice.
Somebody had. Me, sort of. I'd noticed the doughnuts. I just didn't know yet what I was looking at.
I spent fourteen years in HR, seven at a manufacturing plant on the river in Decatur and the rest at a hospital, before I became a project manager. I'm not a doctor or a counselor, and nothing here is a diagnosis. These are patterns I learned to recognize at work, in other people first and then, more slowly, in myself.
What I learned to spot in other people
- The pushback stops. The person who always argued in meetings starts saying, "Sure, whatever works." Managers often read that as a better attitude. I learned to read it as someone who no longer expects their opinion to change anything.
- The PTO balance climbs. At the hospital I could run a report of who hadn't taken time off in a year. The biggest balances weren't always the most committed people. Often they were the ones who felt they couldn't step away.
- Careful people make careless mistakes. A scheduler who never double-booked anything double-books twice in one week. One mistake is a bad day. A run of them from someone reliable usually meant something else was going on.
- The optional things disappear. They skip the potluck, the birthday cake in the break room, the lunch table. Or the doughnuts.
- Emails get shorter and sharper. Not rude, exactly. Just stripped of the "thanks so much" they used to include.
From the HR side, the hard part was timing. By the time someone walked into my office to talk about it, they had usually already decided something, and often it was to leave. The coworker at the next desk almost always noticed months before the manager did.
The three I watch for in myself
"Feeling tired" isn't a useful signal for me. It's October, Ben is coaching Harper's soccer team, practice is Tuesday and Thursday, games are Saturday, and everybody in this house is tired. What helps is watching habits I can count. I have three.
- The lunch walk goes first. Since March I've walked a 20-minute loop around the office park on my office days. When I say "I'll just eat at my desk this week," and it's the second week, that's flag one.
- Email creeps past 8 p.m. In May I stopped answering work email after 8. When I catch myself "just checking" at 9:15, it's almost never because something is on fire. It's because I've stopped trusting that tomorrow will be manageable.
- The "one thing for me" falls off the Sunday reset. My Sunday reset is 45 minutes, and the last ten belong to me. If I skip those ten minutes two Sundays in a row because there's "too much to do," that's flag three.
None of these are dramatic. That's why they work. They show up weeks before I'd admit to anyone, including myself, that I'm stretched too thin.
What I do when a flag goes up
Nothing heroic. A short list:
- Tell Ben. Usually he's already noticed. Last month his line was, "You've said 'it's fine' four times since dinner."
- Look at the next two weeks and remove one thing. One meeting declined, one volunteer ask turned down, one evening errand moved to Saturday.
- Put a PTO day on the calendar. Not someday. A date. I left days unused in 2023 and 2024, and this year I'm determined not to.
- Ask for one specific thing at work. Last month it was this: "Can we push the risk register cleanup to November? I'd rather do it right than squeeze it into the next three weeks." My manager said yes in about four seconds. Specific asks tend to get specific answers.
- Know where the line is. If it's heavier than a rough few weeks, that's a conversation for a doctor or a counselor, not a blog post and not a better spreadsheet.
This month, flag one has gone up twice. Both times I noticed on a Wednesday, and both times I walked on Thursday, geese and all. That doesn't solve anything big. It's just me catching it early, which is the one thing I wish I'd known how to do for that supervisor in 2012.
