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Its not just youwork kind of stinks right now. If youre struggling to get something done because too many people were involved, getting hung up by emotion and conflict in your workplace, or just swaying under the weight of too many tasks in one day . . . congratulations! Youre experiencing work intensificationthe gnarliest trend we dont talk about enough. Researchers in Europe have been looking at this phenomenon for many years. They pin it down to three things happening, often all at once. First, workloads are simply too heavytoo many tasks in too little time. Every job has a version of this. You might be invited to too many meetings or asked to pack too many warehouse pallets in an hour. Second, work is too interdependentit takes too many people to get any given task done. When Jamie Dimon famously complained about a single decision needing 14 committees for approval, interdependence was the issue. Third, workplaces have become emotionally challenging. For example, since COVID-19, rudeness toward frontline workers has increasedand folks are feeling it. To better understand how this issue was affecting workplaces, in April 2025 consulting firm Anthrome Insight partnered with Patrick Hyland, an organizational psychologist. We surveyed 1,000 workers ranging from entry-level employees to the C-Suite levels in five different industries. Our findings were striking. A quarter of respondents always or often felt overwhelmed and half felt overwhelmed at least some of the time. Over half (62%) were experiencing task overload. Over a quarter were getting whacked by bureaucracy and a lack of priorities. Almost a third were dealing with angry coworkers, bosses, and/or customers. The damaging effects of work intensification For employees work intensification drives burnout and negatively affects mental health. It may even be driving the record levels of executive turnover were seeing in the CEO and CFO roles. Work intensification can also impact productivity. On the surface, this seems a bit counterintuitive. Do more tasks, get more done, more productivity, right? Its the middle part of that sentence where things break down. Doing more tasks does not mean getting more done. First off: the tasks may be a bad idea to do in the first place. In an era when we spend up to 60% of our time on work about work (communication and coordination around what were actually trying to get done), our time is being wasted by some of the tasks we undertake. If work has intensified due to work about work, then were just consuming more empty work calories, and not engaging in healthy productivity. Work intensification also comes from a collapse of prioritizationand there too, productivity erodes fast. As the saying goes, when everythings important, nothings important. When too many tasks are coming through too quickly, the important ones are bound to get lost. Humans get cognitively overloaded. For instance, we struggle to remember lists longer than seven items in our heads (which is why American phone numbers are seven digits long). If you have 14 prioritiesall emphasizedyour brain is going to tap out. And it might tap out on the wrong task. Look at the other two dimensions of work intensificationexcess interdependence and highly emotional working conditionsand the productivity consequences become even clearer. No one ever made an organization more productive by making processes more complicated. We may also have some cultural myths from the startup world (or honestly movies) that workplaces where passionate bosses scream and pour their hearts out are more productive. Actually all that running around yelling just eats up even more cognitive space for the unlucky folks being yelled at. Ruminationwhere your brain cant stop going over a traumatic event over and overis a well-documented impact of bad emotional interactions at work. As one study found, rumination from unpleasantness at work can not only affect the sleep of employees, but of their partners too. All that yelling is not positioning anyone to work effectively. What to do bout work intensification Work intensification can seem daunting, but there are concrete strategies to combat it. At an individual level, this might mean more active conversations with leadership about your workload to hone in on whats crucial. It might mean politely opting out of overly complex processes when possible, or lessening your involvement with those processes. It might mean setting up some firewalls in between yourself and highly emotional situationsor having strategies to manage the ones you cant avoid. For example, its okay to not volunteer to mediate arguments at work, even if this is something you are capable of doing. You can ask meeting participants embroiled in a conflict to take it offline and not make the rest of the group spectators to an emotional exchange. Teams can tackle work intensification, too. Regular and clear conversations about roles, responsibilities, and whats actually on everyones plate can help mitigate overwork, process complexity, and even emotionally charged interactions. Discussing priorities is good work about worknot wasted time. Its okay to take a negative angleunderstanding the essence of strategy is what you dont do. If teams have a clear view on whats not worth doing and who doesnt need to be involved, work intensification can be reduced. Finally, organizations can combat work intensification with the right mindset shift. Start with the principles that not all work is good work, not everyone has to touch everything, and not everything has to be an emotional crisis, and a number of different decisions logically follow. We are plagued by bad myths: that overwork is to be cherished, that collaboration means everyone in the same room all the time, and that extreme emotions fuel extreme results. Once we understand that these behaviors dont really drive the right outcomesand in fact the opposite behaviors are actually more productivea whole new array of possibilities open up. As our research showed, simply being aware of the three components (excess tasks, excess interdependence, and excess emotion) and passionately combatting them makes one 119% more likely to feel highly effective. In other words, if you know exactly how work is breaking down, and you actively fight back . . . youre making real progress.
Category:
E-Commerce
During Januarys unprecedented wildfires in Los Angeles, Watch Dutya digital platform providing real-time fire databecame the go-to app for tracking the unfolding disaster and is credited with saving countless lives. Six months out from the fires, Watch Dutys founder and CEO, John Mills, shares how his small nonprofit responded in the heat of the crisis and became a trusted sourceeven for government agencies. As wildfire season rages on and Texas recovers from devastating floods, Watch Dutys story underscores both our growing vulnerability to natural disasters driven by climate change and the power of community-based solutions to keep us safe and connected when it matters most. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. As I understand it, Watch Duty is a nonprofit and it’s an app that gathers information largely from volunteers, right? From regular people who are monitoring fires? It’s like a community? Very much so. You can look at Reddit and Wikipedia in a similar way. The difference is, we do it live. We have about 200 volunteers, about 20 paid staff, about 10 of those are radio operators themselves. But the information really comes from fire service radio. So after going through a couple of disasters, you realize that there’s not a Starlink in every truck. The communication systems aren’t very good. The firefighters are in danger, and the only way to hear what’s actually going on is through them collaborating with each other in real time, through the radio. And so we hear: “Fire starting here, burning over this ridge. Tankers and dozers are coming. Holding the line to Highway 87. Now the wind’s picking up, the fire’s spotting over the ridge. It’s burning over so-and-so, houses are being impacted.” You hear this live. There is no data source for this. There’s not a place for this to happen without us. So that’s how we do what we do. And this community of volunteers, are they fire workers? Or are some of them just watching and sharing what they’re seeing? A lot of them were 30-, 40-year wildland firefighters, dispatchers, reporter types, sons and daughters of firefighters who grew up in the fire service with the radio chatting in the background. So it sounds like there was a community that was there that you tapped into. I understand you had to persuade them a little bit to see you as more than just a tech guy. That’s the beauty of this. We just saw the human behavior and helped enable them to do it better. One of the fires I went through, which was one of the big ones in 2020, when the sky turned red up in Northern California, I was watching them on Facebook and Twitter already doing this. So they were kind of regionalized. There was someone in Red Bluff, someone in Redding, someone in SoCal, someone in Sonoma, Napa. They were independently doing this. They knew each other. They would talk and collaborate a little bit, but they wouldn’t organize together. They weren’t adversarial, they just didn’t spend time really collaborating. The innovation was really [to] convince them all to work togetherthat I was not [just] a techie. That I lived here, like them, in the same danger that they did. The key was to convince them that I’m here to help. I’m part of this community. I’m not sitting in my laboratory in Silicon Valley trying to profiteer off of your disaster. And the information that they’re sharing, the app puts it into a more usable form or a more accessible form? Yeah, it’s a great question. We didn’t change their behavior. They were always listening to radios and speaking the language of the fire service and putting it on Facebook and Twitter. What happens behind the scenes is actually a lot more data. There’s a lot of signals coming in, and a lot of it is very tactical and minor, and we don’t want that to go out on Watch Duty. And so they’re collaborating in Slack. They’re all talking and listening. It’s very rare where there’s one person running an incident. There are many people in real time content editing: 15 acres heading north-northwest. Was it 50 or 15? Oh shoot, let’s wait for the next transmission, air attack’s about to be overhead.” “We’re going to get a size-up on the fire.” Then we deploy the information on Watch Duty. So in real time, they’re collaborating. Someone has the con, or control, and that person’s essentially incident commander. So of the folks who are on duty or running the event at that time, some of them may be volunteers and some of them may be your staff people? Yeah, it’s a mixed bag. Like many nonprofits, there’s paid staff and then there’s volunteers. And a lot of our volunteers are now either changing careers or having a second career, because first, they contribute and they listen, and then they start to report, and then they become a staff reporter or a regional captain in the area and help run and collaborate certain parts of a state or a region. And then many of them actually become full-time employees. During the fires I saw that Watch Duty passed ChatGPT as the No. 1 downloaded app. The traffic must have really caught you by surprise, just like the fire did. Yeah, it did. Here’s the sad part: We’ve been the No. 1 app in the App Store three times. This time was the worst, by far. Yeah, I mean, L.A.s own emergency alert system, there was one, but it was buggy. It was sending false alerts. So it wasn’t just L.A. residents that were using Watch Duty, right? It was government officials and firefighters and the helicopter pilots. Everybody seemed to be on it. Yes, the government also uses Watch Duty. We’re on all the big screens and all the emergency operation centers. We’ve done something that others haven’t been able to crack, and it’s a usable format. So whether you’re a little old lady or a hose dragger or a brush bunny, as firefighters refer to themselves as in the wildlands, they all use it and it’s done something that we didn’t see coming. We assumed that the government had all that information and they just weren’t telling us, not out of malice, but they’re busy, they’re trying to fight the fire. It’s very granular, the information we share, and then quickly we realize that we’re getting emails from tanker pilots and dozer operators and others telling us that we give them more information than overhead gives them. And that’s when we really realized this is a much bigger company than we ever thought possible. It’s strange. Is Watch Duty’s success, I don’t know, an example of te government’s failure or the failure of tax-funded technology? Or was there just no investment in this? Yeah, look, I mean, we work so closely with a lot of these government organizations and there’s failure abound. It’s everywhere. It’s how we voted as individuals. It’s the other software vendors who were selling lackluster products. It’s the government having no other options. There are so many points of failure here. It just really compounded that day and it was very apparent how necessary we were. It’s hard to just point blame at one person or one org. I know that’s what everybody wants is they want to blame the boogeyman so we can go fix it. And it’s not just climate change, it’s bad forest management. It’s like there’s so many things that are all working against us here. It’s making this problem extraordinarily bad.
Category:
E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the Pandemic Housing Boom, from summer 2020 to spring 2022, the number of active homes for sale in most housing markets plummeted as homebuyer demand quickly absorbed almost everything that came up for sale and sellers had ultimate power. Fast-forward to the current housing market, and the places where active inventory has rebounded to 2019 levels (due to strained affordability suppressing buyer demand) are now the very places where homebuyers have gained the most power. At the end of June 2025, national active housing inventory for sale was still -11% below June 2019 levels. However, more and more regional markets are surpassing that threshold. This list is growing: January 2025: 41 of the 200 largest metro area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. February 2025: 44 of the 200 largest metro area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. March 2025: 58 of the 200 largest metro area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. April 2025: 69 of the 200 largest metro area housing markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. May 2025: 75 of these 200 major markets were back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. Now, at the latest reading for the end of June 2025, 78 of the 200 markets are above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels and ResiClub expects that count will continue to rise this year. This next table helps you see what the inventory picture in these same 78 markets looks like now and what it looked like last year. Among these 78 markets, youll find lots in Sun Belt markets like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado. Many of the softest housing markets, where homebuyers have gained leverage, are located in Gulf Coast and Mountain West regions. Some of these areas were among the nations top pandemic boomtowns, having experienced significant home price growth during the pandemic housing boom, which stretched housing fundamentals far beyond local income levels. When pandemic-fueled domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Cape Coral, Florida, and San Antonio, Texas, faced challenges as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market softening in these areas was further accelerated by the abundance of new home supply in the pipeline across the Sun Belt. Builders in these regions are often willing to reduce net effective prices or make other affordability adjustments to maintain sales. These adjustments in the new construction market also create a cooling effect on the resale market, as some buyers who might have opted for an existing home shift their focus to new homes where deals are still available. In contrast, many Northeast and Midwest markets were less reliant on pandemic migration and have less new home construction in progress. With lower exposure to that demand shock, active inventory in these Midwest and Northeast regions has remained relatively tight, keeping the advantage in the hands of home sellers. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}})}(); Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic levels have experienced softer/weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months. ResiClub PRO members can find our latest inventory analysis for +800 metros and +3,000 counties here
Category:
E-Commerce
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