The Other Side of Achievement: On Things Not Done

Things not done

When we talk about someone’s achievements we naturally ask what they did. Which project they led, what numbers they put up. A story about something getting done always has the person who got it done attached to it, so the question goes to “who did what” on its own.

But I often find myself thinking about what that person didn’t do.

Necessary, but didn’t have to

By “didn’t do,” I don’t mean things that weren’t necessary. These are things that clearly needed to happen, things someone absolutely had to do — it’s just that this particular person didn’t have to. Because someone else behind the scenes made sure they wouldn’t have to.

Say there’s someone with a big presentation coming up. If they nail it on stage, we praise their delivery, their logic, their preparation. But look at what made it possible for them to focus on the presentation alone and there are people back there. Whoever organized the data, whoever coordinated the schedules, whoever set up the rehearsal environment ahead of time and checked for technical problems that might come up. Because of the people who took on what the presenter “didn’t have to do,” they could give all of their attention to the thing they’re best at.

I’m not talking about division of labor. Division of labor assumes everyone has clearly separated domains, and the kind of support I mean is a bit different. It’s more like reducing friction and noise inside someone else’s domain. Sometimes it’s about making sure they never even find out that friction was there. So good support doesn’t show. No problem blew up, nothing slipped, there was one less thing to think about — and work like that, work that consists of things not happening, is hard to put on record.

What did I even accomplish?

So people in support roles end up with a peculiar dilemma. The question: “What did I even accomplish?”

The project succeeded. The team hit its targets. But there’s no deliverable with my name on it. What I produced either dissolved into someone else’s output or never took the shape of an output at all. What I did was “make it so that person didn’t have to do that thing” — but how do you even explain that? If I said “I made sure nothing went wrong this quarter,” would that be taken seriously in a performance review?

This isn’t just about wanting recognition. If you can’t define the value of your own work, you can’t sustain it for long. Burnout doesn’t only come from overwork; it also comes from not being sure that what you do every day adds up to anything, and without that, you lose momentum at some point no matter how well the team is running.

A different frame

So I think we need to look at the outcomes of support through a different frame. Instead of “what did I create,” try “what did the other person not have to do because I was there.”

I think this frame works because it turns into something you can measure, at least to a degree.

The first thing to look at is the friction you took away. If a process that used to take three days now takes one, that two-day difference is the support person’s achievement. But this kind of contribution is only visible when there’s something to compare it against. If nobody else knows that it used to take that long, it just looks like a one-day task from the start.

Then there’s the time you freed up. The time someone could put into their actual work — time that didn’t get taken by peripheral things — is what support created. This isn’t only about efficiency, it’s about quality too, because when people get more time to focus, the same person produces better results.

And the most undervalued of them is organizing the information a decision runs on. To judge well you need good information in front of you first, so if someone put the right data together at the right moment, or structured a messy situation until the options were clear, then even when someone else made the final call, the quality of that call was built on their work.

What it means to be inseparable

Of course, proving all of this as measurable achievement is still hard. If the nature of support is enabling other people’s results, then separating out the causal relationship when those results come in is nearly impossible. You can’t precisely determine whether a presentation succeeded because of the presenter’s skill, the support person’s contribution, or just the audience’s mood that day.

But I think this uncertainty itself is a feature of support. The fact that you can’t cleanly separate the causality means that support is deeply intertwined with the other person’s achievement. Maybe the real indicator of good support is exactly that — you can’t extract your contribution from their results.

Making invisible work visible

What I want to say in this post comes down to about two things.

One is that people doing support work need language for explaining their own contribution. Not “I did this,” but “because of me, this person didn’t have to do that.” You need to be able to define the value of your work in those terms. That’s how you keep doing it, and do it better. Even better if you can put numbers to it.

The other is that organizations need to be able to see the value of things that didn’t have to be done. In organizations that only ask “who did what” when talking about performance, the contributions of people quietly reducing friction stay invisible. And invisible contributions eventually disappear. You only realize what was there after it’s gone, and by then it’s already too late.

When you see someone’s outstanding achievement, try thinking not just about what they did, but also about what they didn’t have to do. On the other side of that list, there’s someone working without a name.

And yet

That said, I’m not saying you should stay in a support role forever. Being good at reducing friction behind the scenes also means you already know what matters — in your bones. And when someone who knows that steps up to the front, the difference is clear. I think of support not as a destination but as a place you pass through, and the difference between someone who’s been through it and someone who hasn’t is definitely there.