Your Team Isn’t Stuck — It’s Restarting Every Week
“I’m just trying to get through this without dropping the ball.”
This meeting.
This week.
This quarter.
This launch.
You know that feeling of the pressure like you stepped onto a treadmill and now the goal is simply to keep running ?
In the previous blog post , I wrote about how meetings often become stand-ins for other organizational needs (like managing risk, responding to hierarchy etc) and how this creates calendars full of things that :
the team isn’t deeply invested in
but everyone feels they have to keep moving anyway.
As a kid, I played the flute.
And every single week for 10 years, I would suddenly remember:
“Shit. Flute class is today.”
So I would practice just enough to get through the lesson.
And it turns out a lot of meeting behavior is similar.
Microsoft found that PowerPoint activity spikes 122% in the 10 minutes before meetings start*.
With nearly 50% of the workday spent in meetings and an average of 257 interruptions a day*, it’s not surprising that work starts moving in temporary spikes instead of sustained momentum.
Attention gathers for the meeting.
Then everyone gets pulled into something else again.
And the progress dissolves.
Over time, this breaks something called “continuity” — both in individuals and in the work teams are trying to move forward together.
That’s why so many teams keep revisiting work instead of steadily building up momentum.
Let’s break down this dynamic together.
What weak continuity looks like at work
The meeting starts more or less the same way every time.
A bit of small talk. A catch-up after the weekend. An update on project X.
Then the work slowly gets pulled back into focus.
“Did we get confirmation on X?”
“Can we revisit the timeline?”
“Did someone run this by leadership?”
“Please forward this to me afterwards ”
But because :
someone missed the previous meeting,
priorities shifted slightly during the week,
some decisions have been reopened
The conversation usually starts slightly behind where it ended last time.
For the next 30 or 60 minutes, the meeting fills itself — until attention gets pulled somewhere else again.
Nothing looks blatantly dysfunctional.
In my flute class, I technically attended almost every lesson for 10 years.
I practiced during the class.
I slowly learned how to play.
I even participated in a few group performances.
But I have never played since the classes stopped.
Because the process never became self-sustaining.
This is the opposite of the kind of small, consistent progress people talk about with exercise routines.
With weak continuity, the repetition is there but it never really builds on itself.
It’s like showing up at the gym every week wondering:
“What am I supposed to do again?”
“How do I use the machine ?”
“What was the plan?”
Then exercising for five minutes and leaving.
And because modern work is already fragmented across dozens of moving topics, most people stop trying to create sustained progress.
They start trying to keep up.
Just get through this meeting.
This update.
This deadline.
This is where weak continuity stops being an individual experience and starts becoming an organizational pattern.
— because teams built from fragmented attention struggle to create sustained momentum together.
2. How Organizations Compensate for Weak Continuity
Organizations usually believe work should stay within a certain range:
Not moving too fast
But also not completely stuck.
So when momentum slows down too much, the system introduces urgency. It can look like :
Internal urgency : a deadline, a leadership push, a Friday follow-up.
“Quick question. What is the status on X ?”
“Can everyone attend the meeting on time ?”
“Please send the slides before Friday.”External urgency :
a client escalation, a market shift, a production issue.
Then the work gets pulled back into everything else the team was already trying to manage.
So another spike becomes necessary.
And because each spike feels manageable in isolation, the pattern starts scaling.
One meeting becomes five.
One follow-up becomes three more check-ins.
So the day gets fragmented into coordination moments.
Small bursts of attention.
Small bursts of alignment.
Small bursts of reactivation.
Over time, the organization starts running on overdrive to keep up. (I wrote more about this in another post on The Actual Cost of Bad Meetings.)
Because so much energy goes toward repeatedly restarting work, busyness and stagnation start happening at the same time.
The days turn into weeks.
The weeks turn into months.
Until eventually, a large part of the work becomes focused on repeatedly restarting work instead of steadily building on it.
And very little space remains for deeper thinking, creativity, or seizing new opportunities.
Closing
Healthy continuity works differently.
Decisions hold.
Context carries forward.
Progress survives between meetings.
Less urgency.
Less feeling of barely keeping up.
Because sometimes teams do not need more urgency.
They need continuity.
That’s what The Momentum Series is designed to support.
It is a series of facilitated sessions designed to temporarily hold the continuity externally until the team can learn to sustain it internally again.
If the pattern of weak continuity feels uncomfortably familiar, you can explore the Momentum Series below.
