In the #1 Amazon New Release and Amazon Best Seller Built to Breathe, our Founder Paige McPheely describes a director of operations at a large packaged food company. She’s been promoted twice in four years. She has two kids in middle school who each play at least two sports, and a partner who travels a third of the year. Nearly every performance review she’s ever had says the same thing: she’s someone others can count on.
Most mornings, she gets the kids to the bus, microwaves her coffee at least twice, and joins her first meeting in a work top and the workout pants she means to wear to the gym later. She’s in meetings from 8:00a to 5:00p most days, so the analysis and planning her job actually requires happens after the kids are in bed. On a typical Tuesday she closes her laptop around 9:30p, checks her phone once more, and sets an alarm for 6:15a so she can get a head start.
She knows this isn’t sustainable. She’s probably said so herself this week. She’s certain that once she finishes the quarter, or wraps up that one project, things will slow down.
She has been waiting for that busy phase to end for about three and a half years.
If any of that sounds familiar, you may be what Paige calls a responsibility magnet.
What a responsibility magnet is
A responsibility magnet is someone who attracts work because they’re good at handling it. Here’s how she describes the pattern in the book:
“The high-achievers find themselves plugging gaps and doing work they see needs to be done, regardless of how much they’re already handling. Others notice, so their reputation as capable leaders is only strengthened, which makes these high-achievers even more obvious choices the next time something needs handling.”
This repeats because there will always be more to do than there are capable people to do it. Unless something interrupts it, responsibility keeps landing on the people who’ve proven they can carry it. The better you are at getting things done, the more things there are for you to do.
None of this comes from doing anything wrong. Most of us learned it by watching who got praised, who got promoted, and who was trusted with more. The people who juggled the most usually looked like the most successful, so we copied them, and we got the same rewards.
Signs you might be one
You may be a responsibility magnet if several of these are true:
- You’re the person who remembers why a decision was made years ago, so the questions still come to you.
- When two coworkers disagree, both come to you, separately, for advice.
- Your real work, the thinking and planning your role is for, happens early in the morning or after everyone else logs off.
- You check your phone after hours “just in case,” and the people around you have come to expect quick answers at odd times.
- There’s a hard conversation you’ve been putting off for weeks because there hasn’t been a good time.
- You’ve been telling yourself it will calm down after the next milestone, and you’ve said that about several milestones now.
How it happens
It almost always starts as something temporary. You cover a colleague during their parental leave. You take on part of an open role until someone is hired. You jump in to fix a problem that isn’t really in your scope.
The director of operations in the book joined a weekly production call to help resolve a supply issue. Three months later she was still on it, and people had started bringing her questions that had nothing to do with her role. Because she was already in production meetings, she became the obvious person to join the product team’s launch planning. Now she’s in both, and neither is likely to end soon.
These extra responsibilities stick for two reasons. You handle them well, so nobody thinks to move them. And changing something that’s working well enough takes effort that no one has time for.
Why it wears you down
Our bodies handle stress well when it ends. A threat appears, we respond, the threat is gone, and we recover. In the book Paige puts it this way:
“We can bear remarkable weight, as long as we get to set it down.”
Responsibility magnets rarely get to set anything down. Each open item registers as a small threat. Any single one is harmless, but your nervous system doesn’t make that distinction. It just adds to the pile. Old stressors stay while new ones arrive, like a juggler who keeps getting handed more rings and never gets to put one down.
That’s why rest on the weekend often doesn’t fix it. The items are still open on Monday.
Why better tools haven’t fixed it
When capable people feel stretched, they look for a better system. Right now, that usually means AI. The gains are real: research, presentations and analysis that used to take hours can take minutes.
But every prompt, workflow and draft needs setup, review and correction. A 2024 Upwork study of 2,500 employees, freelancers and executives in four countries found that 77 percent said AI had added to their workload. Nearly 40 percent said they spent more time reviewing AI-generated content than they would have spent producing it themselves.
“Our time is increasingly shifting from doing the thing to managing the thing that does it.”
AI also makes it easy to start things. Many of us now have more open threads than ever, most of them 60 or 70 percent done, and each one takes a small share of attention whether we’re working on it or not. For a responsibility magnet, a faster tool can end up bringing even more work in the door.
Spotting it in someone else
You can usually see this more clearly in a colleague than in yourself. Look for the person whose name comes up whenever someone asks “who knows about this?”, who’s on every thread just in case, and whose calendar has no open/free time before 6p. They’re often the people a team depends on most, and the last to say they’re overloaded.
If you manage someone like this, the most useful thing you can do is ask which of their responsibilities still need them specifically, then help them move the rest.
What to do about it
Breaking the pattern doesn’t mean caring less or working less hard. It means being deliberate about which responsibilities need your judgment, and which you hold only because you were there and could. Here’s where you can start.
1. List ten things that need your involvement but not your judgment. Look at last week. Write down ten things you did that needed you to be present or to press the button, but didn’t need your judgment. For each one, ask: would I still be doing this if my team doubled in size tomorrow? If not, it probably shouldn’t be yours now.
2. Find the three or four things that need you. Most of us run our days from a long list of everything we’ve always done. There’s a much shorter list of the work where your involvement changes the outcome. For most leaders, that’s three or four things. Those deserve your best hours, not whatever time is left at night.
3. Write down your standards before you hand anything off. When you do the work yourself, your standards never need explaining. They only come up when someone else does it, usually after it comes back wrong. Before you hand something off, answer four questions: What does “done right” look like, specifically? What do you check first that you’ve never told anyone? What context do only you have? And what would still bother you even if they did everything you asked?
4. Hand it off for real. The kind of support that makes room is the kind where someone else can make decisions without you, and where you trust them enough to stop thinking about the work once it’s theirs. A quick test from the book: when was the last time you were away from work for a full day and didn’t check in? If you can’t remember, start here.
This last step is the work we’ve done at Base for 13 years. A great executive assistant takes on more than tasks. Once they understand your priorities and your standards, they can own work outright, see what’s coming, and protect the time only you can spend.
It’s predictable, not personal
When you’re in the middle of it, being a responsibility magnet feels like a private problem: the overwhelm, the guilt, the sense that someone more capable wouldn’t be this tired. It isn’t private. It’s a pattern that shows up in almost every capable person I’ve worked with, and like any pattern, it can be interrupted once you can see it.
