This weekend my husband and I worked on the patio behind our house. A few tiles needed new mortar. Some joints needed sealant and a little grout. I expected it to take a half day.

We worked the full day. When we picked up one loose stone, we discovered that there were several more that needed fixing. The mortar underneath required jackhammering to remove. The old sealant would not come out without a fight. When we stopped at the end of a very long day, we were only halfway done.

My husband has more experience with this kind of work. He guessed at least a full day of effort from the start.

Psychologists have a name for my mistake. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called it the planning fallacy: the tendency to underestimate how long a task will take. The usual remedy is to base your estimate on similar projects you have done in the past as a reference. My husband, who has much more expert knowledge than I do, did that. I drew on wishful thinking.

I have worked at nonprofits that were well resourced and at nonprofits that were not. From conversations with colleagues, I know the second kind is common. Most of us have seen a half-day project turn into two full days.

My mother gave me advice when I was a kid. If you have a problem, you can throw time at it or you can throw money at it. When you do not have money, you have to find the time.

That advice works in most households. Nonprofits are harder, because we are often short on both. In an organization, time is not a separate resource. Time is staff. When we choose time over money, we usually ask the same people to stay later or carry one more project.

The sector has a name for the money side of this. In 2009, Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard described the nonprofit starvation cycle in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Funders expect low overhead. Nonprofits underspend on systems, training, and infrastructure to meet that expectation, then underreport what operations cost. The expectation hardens, and organizations are asked to do more with less each year.

Underfunded infrastructure behaves like our patio. Deferred maintenance does not stay the same size. By the time someone lifts the tile, the problem underneath has spread.

The people side shows up in the data. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2026 found that 46 percent of nonprofit CEOs say their own burnout is very much a concern, up from just under 30 percent a year earlier. One quarter say burnout is significantly affecting their staff, up from 17 percent. The survey covers nonprofits with funding from at least one large foundation, so it does not describe every association. The direction is still hard to ignore.

I have written before about prioritization and taking big work one piece at a time. Prioritization is still the main tool we have. It decides where scarce time goes. But it fails when it becomes a polite word for working harder. If the list only grows, the team is not prioritizing. It is fitting more work into the same hours, and the cost shows up later as burnout. Non-profit leaders need to be aware of this dynamic and help their teams with prioritization.

Next weekend we will finish the patio, and this time I have budgeted the whole day.