Fix a stalled project without a meeting

Lucas January 19, 2026 3 min read

Your project is stuck at 80 percent. Cards are not moving. And you can feel the status meeting invite getting drafted.

You usually do not need a meeting. You need one quick pass through the board to reveal the bottleneck and pull the blocker into the open. Here's a 10-minute workflow you can run in Breeze.

You are looking for one clear blocker, not ten opinions right now.

The 10-minute breakdown

2 mins: Find the clogged column
3 mins: Mark the stuck work
2 mins: Rebalance one bottleneck
3 mins: Ask the blocker question

The 10-minute fix

1. Find the clogged column (2 minutes)

Open the board and look for where cards are piling up - review, waiting, approvals, QA. Open the oldest card in that column and read the last comment. If there is no comment, that is the problem: nobody knows the next step.

If nothing looks clogged and everything is stalled evenly, sort by due date or scan for what is overdue. A stalled project often has one overdue task that is quietly blocking ten others.

2. Mark the stuck work (3 minutes)

Create a temporary label called blocked. Apply it to the three tasks that have not moved in the longest time. Add one checklist item that names the next action, even if it is as simple as 'send for approval' or 'get final file'.

This is not about shaming the team. It is about making the invisible visible so the right person can help. Once a task moves again, remove the blocked label.

3. Rebalance one bottleneck (2 minutes)

If one person owns most of the blocked work, reassign one small, low-risk task to someone with capacity. Leave a short comment so it feels helpful, not random.

Keep the change small. You are not reorganizing the whole project, you are just freeing enough space for the true bottleneck work to finish.

4. Ask the blocker question (3 minutes)

On each blocked card, @mention the owner and ask: 'What is the one thing you need to move this today?' If the answer is a person, @mention that person on the same card so the request stays attached to the work.

If the answer is 'time', ask a follow-up right there: 'What is the smallest next step we can finish today?' Then split the work into a smaller task so progress can restart.

The result

By end of day, one of these should happen:

Cards move: the blocked tasks finally shift because the missing piece gets delivered.
Blockers become real: you get a specific answer (approval, file, decision) instead of vague status.
Work gets resized: one task turns into a few smaller ones with clear next steps.
Ownership gets clear: the right decision-maker is named on the task card so work stops waiting silently.

If nothing changes by tomorrow, treat it as a priority decision: do it, resize it, or drop it.

Want to try it right now? Run the stalled project reset in Breeze in 10 minutes.