About

Listening is the qualification.

I'm Mark Kargela. I listen first. Then I build the thing, test it on real work, and hand it over.

I'm a physical therapist and a university faculty member. I'm also the person who builds what Work, Understood. delivers. There's no team behind a curtain.

Clinical work teaches you one thing quickly. The chart never tells the whole story. What someone says in the first five minutes rarely matches what you learn on the second visit, once they trust you enough to say the true thing. I built a career on that gap.

Workflows are the same. The process diagram never matches the Tuesday afternoon reality. The person who actually holds the system together is rarely in the meeting about replacing it.

So I listen first, map what I find, and build the smallest thing that actually helps. Sometimes that's an AI workflow. Sometimes it isn't. Then I stay while real work hits it.

Work, Understood. is deliberately small. You work with me, from the first conversation through the last refinement.

Mark Kargela, founder of Work, Understood.
Mark Kargela, PT, DPT

What I've built.

Working systems, for clients and for my own practice. Each one started with a conversation about how the work actually moves.

For my own practice

A morning brief

Every morning at 8, a short list of posts worth replying to lands in my Slack, with a drafted comment for each.

Stays human: It drafts. I edit and send.

A night watch for client systems

A monitor checks every client's assistant around the clock. It restarts what's safe to restart and messages me about everything else.

Stays human: It handles the known fixes. I handle the judgment calls.

My own books

I'm replacing my bookkeeping software with an app I built. It runs beside the old system until the numbers match to the cent.

Stays human: It does the arithmetic. I decide when to trust it.
Before work can be automated, it has to be understood.
The belief the practice rests on

Start with the work, not the software.

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