How do you explain a week of zero visible output to your boss or team?

Doing a massive refactor that ships zero new features is mentally exhausting especially when your task board stays completely static for days.

It feels like you're falling behind while everyone else is shipping cool stuff. But you're so right about the payoff later touching that messy code cuts your future development time in half.

My biggest struggle is always justifying that time to stakeholders who only care about feature lists.

Do you have a specific way you pitch clean-up work to keep the pressure off?