Work rarely stalls where it appears to. The visible problem is a deadline, a client, a number; the real one is usually a conversation not had, a price not raised, or a task that has been on the list so long it has become furniture. Hold the state of your work in mind and turn a card.
Death rarely indicates physical death. It represents the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. Something must end for something new to be born. Embrace the change.
Read against this stretch of work, Death puts the weight on transformation and ending. Read against work, a card points at the bottleneck rather than the goal. Effort is almost never the missing ingredient for someone who cared enough to ask the question in the first place.
The same card has an opposite face, and it is worth holding both. Reversed, may indicate resistance to necessary changes or incomplete transformation. Let go to be reborn.
So sit with the question you arrived with — What is the honest state of my work right now? — and notice which of the two readings you flinched at. That flinch is the reading. It is the one piece of this page that came from you rather than from the deck, and it is the only piece that can change anything.
Don't fear transformations. Every ending is a new beginning in disguise.
No card knows your industry. What it can do is put the avoided thing back in the middle of the table, which is generally where the next move has been waiting.