Burnout isn’t about working too much

If you haven’t experienced burnout, you’ve surely witnessed it. I have certainly taken part in conversations about someone who hit that wall of physical and emotional exhaustion at work. The sentiments are almost always the same: They were working too hard; they just didn’t know how to create a work-life balance. But what is “work-life balance”? Does it really exist in the definition that everyone’s used to screaming about? Work-life balance is one of those phrases that sounds wise until you examine it, because the framing treats work as the enemy of life: something to be rationed and kept on its side of a line. My point: Work is part of life. For most people, it’s a large part; for some, smaller. And the goal was never to do less of it. The goal was to do it in a way that doesn’t hollow you out. Gallup’s data points that employees who feel unfairly treated at work are 2.3 times as likely to experience burnout as other employees. When people can’t connect their effort to an outcome, when success is undefined, when their work disappears into a fog of shifting priorities, the volume doesn’t matter. Forty hours of unclear work feels worse than 60 of purposeful work. In my 14-year experience of managing different teams and different seniority levels, burnout has three real causes. 1. Unclear expectations The first—and probably the main one—is unclear expectations. When success isn’t defined, people fill the gap with effort because effort is the only variable they control. They work harder to compensate for the fact that they don’t know if they’re working right. And they still feel like they’re failing, not because of lack of effort, but because no one told them what a winning point looks like. Each of our teams at Hily & Taimi takes our long-term goals and breaks them down into short-term goals in their own way. We give managers full ownership of both the result and the roadmap; that way, they aren’