Protect Your Team’s Thinking Time
We talk about burnout as if it’s a personal failing—a lack of resilience, poor work-life balance, or the inability to manage stress. But study after study tells us otherwise: burnout is not just an individual issue. It is an environmental one. And while individuals have agency in mitigating its effects, organizations are the root cause. If we want sustainable solutions to burnout, we have to shift our focus from only looking at personal fixes to designing systemic change.
What Burnout Actually Is (And What It’s Not)
Burnout is not just feeling tired. It is not synonymous with depression. It is a chronic condition that results from prolonged exposure to work environments that are unsustainable. The bottom line is that wasteful work is wasteful energy and it’s crushing your best people.
According to a recent report from Indeed, 52% of workers self-identify as burned out. That’s not a problem with personal resilience—that’s an organizational crisis.
We need to stop taking burnout personally. Instead, we should be looking at the structural causes:
Lack of space to think, breathe, or recover
A culture that values busyness over effectiveness
Workloads that exceed human capacity
Unclear goals, expectations, and constant interruptions
A relentless sense of urgency that makes everything feel like a fire drill
Juliet Funt, Beat Burnout, The Optimism Company
The Power of Whitespace
One of the most effective ways to prevent burnout is by integrating whitespace into organizational culture. Author Juliet Funt describes whitespace not as meditation or mindfulness—”it’s the unstructured time employees need to process, ideate, and recharge.” When was the last time you had time to think? When organizations intentionally build in natural pauses, burnout is held at bay. Without it, burnout is inevitable.
Whitespace is a business tool, not a luxury. It’s the difference between employees who are reactionary and employees who are strategic. When work is spacious, flowing, and tied to meaning, the conditional for burnout can’t creep in. When the environment is frantic, overloaded, and transactional, burnout, quiet quitting, dysfunction, and turnover are fueled.
The Four Thieves of Time
Many leaders unknowingly contribute to burnout by encouraging behaviors that, on the surface, seem productive but ultimately lead to overload. We also all have natural inclinations and different work styles that when harnessed well, lead to great results and help us feel in flow- but when overdone, become the fuel for burnout.
These are the four thieves of time:
Excellence -> Becomes Perfectionism: The urge to perfect everything, refining endlessly rather than shipping and iterating.
Information –> Becomes Overload: Staying in a loop of research, learning, and analysis rather than taking action.
Drive –> Becomes Overdrive: Always building, pushing, and expanding without taking a moment to assess if it’s sustainable.
Activity –> Becomes Frenzy: Constant multitasking, moving fast, and staying busy rather than being effective.
The danger is that these behaviors feel like contributions and virtues, but in reality, they keep people stuck in high-stimulation, low-impact work.
The Illusion of Urgency
Not everything is urgent, but in many organizations, it feels like everything is. Leaders should regularly ask: What percentage of your work actually requires immediate attention? Juliet Funt defines three types of urgency in her book, A Minute To Think:
Not time-sensitive at all: The majority of tasks fall into this category but are framed as urgent due to cultural habits.
Tactically time-sensitive: The faster it’s done, the better the business outcome (e.g., responding to a live customer issue).
Emotionally time-sensitive: Feels urgent due to curiosity, anxiety, or pressure, but has no real business consequence (e.g., answering a Slack message immediately because it’s flashing).
Organizations need to have open conversations about urgency and set clear norms for what requires immediate action versus what can wait.
Unclench Your Jaw
Remember, our culture and conditioning make it really hard for us to take natural pauses. It can feel uncomfortable. We habitually try to fill our own whitespace with activities and stimuli- you can think of them as pause fillers.
Practice sitting quietly (outside if you can) for 2 minutes. Don’t do anything. Don’t meditate, don’t try to solve a problem, or plan what you’re going to say on your next call. Just notice the discomfort of whitespace.
The more you practice making time for white space, the easier it becomes. It may also become your greatest source of creativity, energy, and reconnection to what energizes you.
In the next newsletter, I’m diving into the concrete things organizations can do to create the conditions that prevent burnout and I would love to hear about burnout in your organization:
Are you experiencing burnout personally? What about the people on your team?
What is your organization’s culture like when it comes to burnout? How do people talk about it?
What is going unsaid about burnout?
What are you most interested in solving for your team now?
Send me a note at jessica@jessicalynnmacleod.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Related Programs
Reset, my 8-week Group Coaching program is open now and will be capped at 25 participants. You can learn more about it here and add your name to the waitlist.
I love working with teams to create shared language around vision and value delivery while develop the essential operating principles required for teams to thrive in the distributed and remote work era. You can learn more about how I can help your organization here.
