My experience with burnout

(it had nothing to do with how many hours I worked)

Author

Nick Avaria
August 11, 2026

Pretty much every burnout article/post/video you've ever scrolled past frames it as a workload problem.

  • way too many hours

  • too much on your plate

  • not enough boundaries

  • not enough sleep

  • not enough time off

And the prescription is usually: rest more, do less, set boundaries.

I can’t speak for anyone else but at least for me, the above never works.

I think the reason is… the diagnosis was wrong from the get go.

In my experience, burnout is you tried really hard and got nothing back.

It isn't the volume of work at all, it's the unfulfilled expectation on the other side of the work.

You dug in, you gave it your full energy, you did the things you were told would produce the outcome - and the outcome didn't arrive.

If burnout were purely about hours, we should be less burnt out now than we were twenty years ago.

Automation has taken care of a lot of what used to be manual work. Tools have gotten unbelievably better, information is clearly more accessible than ever, and yet burnout is at record levels.

Which means the workload theory doesn't fully explain it?

I think we’re trying harder than we've ever tried before, more passionate about our work than we've ever been, more emotionally invested in our teams, our clients, our missions - and the return on that investment is often no better, sometimes worse, than what our parents got for grinding through jobs they didn't particularly care about.

The energy input has gone up. The output hasn't followed.

That's what burns people out: the gap between the input and the result.

And in an agency specifically, you spend the year charging people up. You give the pep talks, you set the vision, you push through. Your team gives you everything they've got. And then you look up at the end of the year, and you didn't really move the needle on profit. Or if you did move the needle on revenue, profit went the other way, or your team turned over, or the client book didn't hold. And now you can't reward people for the effort, because the effort didn't produce the result. So you charge them up again for the next year, and they get charged up, and the same thing happens.

That's a cycle of unfulfilled effort I’m talking about, the exact recipe for burnout.

The way out of this isn't rest (again, in my experience).

Rest doesn't fix an effort-to-outcome gap.

The only thing that fixes it is closing the gap.

Which is also why the most reliably burnt-out people I know are often the most passionate, most driven, most committed operators in the market. They're pouring more of themselves into a machine that isn't currently converting the input into output.

Fix the machine, and the burnout cools (often much faster than you'd expect).

I cover this (and a ton more) on a recent podcast called Nothing Small About Business, with Sara Press.

Nick

P.S.

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