Burnout rarely announces itself. It shows up as a slow drift you keep explaining away.
Very few people notice the moment their workload stopped being sustainable. It’s gradual, each individual week is defensible, and by the time it’s obvious it’s usually been true for a long while.
These eight questions are about drift rather than crisis. They ask what your ordinary week actually looks like, not what your worst one did.
Answer for the last month rather than the last few days, and answer for how things are rather than how you intend them to be. Nothing here is recorded.
I check work messages outside working hours without really deciding to.
I am tired in a way a weekend does not fix.
I have quietly stopped doing something I used to enjoy because of work.
I say yes to new work before I have checked what it pushes out.
Small requests land heavier than they should.
I could not tell you what finished looks like for most of my week.
I feel behind the moment I open my laptop.
I have thought about leaving without having anywhere in mind to go.
Answered 0 of 8.
Nothing here is waving at you. Worth keeping the habit of checking, though — this drift is far easier to catch early than to climb out of later.
A few things are creeping. This is the stage where a boundary costs you almost nothing to set, which is exactly why it's the stage everybody skips. Take the single statement you scored highest and change one thing about it this week.
This has been going on long enough to feel normal, and that's the part to take seriously. Rest won't resolve it on its own, because the load hasn't changed. Something has to come out of the week, and it will not leave on its own.
No planner, system, or productive weekend is going to touch this. What you're describing is a load bigger than one person can carry, and the fix is structural — the job, the boundaries, the support around you, or all three. Please talk to someone: your doctor, a therapist, or me. You are not failing at coping. You're being asked to carry too much.
This isn't a diagnosis and it isn't medical advice. If the answers worry you, that's worth taking to your doctor or a therapist — and I'm here too.
Track a fortnight honestly before changing anything. Most people are wrong about which part of the week is eating them, and reorganising the wrong thing costs energy you do not currently have.
Saying no outright rarely goes well, and it’s rarely necessary. Asking which of the existing commitments should move to make room puts the prioritising back where the authority already sits.
A large share of the weight is work with no edges. If you can’t say what done means for a task, you’ll carry it continuously — including on the evenings and weekends when you are not doing it.
Load problems raised early read as good judgement. The same problem raised at breaking point reads as a crisis, and by then your options have narrowed considerably.
No. This is a reflection tool, not a clinical instrument, and it can’t diagnose anything. It is here to make a pattern visible enough to act on.
If your answers worry you, that’s worth raising with your doctor or a licensed mental health professional rather than a website.
Then no amount of personal reorganisation is going to resolve it, and continuing to try is its own kind of harm. Some workloads aren’t a time-management problem — they are a staffing problem, a scope problem, or a management problem.
Naming that clearly is the useful step, because it changes what you’re deciding about: the conversation, the role, or the employer.
Frame it around the work rather than around yourself. “Here is what is currently in flight, here’s what I think the priority order is, and here’s what I’d need to move to protect the top of that list.” That’s a planning conversation, and it reads as ownership.
Yes, and it’s more useful the second time. Nothing is stored, so run it again in six or eight weeks and compare. The direction of travel tells you more than any single score.
A free call is a low-stakes place to talk through what’s actually going on and what you want to do about it.
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