I couldn’t help but wonder…
If we’ve been running on empty for fifteen years, why does it still feel radical to admit we’re tired?
Let me set the scene.
I’m sitting across from an executive I’ve coached a dozen times over the years. Different company, same conversation. She hasn’t taken a real vacation in two years. Not a phone off, notifications silenced kind of vacation. A vacation where work doesn’t follow her into the hotel pool. She tells me this the way people confess things they’ve stopped being surprised by. Like it’s just Tuesday.
I’ve had this exact conversation, in one form or another, with hundreds of leaders. Different titles, different industries, same exhaustion, worn like a uniform.
We Didn’t Get Here By Accident
Fifteen years ago, executive burnout still made headlines. Today it’s the water everyone’s swimming in. Research compiled from McKinsey, Deloitte, Gallup and SHRM puts roughly 82 percent of workers at risk for burnout. That’s not a rough quarter for a few people. That’s nearly everyone.
It’s not evenly distributed at the top either. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace research found 43 percent of women in senior leadership report burnout, versus 31 percent of men. And 71 percent of U.S. middle managers report being burned out, more than any other group, absorbing pressure from above and below with none of the authority and all of the responsibility.
Here’s the part that gets me. Gallup found the “typical” American workweek isn’t 40 hours. It’s 47. We’ve quietly decided an extra unpaid day every week is just how work works now. And Americans work roughly 400 more hours a year than our counterparts in other developed nations. Ten extra workweeks, absorbed without a single conversation about whether that’s sane.
Then there’s vacation, or what’s left of it. More than half of us leave PTO on the table every year. And when we do go, Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found most remote workers still check email on weekends, and roughly a third check it on vacation. We didn’t lose our boundaries. We negotiated them away, one “just this once” at a time.
I have sat with so many brilliant, accomplished people who cannot remember the last time they felt fully off the clock. Not lazy people. People doing everything right by the old rules, when the old rules are the problem.
Working Harder Was Never the Plan
Somewhere along the way, we confused hours with value. We measured commitment by how depleted someone looked at the end of the day, as if exhaustion were proof of importance rather than proof of a system that never learned to stop.
So Let’s Talk About Getting Some of That Back
This is where AI stops being a curiosity and becomes an actual answer to an actual problem.
Think about everything that eats your day that isn’t the thing you were actually hired to do. The first draft of the email. The summary nobody wants to write. The research pull before the real conversation can start. AI can take a real bite out of that list, not by replacing your judgment, but by handling the scaffolding so your judgment has somewhere to land. You delegate the blank page. You keep the decision, the nuance, the call only you could make.
The leaders who handle burnout best right now aren’t grinding harder. They’re getting ruthless about what actually requires them, and handing the rest to a tool that doesn’t need sleep or a vacation.
One Last Thing Before You Go
If you’re still typing everything yourself, here’s your homework. Find the dictation button on your computer. I’m dictating parts of this column to my Apple computer right now, and the button lives in the function row, the F5 key on mine. Yours may live somewhere slightly different, but it’s there.
Talking is faster than typing. That email that takes twenty minutes to type takes four to say out loud. Clean it up after, make it yours, but stop making your fingers do work your voice could do faster.
It sounds small. After fifteen years of working harder instead of smarter, small is where you start.
Because the goal was never to prove how hard you can grind.
And if AI can hand you back even an hour of that a day?
Darling, take it.
