Burnt out on a three-day week

The exhaustion that rest can’t reach Maya spent over a decade at a healthtech company. She worked her way up from IC to people manager, running her own team, and she was thriving on the director track. Then she stepped back to deal with a health issue. Now she’s a fractional product leader three days a week for a startup while job-hunting to try and return to enterprise work. That health situation has since resolved. At three days a week, this is the lightest workload she’s had in many, many years. Yet she’s been struggling with feeling burnt out. The most common advice I see for product leaders facing burnout is to rest. Take PTO. Meditate. Lighten the calendar. When rest doesn’t work, the next piece of advice is to quit and find a different company. In coaching, I’ve watched enough people follow both playbooks to know they don’t always fix the problem. Maya’s story can help show why. She came to me for coaching after reading a post of mine sharing my experiences with how rest doesn’t always help. That resonated. She came to me to figure out what was going on under the surface. On our call, she talked about the interview grind. She’d tried not doing too much prep, then tried a lot of rehearsal. No matter what she did, she’d go into the room and bomb it. The offers weren’t coming in. She ran a hand over her face as she said: “That’s how I feel with burnout, that I’m doing so many things but nothing is ticking or landing.” She blamed the burnout for blocking her ability to be successful in interviews. With all these job-hunt failures, a different question surfaced in her mind: was she actually not as good a product leader as she thought? She had recently switched to applying to lower-tier roles — less pay, less responsibility — because she thought that was the market signal. But she still wasn’t seeing success. She knew she was burnt out. What she didn’t know was what kind, or whether other product leaders were going through it, or what she was supposed to do about it. Something beyond needing some more time off was going on here, so we dug in. Maya on autopilot When you listen to Maya describe her prior role, you can hear the joy in her voice. In her words, she could “get into the weeds yet really strategize.” Leaving a job she loves to deal with a health issue wasn’t an easy choice. And as things stabilized, she didn’t want her skills to go stale. This fractional role seemed like a perfect fit. Not too time-intensive, interesting enough. A startup, so new skills to be gained there. When talking with me, she admitted that she was on autopilot in her fractional role. “I’m holding back over there. I’d rather prioritize my energy on the job hunt.” She added, almost surprised to hear herself, that this was the first time she’d actually said it out loud. The startup is on her resume. The startup is what she’s doing with her days. And by her own account, she’s giving less than her full effort. I took this moment to mirror her words back to her: “You have a belief about yourself that you are a high performing person. I heard it all through your story. And so here you are coasting through this startup, and that doesn’t align to how you see yourself. That’s the gap.” She took a deep breath before she replied. “Exactly. There’s absolute truth to it because I know I’m not presenting the ideals or the work values that I have.” She’s not just burned out from the misalignment at the startup. She’s also letting the bad interview rounds shape her self-perception. The gap between who she believes herself to be and the evidence she’s collecting about herself is widening from both sides at the same time. She’s going into each interview feeling like a liar, presenting a version of herself she’s not currently living up to. That’s hard to sustain. Of course she’s exhausted. Naming it was the pivot for Maya. Once she could see the gap between how she saw herself and what she was actually bringing to work, she had somewhere to aim. Not really about workload Some burnout does come from doing too much. Rest fixes it, and if that’s what you have, take the rest. But over and over in coaching I’ve seen another version of this. Someone comes back from PTO, from a sabbatical, from cutting their hours, and the exhaustion follows them right back into the office. That’s the version I’ve been describing with Maya. What’s underneath isn’t workload. It’s a mismatch between who you are and what your current role or workplace is actually asking of you. Sometimes the source is the environment: a role that doesn’t use what you’re best at, an org that keeps your real work off your calendar, a team dynamic that keeps you performing a version of yourself you don’t recognize. Sometimes it’s you: how you’re engaging with the work, what you’re telling yourself about it, the parts of yourself you’ve been holding back. Usually it’s some of each. Either way, the mismatch shows up as a gap between the version of yourself you thought you’d be at work and the version that’s actually showing up. You can be doing very little and be burnt out. You can be doing a lot and not be. The variable is the size of that mismatch. When you’re living out of alignment, you read everything as more evidence: the slow startup, the failed interview, the operating meeting that isn’t the work you wanted to be doing. The gap feeds itself. The longer it goes, the bigger the evidence pile against the version of yourself you want to be. That’s part of why it’s so hard to rest your way out of. Maya’s case shows the mechanism. She’s letting the interview pipeline define her view of herself. Every “no” becomes more proof that she’s not who she thought she was. And rest doesn’t touch this. Take the break, come back, and you land in the same patterns that made the gap in the first place. Maya’s case is one version. Let me introduce you to Jordan. Jordan drowning in operating cadence Jordan is a director who describes himself as a get-it-done person. A builder, mover, and someone you can rely on to deliver. When his company went through a reorg, the executive team put him in charge of leading the transformation of a critical product team. This was the work he was excited about — the chance to build something real and lead through change. Exactly the kind of assignment he’d taken this director role to do. Then challenges started piling on. His direct report went on parental leave so he started to cover for them. The executive team asked him to support comms for a different product. He still had some of his old responsibilities on his plate. His day-to-day became focused on keeping the lights on — making sure meetings happened, holding operating rhythms together, keeping everyone informed about what was next. The transformation work he wanted to dig into kept getting sidelined by the operating cadence. At the end of every week he went home feeling like he had gotten nothing done. Jordan told himself: “I’m not adding value.” What he really meant was “I’m not doing the work I came here to do.” His executive presentation went poorly because he couldn’t tell the story of team transformation he had committed to. He looked at a back-to-back calendar and saw all those meetings blocking him from success. And so that’s the story he told his CPO. He felt frustrated and disappointed. And busy. So, so busy. So he didn’t really look too closely at those feelings, and instead put his head down to keep trying to stay above water. In coaching, he started mentioning that he felt burnout looming. We started to recognize the internal inconsistency. Jordan had been narrating his work life as something happening to him: passive voice, victim grammar. His calendar keeping him from doing the work he wanted to do. His boss putting more responsibilities on his shoulders. He wanted to be the person who’s resilient, who isn’t bitter, who doesn’t dwell on things. And right now he was the opposite of all three. His burnout looked like overwork. It wasn’t. It was the gap between the leader he believed himself to be and the story he was telling about himself. The gap they had in common For both Maya and Jordan, what shifted in their heads wasn’t rest or a lighter schedule. It was the moment in coaching where we named what was actually going on — the gap between who they believed themselves to be and how they were showing up. For Maya, the gap was between the high-performing strategic leader she believed herself to be and the version of her on autopilot at the startup, unable to land the interviews she thought should be within reach. For Jordan, the gap was between the builder and get-it-done person he believed himself to be and the version of him buried under operating meetings, telling himself a story of failure. Their workload looked very different, but a similar pattern haunted both of them. The bigger the gap, the more exhausting it is to live in. And the more quickly the burnout becomes unsustainable. What actually shifts things As product leaders, busy calendars are part of the job. We can’t often take on a lighter workload or use time management to free up more time to meditate. And even if we could, that isn’t what fixes internal misalignment. For both Maya and Jordan, the pivot wasn’t rest and it wasn’t quitting. It was naming the mismatch between who they were and what their situation was asking of them. Calling out the gap that had opened between how they saw themselves and how they were showing up. That’s the first step, and it’s the hardest one to do on your own. In Part 2, I’ll walk through how we worked together to change that gap. And if you’re managing a team, how to help coach others through this type of challenge. Jordan and Maya’s stories continue there. If you’re seeing yourself in Maya or Jordan, here are some questions I would ask: - What version of yourself did you expect to be at work right now — and how does that compare to who’s actually showing up? - Where’s the mismatch coming from? The role, the workplace, how you’re navigating either, or some combination? - Imagine you were describing the gap to a friend. What would you say? Set a 10 minute timer and write your answers down. When you read them, what do you see? If what you’re reading is landing in a heavier place than “this makes me want to reflect” — if you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, or exhaustion that’s affecting more than your work — please talk to a mental health professional. Coaching is a good fit for the “I recognize this pattern and want a thought partner to work through it” moment. It’s not a substitute for therapy or clinical support. Both matter, and they do different work. If a thinking partner would help you work through the questions above, that’s what coaching is built for. Reach out. Because of the sensitivity of this topic, I have changed names and key details of each person in this article. Many thanks to the pre-readers who helped me make sure this article treated this delicate topic with the care it deserves: Marcus Blankenship, Steven Hicks, George Sudarkoff.