Burnout Isn't Inevitable. It Just Feels That Way

Angie’s List: A Case Study

I see burnout constantly in the startups I work with, and I watch founders struggle with how to respond. Usually, it goes one of two ways, neither of which may actually solves the problem.

The first instinct is to push through. Someone is clearly struggling and overwhelmed, and the company keeps adding responsibilities because the work still needs to get done. It's not malicious. It's just that no one's tracking the load, so no one sees how unsustainable it's become.

The second instinct is to throw money at it. The founder realizes the team is stretched thin, so they hire quickly, sometimes people they can't actually afford. Now there's a payroll problem on top of a workload problem.

Angie Heck, the founder of Angie's List, lived the first version. Early on, she was doing door-to-door sales, hours of interacting with hostile strangers, work she was fundamentally ill-suited to as an introvert. She eventually broke down in front of her co-founder. That's not a warning sign; it was a full-blown crisis.

The company's response was to make her the customer service rep, secretary, magazine writer, editor, accountant, advertiser, and salesperson. More roles, not fewer. She eventually burned out completely and had to leave.

Here's what I want founders to understand: burnout doesn't sneak up on you. It's the predictable result of not tracking capacity.

Every time something new comes into your workflow, a new client, a new responsibility, a new "can you also handle this?", it costs hours. Actual hours, from actual people. If you're not tracking where those hours are going, you're just hoping it all fits. And hope is not a strategy.

What I do with clients is simple: we look at what's actually on everyone's plate, how long things really take (not how long they "should" take), and what's coming down the pipeline. Usually, the problem is obvious once you see it laid out. Someone's been absorbing work for months without anyone noticing that their forty-hour week became sixty.

The fix isn't always hiring. Sometimes it's stopping something. Sometimes it's pushing back on a client. Sometimes it's realizing that a task someone's been doing manually for ten hours a week can be automated or eliminated entirely.

But you can't make those decisions if you're not looking.

One more thing: if someone on your team is in their first real job, they probably don't know what's normal. Angie didn't. She came from academia, where unsustainable workloads are the norm, and assumed startups were just like that. No one told her otherwise until she collapsed.

Don't wait for someone to break down to find out they're overwhelmed. Ask. Look at the hours. Do the math before the math does itself.