Life and Wellness for Engineering Leaders. For the part of the job that never reaches the org chart.

You're running at about 60% and your calendar still assumes 100%. Three months off would cost you the mortgage, so that option isn't real and everyone who suggests it has misunderstood the problem. The job isn't the enemy. The way you're currently doing it is, and you know that, and knowing it hasn't changed anything past a Wednesday in about four months.

Most burnout writing is aimed at people who can leave. Yours has to work while you keep shipping, which rules out most of it, and that's why the articles keep failing you rather than because you lack discipline.

What I've watched restore capacity isn't rest. Rest helps and it isn't the mechanism. It's reducing the number of open loops you personally hold. Twelve unfinished things that only you own will drain you faster than sixty hours of work you can put down when you close the laptop. Most leaders I sit with are carrying somewhere between fifteen and thirty and have never counted.

So we count them, on paper, in session one. Then every week one loop gets closed, handed to someone, or explicitly killed. Killed is a legitimate outcome and almost nobody uses it. We also write down in advance what your own evidence of recovery will be, because otherwise you'll move the line and never notice you got better.

By week 8 the count is meaningfully lower and you tend to feel the difference before the calendar looks any different. That order surprises people, and it's the part I'd ask you to trust.

You answer at 11pm because not answering makes tomorrow worse. That isn't weakness, it's an accurate read of your organisation. Your partner has stopped asking when you'll be done. You haven't been properly present at a weekend since spring.

So I won't tell you to set boundaries. Boundaries fail when the org is genuinely built to need you late, and willpower loses that fight every time it's tried.

We go after the supply instead. There are usually two or three specific mechanisms generating those pings: a decision nobody else is permitted to make, an escalation path with your name hard-coded into it, a timezone you agreed to once and never revisited. Named, each of them is fixable, and the fix is almost always handing someone authority rather than you becoming more disciplined.

Six weeks: one full weekend off the machine, one evening a week back, and a workday that ends because the org can survive it ending.

You got the promotion, the title, the seat. Every Monday some part of you expects to be found out. Six months in it hasn't faded, you can't say it to anyone inside the company, your partner has heard it enough, and your therapist doesn't know what a monorepo is.

Two different things wear the same costume here and they want opposite handling. One is a real skill gap: you've genuinely never reported to a board before, or never run a layoff, and the discomfort is information. The other is a background process that keeps running regardless of evidence, and no achievement switches it off, which you can verify cheaply, because you already have the achievements and it's still on.

We separate them early, usually by looking hard at what specifically you're afraid someone will discover. The real gaps then get closed one a month, deliberately. The background process gets managed rather than cured, which is the honest framing and also the one that works.

By month three there's one closed gap you can point at, and a written account of what you do know. That sounds like a homework exercise and turns out to be the thing people reread before hard meetings. I'll be straight about the rest: the voice usually gets quieter rather than leaving. Most senior people I know still hear it. They've stopped taking instructions from it.

The title, the money, the seat you wanted for years. You keep waiting to feel like you arrived. Instead you feel like a well-paid project manager for other people's priorities, and the thing you're most afraid of is that the honest answer is you're done.

Three quite different conditions get called this, and telling them apart is most of the work. Burnout, where the tank is empty and nothing registers as anything. A values mismatch, where the work is fine and you've stopped believing in what it's for. And plain boredom in a role you outgrew about a year ago, which is the most common of the three and the least dramatic.

They have opposite fixes, which is why guessing is expensive. Rest resolves the first and does nothing at all for the third. Changing companies resolves the third and follows you across the road if it was the first. So we establish which one you have before we change anything, by mapping what genuinely energised you back when something did, then testing one change a month against that map.

I went through the third one in 2023 and spent the best part of a year treating it as the first. That year is the reason I ask people to slow down at exactly this point.

You can't vent to your team, you lead them. You can't vent to your CEO, you report to them. Your peers compete with you for headcount and budget whatever the org chart says about collaboration. Your partner is tired of hearing about people they've never met. So you carry it, and call it seniority.

There's no clever fix for this one. There's a standing hour with somebody who has held the seat, sits nowhere on your org chart, and has no stake at all in how you come across. That's the entire intervention, and most of its value is in the not-having-to-manage-the-listener part.

Where it helps I also put you into the ELC network, 3,100+ engineering leaders across the region, most of whom have had the week you're having. From session one there's one room where nothing you say needs framing first.