When work never ends: A wake-up call for IT professionals

The uncomfortable truth

Your best developers are burning out. Your team leads are answering emails at midnight. Your architects are checking Slack on vacation. And nobody's talking about it.

At our recent conference workshop, Marcela Hollmann, Ph.D., and Prof. Martin Vaculík, Ph.D., specialists in work psychology from Duality, an organisation that helps companies and people function healthier through psychological insight and honest collaboration, brought a sobering message to everyone in IT: work that never ends isn't a badge of honor—it's a ticking time bomb.

"When regeneration is missing long-term, it leads to serious health consequences," Vaculík explained.

"We're not talking about feeling tired. We're talking about diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, and strokes. These are scientific facts, not opinions."

Why your performance is declining (and it's not what you think)

Here's the paradox: the more you work, the worse you perform.

Think of yourself like an elite athlete. A champion needs training and recovery. Without recovery, they get injured. You're the same.

Short-term effects of no recovery:

• Poor focus and concentration
• Memory problems
• Bad decisions made slowly
• Irritability and stress
• Difficulty adapting to change

Long-term effects:

• Burnout
• Serious health issues
• Decreased job satisfaction
• Considering leaving your role
• Paradoxically, worse work output

As Vaculík noted: "If you overload an athlete with training without recovery, they injure themselves. If you overload yourself with work without rest, you perform worse, slower, with more errors."

The real problem: Always-on culture

You're not just working during work hours. You're:

• Checking emails at 10 PM
• Responding to Slack messages on weekends
• Working through lunch
• Answering urgent requests on vacation
• Never truly disconnecting

The worst part? Your managers are doing this too, which makes you feel obligated to do the same.

"If your manager sends emails at 10 PM," Hollmann warned, "you feel obligated to respond. You fear that not responding means you don't care or aren't dedicated. Even if they tell you they don't expect a reply, you'll worry anyway."

What actually works: Practical steps for IT professionals

For you (outside work hours)

1. Enforce real boundaries

• Set a hard stop time (e.g., "No work after 6 PM")
• Turn off notifications completely (not just silent, actually disable them)
• If you have a work phone, leave it at the office or put it away
• Use email scheduling tools to send messages during business hours, not late at night

2. Stay active during off-hours

Physical activity helps your brain disconnect from work. It doesn't have to be intense, like walking, gardening, cooking, or any hobby that engages both body and mind works.

3. Protect social time

Time with family and friends matters—but only if you're actually present. Don't work while "spending time" with loved ones. That defeats the purpose.

4. Create physical boundaries (especially for remote work)

• Designate one workspace for work only
• Don't work from bed, couch, or kitchen table
• When you leave that space, work ends

5. The most important rule: Don't think about work

Hollmann emphasized: "Recovery requires not just stopping work—it requires not thinking about work. When you think about work, your body experiences the same stress as if you were actually working."

For your team and organization (the hard part)

1. Stop pretending gym memberships solve this

They don't. Real change requires structural decisions.

2. Set team communication norms

• Agree on when emails are sent (e.g., "No emails after 5 PM")
• Define response time expectations
• Make these rules binding, especially for managers
• If you're a manager, lead by example

3. Fix meeting culture

Back-to-back meetings with no breaks destroy focus and health. Vaculík shared a concrete example:

"Schedule meetings from 0 to 55 minutes, not 0 to 60. That 5-minute buffer lets people use the bathroom, grab water, and transition between topics without rushing."

4. Speak up about unrealistic workloads

This is the hard conversation. If you want recovery time, you need to discuss what's realistic. You can't do unlimited work and stay healthy.

As one workshop participant shared:

"The hardest part isn't the tips, it's giving yourself permission to not work. People work out of fear. They think something will break if they don't."

5. If you're a manager, lead by example

If you're working nights and weekends, your team will too. Period.

The warning signs you're heading for collapse

Watch for:

• Skipped meals or bathroom breaks
• Sleep problems
• Constant irritability
• Difficulty concentrating
• Strained relationships with family
• Health issues (headaches, high blood pressure, etc.)
• Inability to enjoy time off because you're thinking about work

One workshop participant shared her breaking point: "My head started spinning. I had to lie down on the office floor for two hours. The doctor said it was an overworked brain. That's when I realized I had to change."

The business case (because you need one)

Healthy, rested IT professionals:

• Make better decisions
• Produce higher-quality code
• Have fewer bugs
• Stay in their roles longer (reducing turnover)
• Are more creative and innovative
• Deliver more value over time

Burned-out IT professionals:

• Make mistakes
• Produce technical debt
• Leave for competitors
• Require constant firefighting
• Deliver less, slower

The math is simple: Working 50 hours with poor focus produces less than working 40 hours with full focus.

Your action items this week

For individual contributors and developers:

1. Turn off work notifications after 5 PM
2. Pick one activity this week that's completely unrelated to work
3. Have one meal without checking your phone
4. Tell your manager about one boundary you need

For team leads and managers:

1. Stop sending emails after work hours (use scheduling)
2. Schedule your next team meeting with 5-minute buffers
3. Have a conversation with your team about communication norms
4. Ask yourself: "What can I remove from my team's plate?"

For leadership:

1. Audit your organization's communication culture
2. Identify teams with the highest burnout risk
3. Make one structural change (e.g., no emails after 5 PM company-wide)
4. Model healthy boundaries visibly

The bottom line

"Work that never ends isn't sustainable," Vaculík concluded. "It's not about being lazy or uncommitted. It's about understanding how humans actually work. We need recovery to perform. Without it, we fail, our health fails, our relationships fail, and eventually, our work fails."

You're not asking for less work because you're unmotivated. You're asking for recovery because you're human.

The question isn't whether you can afford to rest. The question is: can you afford not to?

This article is based on insights from the workshop "When Work Never Ends: Blessing or Danger for Organizations?" featuring Marcela Hollman and Martin Vaculík from Duality at our recent IT conference.