5 Ways to Avoid Overwork
Most workers today feel or say they are overworked. How to avoid this trap in summer’s final month.
Are piles of to-dos landing on your desk? You’re not alone. These days, being overworked is a norm: 75% of full-time workers consider themselves to be at least somewhat workaholic, with 47% saying it’s due to company culture or employer expectations, according to Monster’s State of the Workweek 2026 (spoiler alert: everyone’s overworked). Which is to say that you are not alone if your daily to-do list far surpasses what you can feasibly accomplish during work hours.
But during the summer, being overworked carries true FOMO consequences: As you’re curled over your laptop, insisting that you’ll be done “in a few minutes,” you’re missing outdoor concerts, evening walks, and summer bashes, not to mention holidays and vacations. We asked our experts how to best avoid being overworked in the month it matters most.
Schedule is everything.
Remain consistent in how you organize your day, says JP Sniffen, practice leader at the Military Center of Expertise at Korn Ferry. In the summertime, brunching with a visitor or slipping outdoors at 2 PM seems like a great idea—until you realize how far behind you are on your work. “You got to stay with your routine,” says Sniffen. If that means sitting down at your desk at 8 AM sharp, don’t lose that habit.
Look for pain points.
What’s not getting done? What’s keeping you up at night? “Pain is a great teacher,” says Sniffen. Rather than running from it, use the discomfort to get clarity on what needs to be prioritized or delegated. For example, if you’re up at 10 PM answering emails when you desperately want to go to bed, that’s a sign that you need to address your approach to email communication. That could mean encouraging the team to communicate more in person, or delegating customer-response emails.
Accept imperfection.
Which tasks really need your best effort? “One hundred percent of the things can’t be done 100% perfectly all of the time,” says Iktimal Daneshvar, vice president of recruitment process outsourcing, EMEA. Does that slide deck need to be Emmy worthy? What about the proposal that you already know will be accepted? Organization guru Julie Morgenstern’s “70% Rule” comes in handy here: Imagine the task being completed at 70% of your competency. Is that sufficient? Then dash it off, or…
Delegate it.
If you are reading this article, chances are you’re shouldering substantially more work than you need to. As a rule of thumb, any task that does not require your unique skills can likely be done by a teammate. “It’s a change in mindset,” says Daneshvar, with cooperation built in. “If we go down, we all go down together.”
Try “low” goals.
If all else fails, lean in to getting the work done: What’s the minimum that needs to happen this week? If you’re recruiting, perhaps you need to have ten new conversations before Thursday; if you’re applying for grants, perhaps you need to send out two applications. Sure, landing a candidate or a grant are great “high” goals, but disengagement often occurs when you feel the work isn’t yielding rewards. “‘Low’ goals give you something to show for all your work,” says Sniffen.
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