Rustout: The work around the work that is wearing high achievers down

You know the feeling well. The day has been full, properly full and yet, by the time you close the laptop, there is a strange absence where satisfaction should be. You have answered the emails, replied to all the messages, attended the meetings, nodded along when needed, checked the things that needed checking, sent the follow-ups, chased the person, reassured the colleague, absorbed the last-minute changes, and somehow kept the whole show moving. You have been busy since your alarm went off this morning. And still, there is the faintly humiliating question: what did I actually do today? Not what did I complete, not what did I respond to, not what did I prevent from falling apart. But what did I do that felt like the work I came here to do?

‘I’m really sorry to bother you but…’

For many high-achieving people, the most exhausting part of work is not always the work itself. It is the work around the work. It’s the admin, the reporting, the being available, the being sensible, being the person who knows what to do. It’s about attending to the message that arrives just as you are about to start something important or just about to go out the door. It’s patiently sitting through the meeting that should have been an email. It’s getting up to speed with the shiny new system introduced to solve the problem with the perfectly fine but older system. It’s the small task that is, by itself, entirely reasonable, but is travelling in a pack of fifty other small tasks, all with teeth.

None of this looks very dramatic, and that is part of its sneaky power. The work around the work very rarely announces itself as the problem. In fact, it usually arrives politely, ‘I’m sorry to bother you…’ ‘Do you have five minutes…’ ‘Would you mind’. It has a rationale, ‘We just really need to’, ‘I wouldn’t ask, but we need to do this for….’. In isolation, it is hard to argue with.

As someone who researches occupational wellbeing, I can tell you that this may be why so many highly capable and amibitious people are tired in a way that is difficult to explain. They are not necessarily bored or in the wrong job. Often, the opposite is true. They care, and they are invested in what they do, and they have standards – often very high standards. They want to do their work well. The result of the accumulation of tasks is not always simple burnout, but burnout is the word we know. It gives language to exhaustion and the sense of having been overdrawn for too long. But there is another experience that sits beside it: rustout. It is less familiar and less dramatic, but it is no less corrosive. Rustout is what happens when people are underutilised or feel consistently kept from the parts of their work that allow them to feel purposeful and alive. The valuable thing about rustout is that it explains a contradiction many high achievers recognise immediately: being overworked but underused at the same time. It’s having too much to do, but too little of the work that actually matters. It’s having too much responsibility but too little authority to carry it out. It is possible to be extremely busy and still feel professionally starved.

That distinction matters because high-achieving people are often not seeking to take their foot off the pedal. What really wears them down is the sense of being consumed by work that does not fully use their skills. It’s the fact that meaningful work is being displaced. And this is where competence can become a trap. The more capable you are, the more likely people are to ask. The more reliable you are, the more likely things are to land with you. The more you care, the harder it is to want to let anything drop. The more calmly you cope, the less visible the cost becomes to others. And so the competent person becomes load-bearing in the workplace, and this is often met with praise: ‘I don’t know how you do it. Aren’t you great?’

The praise may indeed be sincere, but it can also be part of the problem. Being admired for carrying the load is not the same as having the load reduced or being protected from overuse. Sometimes, the ‘You are amazing’ praise becomes the velvet rope around exploitation, which is very effective at keeping people exactly where they are. I think this is particularly complicated for women, though not exclusive to them, as many women are socialised to be not only competent, but pleasant in their competence. As Michelle Minnikin points out in her text, Good Girl Deprogramming, women can become very good at absorbing an unreasonable amount while making it look reasonable, even easy. This is why some workplace wellbeing conversations can sometimes feel so out of tune. People, of course, need reminders to care for themselves, but in order to address a creeping sense of ‘underbeing’, people also need work that doesn’t continually drain the very qualities it depends on.

The take-home here is that the real workplace wellbeing conversation is an uncomfortable question for workplace leaders: how much of your success depends on the overextension of capable people?