It’s Thursday afternoon, and your team seems checked out. The morning was eaten alive by three “priority” meetings. By lunch, Slack and email notifications piled up. By the afternoon, someone asked, “Wait, which project are we even prioritizing first?” You notice the signs: disengaged faces in Zoom, recycled ideas, missed details. Work is happening but it’s surface-level, not the sharp, strategic thinking you know your team is capable of.
This isn’t about motivation - it’s about depletion. Your brain can only switch contexts so many times before it shorts out. Every Slack ping, meeting pivot, and half-finished task costs a little bit of glucose and attention. Multiply that across a day, and your team is running out of fuel before they ever get to the strategy, creativity, or problem-solving meaningful work.
Our brains crave certainty and that predictability frees up mental energy for creativity and problem-solving. And when our spaces become filled with interruptions, chaos, and “always on” responsiveness, people’s brains retreat into survival mode. Which can look like nodding along in meetings, avoiding risk, and defaulting to the safest, most familiar work.
And the hard truth? If your team is drowning in meetings and context switches, it’s because you’ve designed or tolerated a system that makes exhaustion the norm. If your team looks disengaged, don’t ask what’s wrong with them, ask what’s happening in the system that makes depletion inevitable.
Don’t try to motivate a depleted team - redesign the environment so they have energy left for the work that actually matters.
The Strategies: Plug the Leaks, Don’t Push Harder.
This week, ask your team:
Don’t defend. Just listen. You’ll spot system patterns, like interruptions, duplicative updates, or a meeting culture that kills momentum, that point towards leaks you can work towards plugging.
Pick a recurring meeting and boldly replace it with an async update experiment. For example: replace your weekly status meeting with a shared doc where each person posts a 2-bullet update by Tuesday at noon. Say: “Let’s try this for a month and see what breaks.” You’ll quickly see how much “real-time” connection you actually need versus how much was just habit.
Protect a recurring “reset zone” (Fridays 1-3, for example) where no new meetings or deliverables can be added. Use it for catch-up, focus, or recovery. Signal it out loud: “This block is ours to breathe, finish the week well, and be ready for next week.” It’s not just about time, it tells your team: I care about how your brain recovers, not just how it produces.
People burn out faster when every day feels unpredictable. Build small rituals of stability - for example:
When you mistake depletion for disengagement, you push harder, demand more, and wonder why the spark is gone when really, your system is bleeding out people’s energy before the important work even starts. But when you plug the leaks you create space for an energized team to think, create, and solve at their highest level.