Work-from-home life & Burnout

By: Nooshin Orouji

When people talk about burnout, the same reasons always come up.

To explore it further, a dataset capturing daily work-from-home behavior and wellbeing was analyzed. The dataset contains 1,800 daily records collected from 180 users.

Each record represents a single day of work activity, including working hours and number of breaks, with wellbeing and outcome indicators, including sleep hours, burnout score, and task completion.

Now let’s answer some questions by looking at the data.

Q1: Does getting more sleep mean lower burnout?

A1: No, no such trend is visible in the data.

Q2: How about work hours? Does longer work hours lead to higher chance of burnout?

A2: Longer work hours lead to slightly higher burnout but this doesn’t seem like a strong factor leading to burnout.

Q3: Let’s check the breaks taken! Does taking more breaks lead to lower chance of burnout?

A3: A big NO!

The answer is: Task completion!

Now a clear trend is visible!

People don’t burn out just because they work a lot. They burn out when effort doesn’t turn into progress.

Main takeaway for managers and any home-worker

Reducing burnout may require a shift from managing time to supporting progress. Designing systems that help people complete tasks efficiently could be one of the most effective wellbeing interventions.