Priorities, Burnout, and the Question That Changed How I Work.

Aldona Frelik – Workplace Coach · Systems Thinker · aldonafrelik.com

Why your priorities are not my priorities.

Working in logistics teaches you something quickly: not every scream for urgency is urgent. You learn to read the difference between a genuine emergency and someone’s anxiety wearing the costume of a deadline.

So when I was handed responsibility for a global logistics operation overnight. With no handover, no safety net, just me, the operation, and a new manager to onboard, I already knew the question to ask myself. Every morning, the same one: what is critical here? What needs to happen next for this to keep working?

Everything else fell away. Not because I made a conscious decision to deprioritise it. Because the situation made the answer impossible to ignore.

That experience stayed with me. Because in the years since, working with professionals across industries, I’ve noticed something: most people are not in a crisis. But they feel like they are… and that feeling, that sense that everything is a priority all at once, is one of the most reliable paths to burnout I know.

When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Really Is

I want to challenge something that gets said constantly in leadership and productivity circles.

The advice usually goes: you need to set better priorities. Identify what’s truly important. Stop saying yes to everything. Manage your time more effectively.

And on paper, that’s not wrong. But for most of the professionals I work with, it’s not the real problem.

The real problem is that they already know what matters. They could write the priority list in their sleep. The issue is what happens when they try to act on it.

Something tightens. A voice says: if I step back from this, I’ll seem unreliable. If I say no to that, I’ll lose the ground I’ve worked so hard to gain. If I do less, they’ll finally see that I’m not quite as capable as they assumed.

So they keep going. They manage the discomfort of the list better than they manage the discomfort of stepping back from it.

This isn’t a planning problem. It’s a system’s safety problem wearing a very convincing disguise.

The Story I Keep Coming Back To

Recently, someone came to me with what they described as a problem of conflicting priorities between two teams.

One team was waiting on answers that only a particular person in another team could provide. But that person’s manager had marked them as unavailable. They were working on something urgent. The first team was stuck.

When they eventually arranged the call, the employee answered every question without difficulty. It took almost no time.

The person asking me about this framed it as a priorities issue. Two managers, two teams, both believing their work came first.

But I don’t think that was the real problem. The real problem was access to resources.

The answers existed. The person who had them was available. What was missing was a clear way to communicate across team boundaries, and a shared understanding of what “urgent” actually meant in context. The priorities weren’t conflicting. The systems around communication were.

I think about this a lot. Because when we mis-diagnose the problem, we end up solving the wrong thing. We create more priority frameworks, more escalation processes, more meetings about alignment. When what was actually needed was a direct conversation that should have happened much earlier.

Why High-Achieving Professionals Are More Vulnerable to Burnout

There’s a specific pattern that keeps appearing in people who are intelligent, conscientious, and under sustained pressure to perform. It doesn’t look like chaos from the outside. It looks like competence.

But inside, it feels like:

• Always being slightly behind, even when you’re technically on top of things
• Exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix
• A sense that you’re only as good as your last piece of work
• Difficulty switching off because something always feels unfinished
• Saying yes when you mean no, and resenting it quietly afterwards

For international professionals and expats navigating English-speaking workplaces, there’s often an extra layer. You’re not just doing your job. You’re reading the room in a second language, interpreting tone and culture, managing how you come across. All while trying to appear calm and in control.

That background processing costs something. And it almost never shows up in anyone’s workload estimate.

What the Crisis Taught Me

Going back to that logistics crisis: what it stripped away was the noise.

In normal circumstances, I had the same competing demands most professionals have. Things that were urgent but not important. Things that felt urgent because someone was anxious. Things I kept doing out of habit or fear of what would happen if I stopped.

When the stakes became genuinely high, the clarity came with them. I couldn’t afford to confuse anxiety with urgency. I couldn’t afford to manage my reputation instead of managing the operation. I had to ask, every single day: what is critical? What needs to happen next for things to keep working?

That question: what is critical, right now, for things to keep working, is a useful one to return to in ordinary circumstances too. Not as a crisis response, but as a regular calibration.

Because most burnout doesn’t happen in a crisis. It happens in the accumulation of ordinary days where everything felt equally urgent, and the cost of that confusion was never properly named.

Leadership Skills That Help Prevent Burnout

I’m genuinely cautious about five-step frameworks here. Not because structure is wrong, but because when the underlying pattern is fear or identity, structure tends to become another layer of performance rather than something that changes anything.

What I’ve found more useful. in my own experience and in working with others, is getting underneath the behaviour rather than just trying to manage it.

Ask what you’re actually protecting

Before you attempt to cut your list, sit with this question: what would happen if you did less? Not what you think should happen. What you actually fear would happen.

The honest answers: I’d be seen as less committed, someone would take my place, they’d question my value, something would go wrong; are more useful than any task audit.

Distinguish urgency from anxiety

Some things are urgent. Many things only feel urgent because of the emotional state they trigger. A difficult message can derail an entire morning even when the actual deadline is weeks away.

Learning to name that difference in real time “this is urgent, this is anxiety”, is one of the most practical leadership skills I know. It doesn’t make the anxiety disappear. But it stops it from running the calendar.

Name your limits out loud, professionally

A limit that exists only in your head is a resentment waiting to form.

For many professionals, particularly those from cultures where directness feels uncomfortable or risky, communicating capacity clearly and professionally is a skill that needs to be actively built. Not just acknowledged in theory. Practised, in real conversations, with real words.

This is where leadership communication and burnout prevention intersect in a way that doesn’t get discussed enough. How you talk about your own limits shapes how others understand and respect them.

Check whether the problem is what you think it is

The story about the two teams stays with me because it’s such a common pattern.

When something isn’t working, we tend to reach for the most obvious label: priorities, personality, workload. But sometimes the real issue is structural. A communication gap, a missing conversation, a resource that was available all along but no one had created the path to reach it.

The skill is in slowing down enough to ask: is this actually the problem, or is this the symptom of something else?

The Mistakes Worth Naming

Adding more structure to an unexamined pattern.

A new system on top of an unaddressed fear tends to become another thing to perform. It works for a week. Then the old pull returns.

Waiting until things deteriorate.

Most people arrive at this conversation after the confidence has eroded, the communication has broken down, and the fatigue has become chronic. Patterns shift more easily when they’re caught earlier. Not because earlier is easier, but because there’s more left to work with.

Assuming rest will reset the pattern.

Rest matters. But if nothing has shifted underneath, most people return from a break and fall straight back into exactly what created the exhaustion. The first Monday back is usually revealing.

Making it entirely personal.

Burnout and overwork are almost always partly a systems issue. The environment, the culture, the communication structures around a role. That doesn’t remove personal responsibility. But starting from self-blame generates shame rather than insight, and shame is a very poor foundation for change.

The Question Worth Returning To

I still ask myself the version of that question from the logistics crisis, just in ordinary circumstances now.

Not: what is on the list?

But: what is critical here? What actually needs to happen next?

The answer is often smaller than we expect. Not everything needs solving today. Not every request requires immediate action. Not every uncomfortable feeling is evidence that something is wrong.

It’s a small shift in framing, but it cuts through a lot of noise. It separates what matters from what is merely demanding attention. And it creates a little space. Enough to respond deliberately rather than react from habit.

That space is where real leadership starts.

If you’re navigating the overwork, the communication pressure, the sense that everything is urgent and nothing is quite right, I work with professionals who find themselves carrying too much responsibility, too many competing demands, and too little space to think clearly.

A consultation is a calm, structured space to look at what’s actually happening and where to begin. You can find out more or book a conversation at aldonafrelik.com