Look at your world for a second.

Your roadmap is full of "phase 1.5." Pilots that never graduate or die. OKRs that roll into the next quarter. Slack threads that never really end, they just drift.

Your people are not just tired. They’re stuck in a work life where nothing ever feels finished.

That’s the burnout nobody in the board deck is naming.

It’s not just workload. It’s the mental drag of open loops that never close. Your best people go home, but their head stays at the office, replaying conversations, worrying about half made decisions, bracing for the next "quick follow up."

This is exactly what research on work related rumination keeps pointing at. Unfinished tasks cling to attention and block recovery. Baumeister and Masicampo showed that incomplete goals keep invading our thoughts until we make a concrete plan, which finally frees up mental space. Their work is just a scientific way of saying what your high performers already feel. If nothing is ever truly done, nothing is ever truly off.

If you’re a CPO or a CEO, this is your problem to solve. Not with slogans. With design.

The Hidden Exhaustion Of Work That Never Ends

People can handle hard seasons. They can handle crunch. They can even handle late nights when the moment is real and has an end date.

What breaks them is living in permanent almost done.

Look at a typical team.

The product launch "went live" three months ago. Yet there’s still a weekly sync on "final tweaks." Sales enablement is "basically there" but keeps getting adjusted. A customer project "just needs one more iteration." None of this is bad on its own. The problem is there’s no clear finish line. Nothing ever earns the label complete.

So every item keeps a little hook in people’s heads. They never get the satisfaction that tells the nervous system "you can stand down now."

Burnout research has been boringly consistent. Exhaustion spikes when the effort people put in does not match what they get back in control, clarity, and fairness. Maslach and Leiter call this chronic mismatch the core of burnout. Their work explains why endless in progress work is so toxic. The effort never cashes out into closure.

On paper, your employees had a normal week. In reality, they carried twenty unresolved threads in their head the whole time. You measure hours. Their brain feels unpaid overtime.

This is not just an emotional issue. It’s an operating model issue. Which brings us to the way most companies accidentally create this "never finished" culture.

How Modern Work Accidentally Erases The Finish Line

No CEO wakes up and says "Let’s make sure nothing ever feels done around here."

They say "We need to stay agile."

"We’ll keep it flexible."

"Let’s keep iterating."

Sounds smart. The side effect is brutal.

Here’s what it looks like in real life.

1. Everything Is A Pilot That Never Ends

You test a new process with one team. It kind of works. Instead of either rolling it out or shutting it down, it lingers. A few more teams try their own version. Nobody ever declares it a success or a failure. It just hangs in the background as one more sort of active responsibility.

That half committed state drains more energy than a clear yes or no ever would.

2. OKRs Roll Forward Like A Bad Subscription

You miss a key result, so it "rolls into next quarter." Then it happens again. The OKR becomes background noise. People stop believing it will ever truly finish. Your goal setting system turns into a museum of broken promises.

No wonder your teams lose intensity. Deep down, they don’t expect today’s work to actually close anything.

3. Decisions Never Fully Land

A leadership team "aligns" on a direction. Then two days later, a senior leader drops a "quick thought" in a channel. That message reopens the whole decision. Now nobody knows which version counts.

In Workplace’s own data across companies, you can see the fallout in language. Hedging phrases like "should be fine" and "probably ok" rise when teams stop trusting that decisions are final. Those micro shifts show up long before exit interviews catch the damage.

4. Agile Gets Twisted Into Permanent Beta

Agile rhythms were designed to burn through work in focused cycles, not keep everything forever provisional. When leaders love starting sprints but never invest in clear endings and recovery, agile turns into a fancy word for "we’re always mid flight."

At that point, your people are not energized by iteration. They’re drained by the sense that nothing ever lands.

Here’s the punchline. None of this shows up cleanly on your dashboards. People still hit deadlines. Surveys still show belief in the mission. Yet underneath, attention is shredded. Which is why you need a different lens.

Why Your Best People Feel Done Even When Work Isn’t

Your highest performers are the ones who feel this first.

They carry the heaviest load of unfinished work. They’re on every critical initiative, every follow up, every "can you just take a quick look." They’re also the people least likely to complain.

You’ve seen the pattern already in your own tools. Late night replies from the same few names. Messages that used to be warm and expansive getting shorter and sharper. Appreciation language fading. Workplace’s analysis across customers keeps surfacing these signals as early fingerprints of exhaustion and execution risk long before metrics like attrition move.

Now add in what we know from recovery research. Sonnentag and Fritz’s work on psychological detachment shows that people need to mentally switch off from work to recover. Their model makes the link clear. If your mind stays tethered to tasks, your body never really refuels.

So what happens to the person who owns eight "in progress" projects, all with moving targets, all with leaders who might change their mind tomorrow.

They go to dinner with their family, but in their head they’re still revising a deck. They try to sleep, but their brain keeps replaying that one unresolved conversation with an exec. They wake up more tired than when they went to bed.

At some point, they hit a wall. Not in a dramatic blowup. In a slow downgrade. Less initiative. Fewer bold ideas. More safe moves.

From the outside, they look fine. Inside, they’ve made a decision.

"I’ll get the work done. I just won’t let this place own me anymore."

When your best people reach that point, you have bigger problems than a wellness score. You have a company that burns through commitment faster than it knows how to create it.

The good news. You can fix this. You just have to treat "finished" as a design variable, not an accident.

How To Build A Culture Where Work Actually Ends

If you’re a CPO, your leverage is not another burnout slide. Your leverage is rewriting how work moves through the system.

Here’s how you start.

1. Make "Done" A Non-Negotiable Standard

Every major initiative needs a clear definition of done. Not a vibe. Not "we’ll know it when we see it." A short statement that says what finished means and how you’ll mark it.

Before you greenlight a project, ask one blunt question in the room. "On what exact date will this team be allowed to say this phase is finished and move on." If nobody can answer, you’re not approving a project. You’re approving a permanent background obligation.

2. Run Kill Or Commit Reviews Every Quarter

Once a quarter, put every pilot, MVP, and "we’re just testing this" effort on one page. For each one, force a decision in the same meeting.

Either commit real resources and a definition of done or shut it down and tell people it’s over.

There’s no middle column called "keep it going for now." That column is where energy goes to die.

3. Turn Open Loops Into Concrete Next Steps

Remember the Baumeister and Masicampo finding. Plans reduce the mental drag of unfinished goals. You can turn that into a simple rule for managers.

No meeting ends without a clear next milestone, owner, and date. No "we’ll circle back" or "let’s keep talking." The brain relaxes when it knows exactly what happens next.

Train managers to close conversations with phrases like "Here’s the next visible step, here’s who owns it, and here’s when we’ll decide if this is done." You’re not just driving clarity. You’re giving people a mental off switch.

4. Attach Recovery To Every Big Push

Intensity is not the problem. Endless intensity is.

For every major sprint, define three things before it starts. How long the sprint lasts, what slows down or stops while it runs, and what recovery window follows. Put those answers in writing.

If a leader can’t answer those questions, they’re not making a bold bet. They’re throwing a grenade into someone’s calendar and hoping your most committed people absorb the blast.

5. Instrument Unfinished Work With Real Signals

Stop waiting for annual surveys to tell you people are exhausted. The evidence is in the tools they use every day.

Platforms like Workplace read timing and language patterns in Slack, Teams, and email. When you see more after hours check ins, more reopened threads, more hedge language like "should be fine," and less appreciation, that’s your early signal that work is not resolving and people are stuck in permanent almost done.

Share those patterns with your exec team. Treat them like a cultural P and L, not a side note in HR. If unfinished work is spiking in one org, that’s not a resilience issue. That’s a design flaw in how you’re running that part of the business.

The Real Test For CPOs And CEOs

In the end, this is simple.

Your company will either be a place where work moves through cleanly, ends clearly, and lets people recover, or it will be a place where everything lingers and the most committed people pay the price with their health and judgment.

If you’re a CPO, your job is to walk into the next executive meeting with proof. Show where projects never close. Show the language signals of exhaustion. Then put real rules on the table for how work starts, finishes, and stops.

If you’re a CEO, your job is even simpler.

Start honoring finish lines.

Declare things done in public. Kill work in public. Protect recovery in public. Make it clear through your own behavior that "finished" is not a fantasy. It’s how grown up companies run.

Your people don’t need another wellbeing app.

They need to go home at the end of the day, look at what they did, and feel a clean, unmistakable sense of this part is complete.

Give them that, and burnout stops being an inevitability. It becomes a choice you refuse to make.