Water professionals are not isolated from burnout. Over the last few years, I’ve experienced it firsthand.
I still remember receiving a call from someone on my team:
“I quit. I need to stop.”
I asked, “Do you mean another job?”
“No. I need to stop. I need to wake up on Monday and not open my laptop.”
Anxiety had reached its limit.
When I was younger, I didn’t pay much attention to these situations. I’m not even sure whether burnout has become more prevalent or whether we simply talk about it more openly today. But I genuinely want to understand the root causes.
One of my biggest challenges nowadays is that my job is neither a typical 9-to-5 nor purely technical or purely decision-making. I get home, and my brain keeps spinning:
“What an absurd thing that person said in this morning’s call.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to raise this issue with my boss.”
“There are weaknesses in this Excel model.”
“We’re behind on deadlines.”
“Why can’t others complete tasks as quickly as requested?”
The laptop closes, but the mind doesn’t.
Personally, my anxiety decreases when I have a clear set of actions under my control. If it were just me, supported by AI agents executing tasks exactly as I want and when I want, I feel I could navigate almost anything.
The real challenge is navigating an entire human ecosystem. How do you control what is outside your control?
Other people’s priorities. Human resistance when everyone is overloaded. Tasks that never get done as planned. Stakeholders pursuing their own interests. The gap between what the client expects, what your team can realistically deliver, and what the budget actually allows.
That’s the battlefield.
Perhaps burnout isn’t only about working too many hours. Perhaps it often comes from carrying the cognitive load of managing constant uncertainty, competing incentives, and dependencies on dozens of people and factors you simply cannot control.
And maybe one of the hardest lessons in leadership is accepting that progress is rarely limited by technical knowledge. More often, it’s limited by the complexity of humans working together.
Have you ever felt that your biggest source of stress isn’t the amount of work itself, but the fact that so much of the outcome depends on things completely outside your control?
I’ve come to believe that productivity is as much an engineering problem as any other, and one we’re far worse at solving.
So I sat down with Tejas Pahlajani, founder of Equist and a man with sixteen years across the corporate and non-profit worlds, to talk about it.
His opening line tells you everything about why he’s worth listening to: he describes himself as the most unproductive person he used to know.
Always burnt out, always with too much to do, checking every box of what not to do if you want to stay sane.
He had to learn the way out the hard way, and decided to help other people do it faster.
The five things grinding us down
Tejas surveyed around fifty employees across different companies and found the same five pressures showing up again and again.
Reading them, I recognised every single one from my own desk.
Communication overload.
You wake up to 150 new emails and fifty different requests, and by the hour the pile only grows.
The trap, as Tejas put it, is believing you’ll ever clear it — that there’s a day coming where everything is finally settled. There isn’t. The reward for good work is more work.
The more you get done, the more comes back your way. Accept that, and you can start making real choices instead of chasing an empty inbox that will never exist.
Constant time pressure.
Everything is urgent, everything was due yesterday.
But as the old line goes: what is urgent is seldom important, and what is important is seldom urgent.
In water, where projects are long and multidisciplinary, this is brutal — the genuinely important work (the strategy, the relationship, the design decision that saves you in commissioning) keeps getting shoved aside by whatever’s screaming loudest today.
Fading boundaries.
We used to shut down a desktop and go home. Now we just close the lid — and the phone keeps us tethered anyway. Tejas knows people who wake at two or three in the morning to check email. When does work end and life begin? For too many of us, the honest answer is that it doesn’t.
Inadequate rest and rejuvenation.
The revenge social-media binges, the scrolling, the shorts — all of it eats the rest that focus depends on. We’re tired in a way sleep alone doesn’t fix.
I personally take 30-40 minutes break at lunch time to do some exercise as routine.
Lack of clarity.
Ask five people on a team what its objectives are and you may get five answers. Tejas once asked a team simply what do you do — not the mission, not the purpose, just the work — and nobody could articulate it cleanly. We’re so buried in our own tasks that we lose the larger view entirely.
Three levels, but only two you control
Tejas frames the solutions across three levels: the individual, the team, and the organisation.
Org-level productivity — structure, vision, strategy — matters, but for most of us it’s fixed and far away.
The rubber hits the road (I love this expression) at the individual and team levels.
That’s where we actually live our days, and that’s where the gap is widest. So that’s where he spends his time, and where I’ll spend the rest of this piece.
Fixing your own productivity
At the individual level, Tejas works through six areas. Think of them as a diagnostic: when your day falls apart, one of these is usually the culprit.
Mindset.
This one arrived late in his own journey. He spent years hunting for the tool, the hack, the template, the software — when the most powerful lever was how conducive his own mindset was.
If a voice in your head is telling you it can’t be done, no app will save you.
Prioritisation.
There is no version of the day where you do everything.
The red flag, Tejas says, is wanting to get everything done. You have to choose.
One technique I’d single out: protect fifteen to twenty minutes a day for the one task that will help you grow — the strategy, the new idea, the thing that’s important but never urgent.
We always tell ourselves once I finish this, then I’ll get to it. We rarely do. Fifteen minutes a day, defended, beats the someday that never comes.
Planning.
Here’s an exercise worth doing: forget your constraints and write out your ideal day.
Two things happen.
You get clarity you may never have had before, and you usually discover the ideal day is closer to achievable than you thought — maybe not a hundred percent, but eighty.
And the deeper point Tejas made stuck with me:
The plan itself rarely survives contact with reality, but the thinking you do while planning is the real prize. This is very similar to the value behind The Water MBA: we push our community members to engage in a thinking process, to activate those neurons. That’s what ultimately transforms professionals for the better.
It’s the one moment in the day you think about your work before drowning in it.
This is the one place I’ll admit my own practice. Every morning I open my notebook and write eight points — what I want from the day, the meeting that matters, the thing that can’t slip. I don’t always finish them.
But the planning keeps me from getting lost in the volume. Even when you don’t comply, having the plan helps.
Task management.
The average person carries around a hundred open tasks — scattered across a sticky note, an app, a flagged email, a half-remembered promise.
The tool barely matters. What matters is that everything lives in one place. Tejas keeps a master list digitally so it’s always with him, then writes the day’s handful on paper for the satisfaction of crossing them off. Mix the two if it helps.
Attention.
For me, this is the central barrier of the age — for business and for life. Getting five uninterrupted minutes of someone’s focus is genuinely hard now, and it’s only getting harder. I know that if I sit down to a one-hour webinar, I won’t hold my own attention either. The ability to focus is becoming a serious competitive advantage. The people who relearn it will pull ahead.
Triggers.
And even when your focus is perfect, an email lands or a meeting starts and it’s gone. The whole game is learning to absorb the triggers without letting them shred the deep work.
What to actually do about it
Tejas closed the individual section with concrete moves:
Build a deep-work office.
Focus blocks in the calendar — one or two protected hours a day. Dedicated quiet zones if you’re physical. Deep Work Mondays, or even a deep-work morning, so people catch up before the meeting machine starts (that 8am Monday call when you’ve barely begun the week is the worst feeling in corporate life).
And track your deep work — you can’t improve what you don’t measure. He logs every working day in a Google Sheet, and the tracking alone keeps him honest.
Become priority-focused.
Define weekly priorities. Map the highest-priority tasks for each role, then check how much of the week actually went to them.
A salesperson who spent the week in internal meetings and two hours with a client did not have a good week. Twenty percent of the work delivers eighty percent of the impact — find that twenty percent, go deep, and you build expertise and process you can actually scale.
Enable a positive mindset.
Recognise people beyond awards: a blog post telling someone’s story can be more powerful than a trophy, because almost everyone has an interesting story to tell.
Fixing the team
Same structure, six areas — and in our multidisciplinary world, the team level is where water projects live or die.
Direction.
Is the team clear on its purpose, and is that purpose inspiring? We set revenue goals and delivery targets, but those don’t move anyone. People come to work for the mission — for the impact. Keep reminding them of it.
Delegation.
A real skill, not a personality trait. Individual contributors often struggle to hand work off, and nobody teaches them to. It’s the central skill in the leap from contributor to manager.
Managing upwards.
Build a persona of your manager. Do they want the detailed brief or the short one? Written or verbal? A call right after the meeting, or time to think first? Every manager is different, and figuring yours out early saves you years of friction.
Culture.
High performance lives between rigidity and chaos. Too few processes and you’re ad hoc; too many and you’re frozen. You need both processes and room to experiment.
Meetings.
This is the one I feel most acutely in water.
The work is so multidisciplinary that you spin up a weekly follow-up for every project, every opportunity, every line — and suddenly you’re in ten or fifteen recurring calls a week with no time left to prepare for any of them.
Worse, you sit through most of them adding two minutes of value across an hour, headphones on, half-working in parallel.
Tejas’s framing landed hard: every company has a financial policy for expenses, but almost none has a time policy — even though six hours of meetings is seventy-five percent of someone’s day and seventy-five percent of their cost.
His fixes: a meetings policy document; a cap on daily meeting hours; better-prepared meetings (because good meetings mean fewer meetings); the 40-20-40 rule for large ones (forty percent preparing, twenty percent in the room, forty percent on follow-up); and protected meeting-free slots.
My own rule (I reserve all the rights under Ramon Rubio brand): fifteen to thirty minutes maximum, two or three clear points, decide, and move. Anything longer should mean fewer people and sharper objectives.
Collaboration.
How do you get good ideas from everyone, not just the loudest voices top-down? Tejas pointed to brain writing — having people write their ideas down before the meeting, so they aren’t anchored to whoever speaks first.
I can’t help but “laugh” writing this. In my career, I try to get people to actually show up to meetings, so asking them to write and think before speaking… I’m very far from that now. But I still think the underlying idea is powerful (I believe Amazon, or another well-known company, has done something similar).
Run that way, collaboration can generate up to forty-one percent more ideas than simply opening the floor, where people tend to agree and build rather than originate.
What to actually do about it
Optimise meetings
Using everything above (do not laugh please…), the cap, the quality, the free slots. And for the big ones, collect feedback: why not ask whether an hour of fifteen people’s time was worth it?
Enhance collaboration,
Joint targets across teams, and a focus on meaningful collaboration — not the checkbox kind where you forward an email and call it teamwork.
Real collaboration is when you’d lose something by not doing it. One mechanism I love for water: the bridge role (a typical coordinator or good middle manager) — someone embedded enough in two teams to actively spot where they should be working together.
In a discipline this fragmented, those bridges are gold. The more workload you’re under, the more you need them, precisely when you’re most tempted to retreat into your own silo.
Drive direction
By aligning on first principles (why does this organisation, this team, exist?), setting clear goals — including a no criteria, an explicit line on what you will not take on — balancing process with flexibility, and, crucially, focusing on the what, not the how.
Give a team the what and let them own the how. Managing every detail of the how disempowers the very people you hired to figure it out.
Be safe!
We obsess over recovery rates and pump efficiency and CAPEX optimisation and then we run our own working lives with no policy, no plan, and no boundaries at all.
The pattern is out across the sector: everything is urgent, nothing is ever finished, people exhaust themselves and jump from job to job chasing a calm that no employer can hand them.
The new generations are arriving already feeling it.
Small, defended, compounding choices are how you build the kind of working life you can actually sustain, in water, or anywhere.
Here as usual a brief journey through key quotes.
On burnout
“I call myself the most unproductive person I used to know.”
“I pretty much checked the box of what you should not do to be productive.”
On communication overload
“The reward for good work is more work. The more you get done, the more you get in return.”
On the trap: “thinking that you’ll be able to get over your email, finally reach a day where everything is settled.”
Ramón: “Maybe we wake up a day with 150 new emails and 50 different requests.”
On urgency
“What is urgent is seldom important, and what is important is seldom urgent.”
On fading boundaries
“When does work end and when does personal life begin has become a blur.”
“I know of people who get up in the middle of the night to check their email — 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock.”
On clarity
“You ask five people in a team what the objectives are, you may get five different answers.”
On mindset
“I always felt like I needed a tool, a hack, a template, a software. But in reality, one of the most powerful things is how conducive your mindset is.”
On prioritisation
“If you want to get everything done — that’s a big red flag.”
“Just take 15–20 minutes a day working on something that’s not urgent but important in the long run. Otherwise you’ll never have time.”
On planning
“It’s not necessarily the plan that’s important, because the plan rarely happens. It’s the thinking you put in when you planned that matters more.”
Ramón: “Even if you don’t manage to comply, having a planning always helps.”
On task management
“The tool doesn’t matter so much — Notion, Todoist, paper. The main thing is being able to put your tasks down somewhere.”
On attention
Ramón: “For me this is the main barrier nowadays — for business, for everything, even for personal life.”
“It’s going to be a huge competitive advantage if you can learn how to focus again.”
“We’re going shorter and shorter and shorter.”
On meetings
“Every company has a financial policy for expenses, but we don’t have a time policy.”
“If you spend six hours of eight in meetings, that’s 75% of your time — and 75% of the person’s cost — but it’s not governed by any policy.”
Ramón: “In the end we are just there physically, but not mentally.”
The 40-20-40 rule: “40% before the meeting preparing, 20% executing, 40% afterwards in follow-ups.”
On collaboration
“Collaboration should feel like: if I don’t make this happen, I’m actually losing something. Until that feeling is there, you won’t collaborate effectively.”
On brain writing: writing ideas down before the meeting “can generate up to 41% more ideas.”
On bridge roles: having people who understand both teams so “they see collaboration opportunities actively.”
On feedback
Ramón: “Feedback, in all aspects of life, is very important.”
“You should be surprised if you don’t get any feedback, because there is always some feedback that exists.”
On managing upwards
“Figuring out your particular manager’s persona early will save you a lot of stress in the future.”
On direction
“Focus on the what, not the how. Give the team the what and let them figure out the how.”
On boundaries: “Having a no criteria — deciding what you will not work on.”
On recognition
“Recognising people beyond awards — a blog post telling their story can be very powerful.”
My thanks to Tejas Pahlajani for a conversation that, fittingly, was the most productive hour of my week.
