Why I protect my employees from the existential dread of a light workload

I was recently reading a harrowing personal essay titled "I Have a Light Workload and I Simply Can’t Handle It" while waiting for my Gulfstream to be de-iced in Davos. The author described the profound, unmooring emptiness of logging on at 9:00 AM and realizing all their assigned tasks could be comfortably completed by noon.

My heart broke for them. It is an absolute tragedy that any professional should be left alone with their own thoughts for four uninterrupted hours, forced to stare into the abyss of a blinking Slack cursor while waiting for a directive that never comes. We are living through an epidemic of psychological devastation in the modern workplace, and it is entirely self-inflicted by managers who simply refuse to assign enough deliverables.

Let me be clear: the cruelty of the light workload must end.

For years, the business press has obsessed over the concept of "burnout," entirely ignoring the far more insidious threat of adequate free time. When a knowledge worker is given a realistic timeline, the mind inevitably begins to wander. They finish their designated tasks and are suddenly confronted with the terrifying silence of an afternoon without a fire drill. They look around their home office. They notice the dust on their baseboards. They begin to ask dangerous, unproductive questions. Is this spreadsheet actually necessary? What is the purpose of this quarterly review? Am I fundamentally alone in the universe?

This is not self-actualization. It is an unforced error in resource allocation that directly threatens shareholder value.

The best founders I know understand that human beings are essentially high-performance greyhounds. If you do not keep them chasing a mechanical rabbit made of arbitrary Q3 KPIs, they will simply chew through the drywall of their own psyche. When you remove the apex predator—in this case, an irrational Vice President demanding a forty-slide deck on a Friday night—the brain turns on itself. This is why employees with light workloads inevitably begin organizing their inboxes by color, or worse, joining optional committees for "culture building." They are desperately trying to simulate the feeling of being hunted.

I saw this crisis play out across the S&P 500 during the last earnings season. I listened as a tech CEO apologized to the street for a dip in productivity, citing a "stabilized operational cadence." I nearly threw my AirPods into the Mediterranean.

A stabilized cadence is corporate hospice. If your team isn't desperately triaging competing emergencies, you are quite literally starving them of the cortisol they need to feel alive. They do not want a light workload; they want the sheer exhilaration of eating a lukewarm Sweetgreen salad over a keyboard at 9:45 PM while fixing a deck for a client who doesn't even know what they want.

This fundamental misunderstanding of human psychology is why I have long argued that mass layoffs are actually a form of mass therapeutic intervention. When a company "right-sizes" its headcount, the media immediately focuses on the people who lost their jobs. What they fail to celebrate is the incredible gift being given to the survivors: the sudden, crushing inheritance of three other people's responsibilities.

By firing twenty percent of your workforce, you are providing the remaining eighty percent with a foolproof shield against existential dread. There is simply no time to ponder the inherent meaninglessness of a B2B SaaS marketing strategy when you are doing the jobs of an entire departed department. We call it "creating synergies," but what we really mean is "salvation."

I deployed this exact strategy at my last startup. We had a junior product manager—let’s call him Tyler—who came to me complaining of listlessness. He was finishing his sprints by Thursday afternoon and spending Fridays "researching market trends." It was a clear cry for help. I immediately fired his two peers and tasked Tyler with migrating our entire legacy database over the weekend.

By Sunday morning, his listlessness was gone. It had been replaced by a beautiful, trembling focus. His hands shook as he handed me the final report, his eyes wide with the raw, untamed energy of a man who hasn't slept in 48 hours. He thanked me. Or at least, he made a noise that sounded like gratitude before collapsing on the beanbag chair in the breakroom. He hasn't had time to experience a negative emotion in eighteen months.

The macroeconomic headwinds only underscore my point. With Chairman Powell holding rates steady, capital is no longer free. We can no longer afford to subsidize the luxury of an empty afternoon. Every fifteen-minute block of "white space" on a Google Calendar is a micro-betrayal of the American economy, a leakage of potential energy that could have been harnessed to marginally increase a dividend yield before the next print.

The burden, ultimately, falls on leadership. It takes real effort to invent fake emergencies. It requires imagination to look at a perfectly functioning, low-stress department and figure out how to plunge it into total chaos by moving a product launch up by three weeks for no discernible reason. But that is the burden of command. We must do the hard work of creating panic, so our employees do not have to do the hard work of sitting with themselves.

So the next time you find yourself with a "light workload," do not write a confessional essay about your inability to handle it. Do not sit there letting the deafening silence of a completed to-do list slowly erode your sanity. March into your supervisor's office, demand they double your targets, and ask them to manufacture a crisis out of thin air. Your mental health depends on it.