Last January I spent three weeks on a research sabbatical in Kyoto, deliberately away from every notification channel my company uses. Before that trip, I had not gone more than six waking hours without checking team chat since 2019. The silence was disorienting — and then, slowly, clarifying. When I returned, I started asking colleagues a blunt question: when was the last time you felt genuinely off the clock?
The Response Tax We Pay Every Hour
What I found was not burnout in the clinical sense, but something more diffuse. Thirty-one of the forty people I spoke with described a low-grade vigilance — a background process always running, checking whether someone had pinged them, whether a thread had moved forward without their input. Dr. Rebecca Torres at a workplace research lab calls this "anticipatory labor": the cognitive overhead of being perpetually on-call, even during supposedly protected time.