Project Overload: How Startups Burn Out Their Best People

I was listening to this HBR IdeaCast episode, The Risks of Putting People on Too Many Project Teams the other day. The message was clear: spread people too thin, and productivity collapses. Velocity drops, quality slips, and your best people quietly burn out. The hosts pointed to context switching, initiative overload, and multi-team fatigue. You don't see these in dashboards, but you feel them in missed deadlines and drained faces.

The cost of context switching

An engineer splitting between two projects isn't 50/50. They're constantly reloading mental state, syncing with two sets of people, juggling different priorities. That overhead compounds until neither project gets their best work. Research from the University of California, Irvine found it takes an average of 23-25 minutes to regain focus after an interruption. Multiply that across a week, and you've lost entire days of deep work. For a startup, that's deadly.

I've seen this play out in standups. Developers showing up unsure which sprint's tickets to prioritize. Slack pings from three channels lighting up at once. Meetings for one product spilling into prep time for another. It looks like productivity-but it's chaos disguised as momentum.

The do-it-all trap

Startups love multi-hat people. One PM running five sprints. One backend dev across three products. On paper it looks efficient. In reality it's slow bleed. You're not multiplying talent, you're dividing it.

The bigger trap is leadership itself. Founders say yes to every shiny client request or investor nudge. Each yes adds another half-baked roadmap item. Documentation slips. Nobody analyses impact. Teams build just to show movement, not because it matters. Ship fast? Yes. Ship sharp? Rarely.

I've seen this firsthand. We once shipped custom client features that weren't core to the product. Six months later, they sat unused while our backlog bloated. Another time, we burned a sprint on an investor-driven experiment that never launched. Saying yes too often means saying no to your own roadmap.

WhatsApp built its scale with forty engineers focused on one product. Imagine a startup today: ten engineers split across three products, five investor asks, and a dozen client escalations. That's not scale-it's slow motion collapse. Focus beats headcount every single time.

Burnout is real

One of my teammates hit that wall last year. We'd stacked him on product releases, production support, and side experiments. Slack replies got clipped. Code reviews lagged. Standup energy drained. He was still there, but the spark was gone.

Instead of pushing harder, we pulled him off all new feature work for two weeks. His role was narrowed to pure WFH, handling only production support on his own hours. The rest of the team stepped up to cover. He came back sharper, more rested, and more motivated. The team bonded too, having shouldered the load together. That break didn't just save him-it saved the group's momentum.

I've seen the opposite too. A strong engineer left after being stretched across three projects without a reset. The cost wasn't just hiring. We lost months of knowledge transfer and product momentum. Recovery will always cost less than replacement.

The culture of guilt and fear

Here's the darker part. People rarely say no. They nod, accept, and burn out quietly because they don't want to look less committed. Startups unintentionally breed a guilt economy: if I'm not everywhere, I'm not valuable.

I've seen it firsthand-engineers afraid to decline new work, PMs agreeing to impossible timelines because saying no feels like career suicide. It buys short-term peace but creates long-term rot. Teams that operate from fear stop experimenting. Creativity dies when survival mode kicks in.

The podcast called it initiative overload, but I've always seen it as emotional overload. Fear-driven work fills calendars and Slack threads but empties people out. That's how startups lose their edge.

What leaders can do

This isn't solved by perks. It's solved by discipline.

• Delegate effectively: Stop hoarding projects with the same few reliable people. Spread ownership, even if it means slower onboarding.
• Learn to say no: Clients and investors will always want more. Founders too. But focus is subtraction, not addition. Not every idea deserves a sprint.
• Prioritize and focus: One owner, one outcome, one mission at a time. Document trade-offs. Analyse impact before green-lighting. Ship because it matters, not because it looks good in a demo.

I've learned this the hard way. Last quarter we killed a shiny feature investors loved because it distracted from our core release. Another time, we paused a flashy "AI" experiment that excited everyone but had no path to user value. Those calls weren't easy in the moment. But months later, the payoff was undeniable: sharper focus, faster delivery, and happier users.

TL;DR

The IdeaCast said it best:

When people are spread across too many projects, they’re effectively nowhere.

Startups don’t struggle because of a lack of ideas, they struggle because they chase too many at once. I’ve myself made same mistakes: taken on every client ask, every investor suggestion, every shiny side project, and watched focus evaporate. The tax shows up as endless context switching, scattered roadmaps, burnout, and work that looks busy but doesn’t move the needle.

The hard-earned lesson: protect focus. Do less, but do it well. Be willing to say no, even when it feels uncomfortable. That’s how small teams punch above their weight, that’s how products actually ship, and that’s how you build momentum that compounds over time.