The tricky thing about burnout is that it doesn't arrive all at once. It builds slowly, week by week, until the accumulation becomes undeniable. Which means most people who are burned out spend weeks or months telling themselves they're just tired.
These 8 questions are designed to cut through that rationalization. Answer them honestly — not how you wish things were, but how they actually are right now.
1. Does rest actually restore you?
Take a proper weekend off — no Slack, no email, genuinely disconnected. Do you feel restored on Monday, or do you feel exactly the same? Tiredness lifts after real rest. Burnout doesn't. If you've taken breaks recently and they haven't helped, that's the clearest signal there is.
2. Has your interest in your work changed over the past few months?
Not just this week — over the past 2-3 months. Is there anything about your work you look forward to? Or has that feeling quietly disappeared? Sustained loss of interest over months is one of the defining characteristics of burnout, and one of the first things people stop noticing because it happens so gradually.
3. How do Sunday evenings feel?
Sunday dread is one of the most reliable early indicators. Not just mild reluctance about Monday — but a heaviness, an anxiety, a feeling that the weekend wasn't enough. If Sunday evenings have gotten noticeably harder over time, your nervous system is trying to tell you something.
4. Are you more cynical than you used to be?
Cynicism about work — about your company, your team, the value of what you're building — is one of the three hallmarks of burnout according to the World Health Organization. It's the mind's way of creating distance from something that's hurting it. If you've become more detached or dismissive about things that used to matter, take note.
5. Is your exhaustion proportional to what you've actually done?
Everyone gets tired after a genuinely hard week. But if a normal Tuesday feels as crushing as a sprint deadline, that disproportionality is significant. Burnout flattens your capacity — everything costs more, even things that used to be easy. If you're exhausted by work that shouldn't be exhausting, that's worth paying attention to.
6. Are you more irritable at home than you used to be?
Burnout doesn't stay at work. When your emotional reserves are depleted, you have less patience for everything — and the people closest to you often feel it first. If your family or friends have noticed a change, or if you've noticed yourself being shorter-tempered outside of work, that spillover is a sign your system is overwhelmed.
7. Are you going through the motions?
This one is subtle. It's not that you're not working — you might be working hard. But there's a difference between working because you care about the outcome and working because it's what you do. If you've started showing up, completing tasks, and shipping things without any real investment in whether they go well, that detachment is a burnout signal.
8. Has anything changed in the last 3-6 months?
Burnout usually has a cause — or a confluence of causes. A new manager, a project you didn't want, an on-call rotation that never ends, a reorg that left things unclear, a promotion that came with more weight than support. Sometimes naming what changed is enough to start understanding what's happening.
What to do with your answers
If you answered yes to 2-3 of these questions, you're likely in the early stages of burnout — or heading there. The good news is that early burnout is much easier to address. Small changes now can prevent a much longer recovery later.
If you answered yes to 5 or more, you're probably already burned out. That's not a judgment — it's information. And it means the most important thing you can do right now is stop treating this like tiredness and start treating it like what it is.
Either way, the first step is the same: start paying attention. Not to how you wish you felt, but to how you actually feel — consistently, over time. That data is the foundation of everything else.
Recharge is a private daily check-in tool built for engineers, PMs, and founders. It tracks your burnout signals over time so you can see patterns before they become crises.