Why We’re Exhausted Despite Flexible Schedules

It’s Monday.

Specifically, the Monday between Christmas and New Year’s—the liminal space of the calendar where time is fake, inboxes are quiet(-ish), and everyone is technically “working” while hoping no one notices they are not.

You are free to work today.
You are also free not to.
Both options feel vaguely wrong.

Welcome to the promise of flexibility.

On paper, academic life offers enviable (safe to say, prestigious) freedom: no punch clocks, no fixed hours, no one checking whether you logged on at 9 a.m. In practice, that freedom often leaves us more tired than rigid schedules ever did.

Flexibility Doesn’t Reduce Work. It Removes the Stop Button.

Ironically, (and many of you don’t know), a flexible schedule doesn’t shrink your workload. It dissolves the boundaries around it.

Teaching leaks into research. Research leaks into service. Service leaks into email. Email leaks into the background hum of your brain while you’re supposed to be relaxing, eating, enjoying quality family time, or just “taking a break” that feels suspiciously like procrastination.

Work no longer starts or ends. It just… exists.

Autonomy Turns You into Management

No one tells you when to work, so you do what any responsible academic would do: you supervise yourself constantly.

You become your own boss, project manager, and productivity app. You notice, at all hours, that you could be doing more. Reading more. Writing more. Optimizing something.

Flexibility replaces external oversight with internalized pressure. You are never explicitly behind, but you are also never fully caught up.

The Exhaustion Is Cognitive

The exhaustion doesn’t come from long hours alone. It comes from fragmentation.

A day spent toggling between lecturing, mentoring, reviewing, administrating, and answering emails is not flexible: it’s cognitively violent. You are asked to switch identities every 30 minutes and perform each one competently.

By the end of the day, you haven’t lifted anything heavy, yet you are inexplicably drained.

A pocket watch partially buried in sand, symbolizing exhaustion.

Flexible Schedules Assume Invisible Support

Flexibility works best if you already have:

protected time
emotional bandwidth
minimal family/caregiving responsibilities
a life that stays out of the way (which is never the case)

For everyone else, flexibility simply means work happens whenever the rest of life allows it—often late, often tired, often with guilt.

There Is No Official End to the Day

The real problem with flexible schedules is that they never tell you when you’re done.

There is no bell. No clock-out moment. No visibly defined stopping point. Rest feels arbitrary, even indulgent.

So you half-work while resting and half-rest while working. You never fully do either.

Back to Today

Which brings us back to this Monday between Christmas and New Year’s.

You could work. No one would stop you.
You could not work. No one would notice.

Either way, you might feel uneasy, because flexibility doesn’t grant permission. It just hands you the decision and lets you sit with it.

Random Concluding Thoughts

Maybe the exhaustion isn’t because we lack discipline or time management. Maybe it’s because work without edges quietly consumes more than it should.

If flexibility is here to stay, we might need to relearn something unfashionable in academia: stopping is not a moral failure. It’s a boundary.

And boundaries, it turns out, are not the opposite of freedom. They’re what make it usable.

…says a butt-hurt millennial professor who rushed to meet a deadline today, only to be greeted by an automatic reply that read: I’m out of the office.