For the past few years, many headlines have been telling us we’re all a little checked out at work. From passive-aggressive quiet quitting to spooky-sounding “ghost working,” people are asleep at the wheel, or at least dozing off every few miles, this line of thinking maintains.

But what if that’s not true, at least for a meaningful portion of us?

What if there’s a good-sized group of folks who feel pretty overworked … but remain both motivated and effective? In the current job market, where changing your working conditions can feel well beyond your reach, what can we learn from these employees on how to keep pushing through?

In April 2025, in conjunction with Patrick Hyland, Ph.D., an organizational psychologist at Remesh, my company Anthrome Insight conducted a study of more than 1,000 people across industries, the organizational hierarchy, and generations that focused on how they are dealing with a phenomenon called work intensification. Work intensification is when work is too much — too many tasks to do in too little time, too much bureaucracy and interdependencies, or too much emotional labor. (Sometimes it can be all three!) Unsurprisingly, 75% of our respondents said they feel legitimately whacked by work intensification and overwhelmed at least some of the time.

Here’s what’s strange: When we examined the data on effectiveness and motivation, we identified a good-sized chunk of people who reported feeling both pretty effective (getting all or most of what they need to do done on a day-to-day basis) and motivated (highly or somewhat more motivated recently) but also feeling always or often overwhelmed. Twelve percent of our sample felt that way — almost 1 in 8 people.

I love a counterintuitive finding, but this one really puzzled me. These folks were wrestling with exhaustion and turned on the afterburner? Instead of quiet quitting, they were quiet questing? Quiet quickstepping? (I’ll stop — verbs that start with Q are in pretty short supply.) In my mind, high levels of overwhelm should be productivity and motivation killers, but these folks defied that otherwise logical assumption. These leaders are “desert flowers,” thriving under harsh conditions.

Digging into the data further, we found that this effective, motivated, but overwhelmed group of leaders has some lessons for us all.

Three Lessons on Overwork

Let’s explore what the desert flowers can teach us about work overload.

1. Actively, passionately fight the ways that work is “too much.”

I’ve lost track of how many conversations I’ve had about how difficult it feels to fight the overwhelming nature of work. Many people feel hopeless about it. Intensified work is, after all, what social scientists call a “wicked problem,” with many tangled causes; fighting bad work can feel like wrestling an octopus.

But the desert flowers are indeed fighting. We asked our study participants whether they were taking action against the three dimensions of work intensification. The desert flowers were far more likely than the average person to be passionate about trying fixes. They were 43% more likely to consistently try to reduce workload, 55% more likely to regularly try to work more independently, and 48% more likely to habitually try to reduce emotion in the workplace. The action is a big piece of these leaders’ secret sauce for staying motivated and effective even when they feel work is too much: They’re focused, day in and day out, on doing something about it.

Let’s look at one example: managing emotion in the workplace. To fight this aspect of work intensification, the desert flowers began from a place of self-regulation but quickly looped in other people. This group frequently described taking thoughtful pauses from work, with other coworkers in tow: “I do positive affirmation exercises with other members of my team,” one respondent reported.

That comment embodies three constructive choices that surfaced in a number of the group’s other research responses: a thoughtful pause, a reframe along positive lines, and a moment of community. The desert flowers are not going it alone or relying solely on themselves. To create a better emotional ecosystem, they’re marshaling the energy of the team around them. This is a highly active stance.