Beat Burnout by Changing Your Time-Beliefs

This talk is part of our annual Summer Series ’25: A week of an hour-long daily keynotes.

In her session Anna Katharina Schaffner, PHD, Burnout and Executive Coach (CPCC), Writer, Speaker, offered a powerful and refreshing perspective on burnout: our distorted relationship with time. Sharing her own experience of “time madness” and what she observes in her clients, Anna explained how unhelpful time beliefs, shaped by culture, history, and technology, drive us into exhaustion. Rather than cutting more from our lives, she urged us to reintroduce activities that nourish us, to challenge the relentless productivity mindset, and to ask what truly counts as time well spent.

Key takeaways from Anna’s Beat Burnout by Changing Your Time-Beliefs talk:

• Unhelpful time beliefs fuel burnout – seeing time as an enemy or constantly racing against it traps us in overwork and under‑rest.

• Reintroduce what energises you –