Everything you've been told about burnout is wrong | Bscholl 

Reminds me of #23 from Principles :

Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’.

Here's the main point in 3 paragraphs:

Burnout is not what it presents: it’s not about working too hard for too long, burnout is about working in the face of a goal that seems too far out, too unattainable, too abstract.

Everyone has what I’ve come to call a “gratification window,” the period of time in which there must be a believable reward in order to stay motivated. As exemplified in the Marshmallow Test, kids can have notoriously short gratification windows. Founders probably have some of the longest gratification windows—willng to work years or even decades to realize a goal. Most people lie somewhere in the middle.

The principle of a gratification window applies to all of us. So long as there’s something tangible, believable and motivating within their gratification window, great people will happily work long, smart, and hard—often with remarkably little rest. When there’s nothing in the gratification window, even great people feel burned out. And they will feel that burnout even when working not that hard—even when coming straight off a break.