How Burnout Cost Me $84k in One Month

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A long-term client I had worked with for nearly a decade reached out to me about rebuilding their website, and I almost chose not to submit a proposal.

At the time, I was working 75-hour weeks year after year with almost no downtime and no room for error.

Even making time for the proposal felt exhausting.

I barely had enough time to keep up with my current commitments, and adding one more thing felt overwhelming.

But I carved out the hours and submitted it.

I had a great relationship with them and knew their work and mission inside and out. I didn’t know anyone else who could provide them with what they needed better than I could.

What I didn’t have anymore was the energy to pursue something I knew I should have won.

Even though I had a fantastic relationship with my contact, I didn’t go after the project with any real tenacity.

I submitted the proposal and went right back to the hundred items on my to-do list.

I lost the project to another local developer.

And that was one of many moments that year that made me realize my career had become a monster I could no longer contain.

It had grown so large that even I, the person who built it, was struggling to keep up with it.

Long story short, the developer delivered the website months late, and on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say it was probably a 7.5.

Guess whose images were used throughout the site? Mine.

Guess who was asked to review the entire site before it went live, pro bono? Me.

And then I found out they paid $84k for it.

That was the moment I realized how badly I had undervalued my own time.

It took me more than three years to make that amount of money working with them in my day-to-day work.

I could have made $84k in a month, delivered them a better product on time, and everyone would have won, especially the user.

That experience became one of many wake-up calls for me about where I was placing my time, energy, and value.

Sometimes we get so buried in the work, the deadlines, and the stability of long-term relationships that we stop stepping back to evaluate the bigger picture.

Burnout doesn’t always look like exhaustion.

Sometimes it looks like missed opportunities you were perfectly qualified for.

The scariest part about burnout is that you often don’t realize it’s happening until you stop going after the very things you know you can do better than the other qualified applicants.

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