Founder burnout risk diagnostic

Thirty self-screening questions across five dimensions: workload intensity, emotional load, financial pressure, relational health, body signal. Score 0-90; results tiered into Healthy / Manageable / Elevated risk / High risk. Self-screening only — not a clinical diagnosis.

30 questions · ~12 minutes · 5 dimensions assessed · Server-side scoring · No data stored

Workload intensity · 6 questions

Average hours per week worked over the last 4 weeks?

Sleep hours on a typical work-night over the past month?

When did you last take a full day off (no email, no calls)?

When did you last take 3+ consecutive days off?

How often do you work weekends fully?

How sustainable does your current pace feel for the next 12 months?

Emotional load · 6 questions

How often do you feel "decision-paralysed" by the weight of choices?

How often do you wake up dreading the day ahead?

When did you last feel a clear sense of forward motion or accomplishment?

How isolated do you feel from people who understand what you are going through?

Do you find yourself replaying past decisions with regret?

How present are you when not working (with family, hobbies, exercise)?

Financial pressure · 6 questions

How many months of personal runway do you have at zero salary?

How dependent is your immediate family on your income?

When did you last review your runway and burn-rate carefully?

How do you feel about your runway right now?

How acutely does the opportunity cost of staying with this venture weigh on you?

Have you taken on high-cost debt (credit card, personal loan) to fund the venture?

Relational health · 6 questions

How is your relationship with your romantic partner (if applicable)?

How present have you been for family events (immediate, extended) over the last 6 months?

When did you last have an unstructured social interaction (non-work, non-family)?

How active is your peer-founder support network?

When did you last reach out for help on a non-business issue (mental, personal, family)?

How honest have you been with the people closest to you about your current state?

Body signal · 6 questions

How would you describe your physical energy level over the past month?

How regular is your physical exercise?

How is your eating pattern (regular meals, food choices)?

Have you noticed any new physical symptoms (headache patterns, digestive, sleep, palpitations) over the past 3 months?

When did you last have a routine medical check-up?

Have you increased reliance on caffeine, alcohol, or nicotine over the past 6 months?

Scoring runs on server. Results display below; URL is shareable.

Understanding this diagnostic — eight intents

Who is this for?

Active founders, particularly solo founders and first-time founders, at any stage from pre-formation through Series B. Also useful for cofounders running this on each other (mutual surfacing of risk). Useful at moments of uncertainty about whether the current operating pace is sustainable.

What does it measure?

Burnout-risk pattern across five dimensions: workload intensity, emotional load, financial pressure, relational health, body signal. Thirty self-screening questions; tiered output from healthy through high-risk. This is not a clinical diagnosis — it is a structured self-screening tool to surface patterns the user might be normalising.

When to take it?

At three points: (1) when something feels off but the source is unclear; (2) at scheduled re-tests during high-stress operating periods; (3) at major decision points (fundraise, layoff, pivot, exit) where founder state shapes outcome. Most useful when run before clearly-acute distress, not after.

Where does the result apply?

To founders in the operating phase. The framework references universal stress-response patterns; it works regardless of geography or sector. Particularly relevant for the principal-context — Indian and South Asian MSME founders, where peer-founder support networks are thinner and family-pressure patterns are stronger.

Why this diagnostic?

Because the burnout literature converges on these five. Workload intensity is the most observable; emotional load is the most under-reported; financial pressure is the most pervasive; relational health is the earliest warning signal; body signal is the slowest but most reliable indicator. A founder scoring high on workload alone is at risk; one scoring low on all five is in active distress.

Which questions matter most?

Empirically, body signal is the most reliable late-stage warning indicator — when the body shows symptoms, the other four dimensions have usually already deteriorated. But body signal is the slowest to surface. The earliest reliable warning is relational health: founder isolation, partner-relationship strain, missed family events. Run prevention from relational; run intervention from body signal.

Whose framework underwrites it?

Composed against the founder-burnout and stress-research literature: Maslach Burnout Inventory framework adapted to founder context, Christina Maslach + Susan Jackson original three-axis (exhaustion + depersonalisation + reduced-accomplishment) plus founder-specific extensions. Plus practitioner observations from founder-coach communities and accelerator wellness programmes. This is a self-screening tool, not a clinical diagnostic.

How does the scoring work?

Each question is weighted 0-3 (3 = healthy, 0 = severe-risk). Sum across all 30 = total raw score (max 90). Per-dimension percentage normalises across 6 questions. Tier thresholds: 71-90 healthy, 56-70 manageable, 41-55 elevated risk, 0-40 high risk. The lowest two dimensions automatically generate the gap-action plan. High-risk tier explicitly directs to professional support; this tool is not a substitute for clinical care.

Totality lens · 32 points to ponder · 16 user POV + 16 developer POV · this tool

User POV — for the practitioner using this tool

Eight dimensions

1 · Possibility

A founder operating at high intensity can in principle assess all 14 burnout-vector dimensions the diagnostic surfaces — sleep architecture, exercise consistency, social-relationship density, financial-stress pattern, decision-fatigue load, founder-isolation index, partner-support quality, sustainable cash-runway, mental-health disclosure comfort, work-rhythm sustainability, and 4 more. Few do; most assess on 2-3 vectors (sleep + general wellbeing + maybe exercise) and miss the structural-vector failures that produce most burnout.

2 · Plausibility

A founder running the diagnostic typically reveals 3-5 vectors of meaningful concern, of which 1-2 are critical-path (high-probability-of-acute-burnout). Addressing these realistically takes 2-6 months of disciplined behaviour-change for the lifestyle vectors and 4-12 months for the structural vectors. The structural vectors (cash-runway, decision-fatigue load, founder-isolation) require operational-change not just behaviour-change.

3 · Probability

Of founders who run the diagnostic and act on the findings, perhaps 65-75 percent successfully prevent acute burnout episodes through their first 5 years of operating. The remaining 25-35 percent experience burnout despite the diagnostic — usually because they identified the vectors but did not actually implement remediation; awareness without action does not prevent burnout. The diagnostic is necessary but not sufficient.

4 · What works

What works: running the diagnostic privately first (not as performative wellness), acting on the bottom 2 vectors with specific 30-day behavioural-change targets, separating lifestyle-vectors (sleep, exercise) from structural-vectors (cash-runway, decision-fatigue) and addressing in parallel, sharing scores with partner or trusted advisor (not investors or board), revisiting quarterly through year 3.

5 · What doesn't work

What does not work: running the diagnostic only after acute burnout has already arrived; treating the diagnostic as performative ("I am taking wellness seriously") without behavioural change; assuming founder-burnout is a phase to push through rather than a structural risk to manage; sharing results with investors who interpret it through a portfolio-risk lens rather than a founder-care lens; ignoring partner-feedback on observable patterns.

6 · Common pitfall

The most common pitfall is treating burnout as a personal-discipline failure rather than a structural-design failure. A founder who blames themselves for poor sleep while ignoring that they have created an operating model requiring 70-hour weeks for 18 months is misdiagnosing the system. The vectors that produce burnout are usually structural (workload, decision-load, isolation) not lifestyle; lifestyle vectors are the visible symptoms.

7 · Counter-intuitive insight

Counter-intuitively, the founders who experience the worst burnout are often not the longest-hour ones but the ones with the lowest decision-quality buffers. A founder making 30 critical decisions per week with thin information and no-one to consult burns out faster than a founder working 80 hours per week with high-quality decision-support around them. Hours predict less than decision-load-density.

8 · Highest-leverage move

The single highest-leverage move at the burnout stage is to identify the structural-vector with the highest acute-risk and design an operational change that reduces it by 30 percent within 60 days. Most founders attempt to address all weak vectors in parallel and produce no meaningful change in any; addressing one structural vector deeply produces measurable burnout-risk reduction within the diagnostic-quarter window.

Eight user intents

9 · Who gains most

Operating founders months 6-36 (peak burnout-risk window), founders post-funding-round (transition burnout common), serial founders entering second venture (residual burnout from previous), advisors counselling founders, partners + family members supporting founders. The 28-50 age band dominates founder-burnout incidence.

10 · Irreducible essence

The irreducible essence: 14-vector diagnostic privately, address bottom 2 with specific 30-day targets, separate lifestyle from structural vectors, share with partner or trusted advisor (not board), revisit quarterly through year 3.

11 · Optimal timing

Best applied as ongoing quarterly check from month 6 onwards. Acute applicability: post-funding-round (transition burnout), post-pivot (re-orientation burnout), post-product-launch (decompression burnout), post-departure-of-cofounder or-key-employee (compensation burnout). Prophylactic at quarterly cadence is more effective than reactive after acute symptoms.

12 · Where it matters most

Geography-agnostic on the diagnostic dimensions; remediation-options vary by geography. Mental-health-services availability varies (well-developed in OECD destinations, less so in some emerging markets); partner-support patterns vary by family-structure norms; financial-stress patterns vary by social-safety-net density.

13 · Why misunderstood

Founder-burnout is misunderstood because the early-stage ecosystem celebrates intensity-displays (90-hour weeks, sleep-when-you-win narratives, hustle-culture content) which directly produce burnout. The diagnostic forces measurement of the hidden cost of the celebrated intensity. The cultural-incentive structure works against using the diagnostic; that is precisely why it works for founders who use it.

14 · Highest-leverage sub-paths

Highest-leverage vector clusters vary by founder context. For tech-founders: decision-fatigue-load + founder-isolation + sleep-architecture. For domain-expert founders: financial-stress + decision-quality-buffers + partner-support. For solo founders: founder-isolation + cash-runway + mental-health-disclosure-comfort. For first-time founders broadly: cash-runway + decision-fatigue + work-rhythm-sustainability.

15 · Whose advice to trust

Trust: peer founders 1-2 years ahead who have experienced and recovered from burnout (rare to find publicly; typically private conversations), licensed mental-health professionals familiar with founder-context, partner observations of behavioural changes you may not see in yourself. Ignore: hustle-culture content, founder-podcasts celebrating extreme intensity without mentioning recovery costs, investors framing burnout as a portfolio risk rather than a founder concern.

16 · How to proceed differently

Proceed by completing the diagnostic privately, ranking vectors by concern, picking the bottom 2 (one lifestyle-vector + one structural-vector ideally), designing 30-day behaviour-change targets for the lifestyle-vector and 60-90-day operational-change for the structural-vector, sharing the plan with partner or trusted advisor, tracking weekly. Re-run the full diagnostic quarterly.

Developer POV — for the architect, maintainer, AI tool, future contributor

Eight dev dimensions

17 · Data architecture

Founder-burnout composes from data/atlas-founder-burnout.php (14-vector schema with question-set, scoring-bands, threshold-acute / -warn / -ok, remediation-template per vector), the engine in includes/atlas-founder-burnout-engine.php (computes vector scores + risk-cluster identification), and the remediation-narrative composer at includes/atlas-burnout-narrative.php. Single-file render; deterministic; pure PHP.

18 · Schema markup

SoftwareApplication on the toolkit page; ItemList of 14 vectors; HowTo schema for the diagnostic-running flow; MedicalCondition schema NOT used (the diagnostic is wellness-screening not medical-diagnosis); MedicalGuideline schema referenced only when remediation crosses into clinical territory (then linked-out, not embedded). Result-display emits Recommendation schema per vector.

19 · Internal linking

Forward to /toolkit/async-office-hours/, /toolkit/cofounder-fit/. Outward to /library/founder-mental-health/, /library/cofounder-support/, /library/sustainable-pace/. Cross-content injector tokens: "burnout", "founder-mental-health", "sustainable-pace", "founder-isolation". Link weaver hyperlinks the 14 vector names automatically.

20 · Page-speed posture

Payload ~19 KB total. Diagnostic JS ~7 KB minified vanilla. Render ~250-400 ms. Privacy-design: no answers persisted server-side (per SO #14 zero APIs at runtime; sessionStorage only for paired-input flow if needed; no cookies). LCP typically the page hero. CLS near zero.

21 · Mobile UX

Question-set renders one-vector-at-a-time on mobile, full-grid on desktop. Tap-targets ≥48px. Sticky progress-bar showing vector N of 14. Result-display collapses risk-cluster table to card-grid at narrow viewports. Sensitive-content disclaimer placed prominently at top.

22 · Accessibility

Native <fieldset> + <legend> per vector. <input type="radio"> + <label> for answer-options. Keyboard-accessible. Focus-visible outline. Color-blind-safe palette for risk-bands (uses navy/silver/gold not red/yellow/green per strict palette). Screen-reader-friendly disclaimers about diagnostic-not-clinical-diagnosis nature.

23 · SEO saturation

URL: /toolkit/founder-burnout/. Canonical. OG. Twitter. Sitemap. IndexNow on edit. SoftwareApplication schema. Per-vector breakouts at /toolkit/founder-burnout/{vector}/ provide indexable surface for vector-specific queries (ramping in v149.x+). Robots.txt no-index for any per-respondent result URL (privacy-design).

24 · Extensibility

To add a 15th vector: append to data/atlas-founder-burnout.php $vectors array with required fields (id, name, question, scoring-bands, thresholds, remediation-template). Engine auto-picks up. Total ship: ~30 min including handwritten remediation-template prose.

Eight dev intents

25 · Who maintains

Joint maintenance. Vector-set edits are bilateral. Remediation-template prose handwritten per vector (currently 14 unique paragraphs ~1,800 words). Reviewed annually as founder-mental-health research evolves. Not maintained as clinical content (explicitly wellness-screening framing).

26 · What tech stack

Tech: PHP 8.3 + vanilla JS. Helpers: ajg_atlas_burnout_vectors(), ajg_atlas_burnout_compute(), ajg_atlas_burnout_remediation_template(). No external API. No persistent storage of respondent answers (privacy-design).

27 · When to refresh

Annual vector-set review. Remediation-template refresh as new patterns emerge from founder-mental-health research + peer-conversations. IndexNow on edit.

28 · Where in codebase

Code: data/atlas-founder-burnout.php, includes/atlas-founder-burnout-engine.php, includes/atlas-burnout-narrative.php, toolkit/founder-burnout.php (page).

29 · Why this approach

Why no persistent storage of respondent answers: privacy-sensitive content (mental-health adjacent). Per-respondent results computed in-browser from sessionStorage only; no server-side persistence. SO #14 (zero APIs at runtime) reinforces this; no analytics on per-respondent answer patterns.

30 · Which dependencies

Critical: atlas-founder-burnout.php (14-vector schema), atlas-founder-burnout-engine.php helpers, atlas-burnout-narrative.php prose. Optional: per-vector PDF deep-dives (with explicit disclaimers about wellness-vs-clinical), peer-case-study links.

31 · Whose responsibility

Same ownership. Vector-set verified against published founder-mental-health literature (Founders Mental Health Pledge, FMHP research, longitudinal-burnout-survey data, founder-podcast burnout-recovery interviews). Remediation-prose framed as wellness-suggestion not clinical-recommendation.

32 · How to extend

To extend with a partner-feedback variant: (1) define partner-observation question-set parallel to founder-self-report; (2) add paired-completion flow (similar to cofounder-fit pattern); (3) compute divergence between self-report and partner-observation. Total ship: ~3-4 hours including handwritten partner-prompt prose.