I can no longer finish anything, and the load never comes back down

My workload never comes back down: what can the exchanges say about it?

Volumes, hours, response times — what can be counted, and what cannot

Reconstructed case: the exchanges, dates and participants are fictional data, written to show the structure of the document. No real person, team or company is described here.

This document says nothing about your health, and it has no right to: it measures volumes, hours and delays in the exchanges you provide. Assessing how you are doing is a matter for an occupational physician or your own doctor, to whom this record can be handed as it stands. A count of out-of-hours messages is not a symptom: it is a dated element, which someone qualified will place in a context these exchanges do not carry.

The record of facts

Period covered: 12/01/2026 to 16/05/2026 · 1180 messages · 4 participants

Messages received outside the working hours retained — 148 messages
Count of the messages received whose timestamp falls outside the 08:30–18:30 range declared by the report holder, from 12 January to 15 May. Automatic messages and system messages excluded. Breakdown: 119 over the nine weeks from 2 March to 30 April, 29 over the nine other weeks, of which 6 over the two weeks from 4 to 15 May.
Messages received on a Saturday or a Sunday — 31 messages
Count of the messages received whose date falls on a Saturday or a Sunday, over the period covered. 24 of the 31 fall on the nine weeks from 2 March to 30 April.
Messages carrying a deadline less than 24 hours away — 63 messages
Messages received containing an explicit deadline situated less than 24 hours from their sending (“by tomorrow morning”, “before this evening”, “during the day”). 44 of the 63 fall on the nine weeks from 2 March to 30 April.
Requests from the report holder left unanswered — 5 requests
Explicit requests from the report holder followed by no message from their recipient over the period covered. Five of the fourteen requests bearing on the order of priority between two deadlines are in this case; the other nine received a reply, whose delay is measured separately.
Reply delay to the requests from the report holder — 61 hours (median, priority-order requests)
Median delay between an explicit request from the report holder and the first message from its recipient, calculated separately according to subject: 61 hours over the nine priority-order requests that received a reply, 4 hours over their 46 other requests that received a reply.
Wording repeated identically — 7 occurrences
Strings of more than six words repeated word for word at least three times by the same sender, polite formulas excluded. Seven occurrences recorded between 2 February and 28 April.
Distribution of message volume — 34 %
Share of messages sent by each participant out of the 1,180 messages retained: E.V. 402 (34%), B.N. 315 (27%), T.R. 289 (24%), M.A. 174 (15%). System messages excluded.
Share of requests addressed to a group — 22 %
Share of action requests addressed in a channel with at least three recipients, relative to all the action requests received: 47 out of 214. The other 167 are addressed by direct message.
Back-to-back turns in a group channel — 17 %
Share of turns taken up by another participant in less than 40 seconds without taking up the subject of the previous one, in a group channel: 59 out of 344 turns recorded.
Exits from a thread or channel, dated — 0 exits
Threads with at least three recipients where the report holder appears and then no longer appears, the thread continuing afterwards over at least ten messages. The four threads in the corpus were examined over the whole period: no exit recorded.
Dated break in the frequency of courtesy markers — not applicable to this material
Identification of the date from which the frequency of courtesy markers and the form of address change lastingly, over a sliding window of ten messages. 1,043 of the 1,180 messages in the corpus contain fewer than twenty words and carry neither a courtesy marker nor a form of address: the measure has no basis for calculation on this material.

This document is an automatically generated record of facts, based on the exchanges you provided. It is neither an expert assessment, nor legal advice, nor a legal characterisation. Workplace harassment, discrimination and similar characterisations are legal determinations that belong to the competent authorities. For any action, contact your labour inspectorate, occupational physician, staff representative or a lawyer. The measures shown here cover only the exchanges submitted: they do not reflect the full context of your situation.

The report

What is observed

1,180 messages are covered by this record, from 12 January to 15 May: 402 sent by E.V., 315 by B.N., 289 by T.R., 174 by M.A.
214 dated action requests are addressed to T.R. over the period: 96 by E.V., 88 by B.N., 30 by M.A.
Over 11 of the 18 weeks covered, E.V. and B.N. each address a request whose deadline falls on the same working day; no message in the corpus sets an order between these two requests.
14 written requests from T.R. bearing on the order of priority between two deadlines are recorded: 5 received no reply over the period, the other 9 a reply after 61 hours as a median, against 4 hours for their 46 other requests.
148 messages were received outside the 08:30–18:30 range declared by T.R., of which 31 on a Saturday or a Sunday; 119 of the 148 fall on the nine weeks from 2 March to 30 April.
On 27 February, a message sent to the steering channel sets 30 April as the end of the announced workload period; over the two weeks from 4 to 15 May, 6 messages outside working hours are recorded, against 13.2 per week on average over the nine weeks announced.
The wording “you handle it, you know better than I do what comes first” recurs word for word 7 times between 2 February and 28 April.

What this indicates

Several sequences show that two competing requests coexist without an order being set by either of the requesters: 11 weeks out of 18, of which 3 situated outside the announced workload period.
The chronology indicates a concentration of out-of-hours messages over the nine weeks announced on 27 February, then a return to 3 messages per week over the two weeks that follow them.
Several sequences show that the framing of a task arrives after it has been launched: 7 sequences out of 12 examined.
The distribution of requests indicates two sources of comparable volume — 96 and 88 out of 214 — without the exchanges provided carrying any rule of priority between them.

Leads to check

One lead to check would be a distribution of roles that has remained unwritten between the two requesters: no framing document appears in the corpus, and the distribution of responsibilities does not appear there in any form.
A second lead, to be checked outside the exchanges, would be an order of priority settled in a meeting and never put back in writing: three meetings are mentioned in the corpus with no minutes attached to any of them.
A third lead would be that the 3 weeks with competing requests situated outside the announced period belong to ordinary operation and not to a peak: settling this would require a corpus covering the months prior to 12 January, absent from the export.

Volumes, hours and requests left without arbitration can be counted. See what a record of facts establishes from them → Count my actual workload