Excel Burnout: Why It Happens, and How a New Strategy Can Cure It

SUMMARY: Burnout among Excel professionals isn’t just about long hours—it stems from outdated workflows that strip away time, advancement, and recognition from overworked Excel users. This article explains how a new, all-Excel strategy for working with data in Excel—often with help from AI—slashes scutwork, restores professional energy, and unlocks the strategic contributions that today’s innovation economy demands. Here’s an introduction to the new strategy.

Excel users are easily replaceable parts in a scutwork machine!

At least, this is what many of the Excel users I’ve worked with over the past 40 years have seemed to believe.

• The users lacked recognition because everyone on their team was contributing to the same anonymous, low-insight outputs.
  
  
• Growth opportunities were limited, because copying and pasting left no room to apply the education or special talents they had worked so hard to develop.
  
  
• Pressure was always high, because their scutwork had to be delivered, error-free, by strict deadlines—month after month.
  
  
• Even their managers were trapped, tasked with keeping the scutwork machine kept running, and without the knowledge to improve it.

It’s no surprise that Excel users and their direct managers all showed classic signs of burnout. And it’s no surprise that so many talented Excel professionals wondered how long they could keep working this way.

What Studies Reveal About Work, Stress, and Scutwork

Unfortunately, research confirms that their experience is common. In 2025, Forbes reported that 66% of workers feel burned out—driven by lack of recognition, poor career growth, and the sheer grind of repetitive, deadline-driven tasks.

Safety+Health Magazine found Millennials and Gen Z professionals reporting the highest burnout levels, with work pressure and limited development opportunities at the core.

Even in technical fields like IT, where AI was expected to reduce workloads, CIO.com found that technological change has instead increased complexity, deepening exhaustion and turnover.

Across industries and roles, the message is the same: without structural change, burnout wins. See: From Burnout to Breakthrough: How HR Can Lead the Next Era of Excel Training.

And in Excel-based work, the solution won’t be found in even more effort or with even more Excel knowledge.

The solution requires a completely new Excel strategy.

Why Tactical Fixes Have Failed

If you ask ChatGPT or Copilot what strategy you should follow to become ultra-productive in Excel, those AI tools will leave you underwhelmed.

Unless those AI products have discovered the EDP Institute, they’ll list mere Excel tactics—like using macros, named ranges, keyboard shortcuts, and helper columns—tactics that have failed for years to make us even moderately productive in Excel. They might be good practice, but they’ve failed to make us productive because they don’t address the real problem.

The real problem is that most Excel users who work with data use a passive, non-strategy strategy: the Excel Scutwork Strategy.

They copy and paste data nearly anywhere, rather than flowing their data to logical locations in their workbooks. They rebuild their Excel work manually each period. They rewrite formulas under tight deadlines. They enter values in random cells. They manually correct data labels provided by IT.

And they check for errors randomly because they often have no ultimate truth to which they can reconcile their reports’ results.

This cycle repeats, period after period, consuming time, draining energy, and denying users the time to develop their professional knowledge and analytical skills.

Without a well-tested strategy to define how to structure Excel work with data, even the best Excel user is at a constant risk of burnout.

The True Cause of Excel Burnout

More generally, the major causes of Excel burnout match closely with the broader drivers cited by Forbes and others—but with some Excel-specific twists.

Excel users are pressured to deliver perfect outputs on tight deadlines, but they often have no time for thoughtful research and deeper insights that senior managers need. They are expected to operate quickly and without errors, but they lack the tools and structures to make that feasible. Their value is judged on mechanical execution rather than insight or judgment.

As time passes, these pressures do more than stall their career. The work de-skills them. It diminishes the unique professional capabilities they were hired for—the ability to find patterns, tell stories with data, guide decisions, and add value to the firm.

In short, Excel burnout isn’t just about stress. It’s about being trapped in a business environment that actively undermines professional growth and contribution.

And it’s been that way for decades!

How the Excel Data Plumbing Strategy Changes Everything

The Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy changes the structure of Excel work in a fundamental way.

Instead of manually rebuilding workbooks period after period, users design them as flowbooks: workbooks with clean, modular pipelines through which data flows—from multiple sources, through processing steps, to final reports, analyses, and so on, which are collectively known as reflows. Once the flowbook is set up, updating it requires only one command: Excel Power Query’s Refresh All command.

The periodic work might remain, but scut WORKING disappears, because flowbook-based scutwork can be updated so quickly and easily.

So instead of scutworking, Excel Data Plumbers can spend their time brainworking: plotting trends, finding patterns, analyzing scenarios, identifying cost drivers, improving forecasts, supporting strategic decisions—and explaining what they find.

They become value generators, not Excel drones, not mere cogs in a scutwork machine.

This shift matches exactly what burnout researchers emphasize: that restoring autonomy, skill development, and meaningful contribution is essential to professional well-being.

How the EDP Strategy Addresses the Causes of Excel Burnout

By fundamentally restructuring Excel work, the EDP Strategy addresses the causes of burnout identified across multiple industries:

• Overwork is reduced significantly because Excel Data Plumbers can update their Excel work in seconds or minutes, not in hours or days.
  
  
• Lack of recognition is cured because professionals can spend more time delivering unique insights that managers truly value. And that gives them good reason to “sign” their work by adding their name to the footer of every reflow they create.
  
  
• Limited growth opportunities are replaced by constant opportunities to develop analytical, forecasting, and data-storytelling skills (How to Use Excel and AI to Tell Powerful Stories About Your Data)—and then showcase those skills in Golden Porfolios.
  
  
• Work-life balance improves because month-end and quarter-end pressures become manageable, predictable cycles—not continuing crises. And also, the Insight Flywheel slashes the amount of deadline-critical work that needs to be done in the first place—leaving more time for a personal life, as I explain in The Hidden Gift of Excel Data Plumbing: How to Get Your Life Back.
  
  
• Managerial frustration eases because they, too, are freed. Instead of supervising a scutwork machine, they can focus on leading strategically valuable teams.

Instead of constantly operating under deadline panic, Excel users can work in a system designed for sustainable excellence.

Moving from Scutwork to Strategic Work

The broader economy is moving in a new direction. LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman observed that because of AI, the knowledge economy is giving way to the innovation economy—where unique human skills like judgment, creativity, and imagination are at the center of work.

The Excel Data Plumbing Strategy gives Excel users the time to exercise those skills. It aligns our work with the broader evolution that has begun to disrupt professional life.

Instead of being burned out by endless manual tasks, we Excel users can become strategic profit drivers—the kind of employee that companies need now more than ever.

A New Professional Identity

When we Excel users implement the EDP Strategy, we don’t just get our time back. We get our professional identity back.

We’re no longer anonymous cogs in a scutwork machine. We’re analysts, advisors, and creators—trusted by our managers, valued by our organizations, and energized by our innovative work.

We spend most of our time on brainwork (see Excel Burnout: Why It Happens, and How a New Strategy Can Cure It) and nearly no time on scutwork. We contribute to our company’s long-term success, instead of working as a digital drone. We have the time and confidence to learn new methods, ask better questions, and shape better answers.

And we’re far less likely to burn out, because our Excel work feels fun and meaningful—often for the first time ever.

The Bottom Line

Burnout among Excel users is not a personal failing. It’s the predictable result of a failed strategy for working with data in Excel.

By redesigning our Excel work with the Excel Data Plumbing Strategy, we can end Excel data drudgery—while saving significant costs, as explained here: It’s Just Math—Excel Scutwork’s High Opportunity Cost.

We can move from endless manual scutwork to strategic, innovative brainwork. We can protect the energy and engagement of other Excel professionals—and help them to thrive in the economy of the future.

Excel burnout is avoidable. But only if we change the nature of Excel work. The Excel Data Plumbing (EDP) Strategy points the way.

Restore energy, recognition, and growth. Scutwork or brainwork: It’s your choice. Join the EDP Institute today.