[detourdog]

I can’t tell if my thinking is dated but here it goes. The young are inclined to want to help and be useful and more work satisfies this need and exposes them to more facets of the jobs being done. Ideally boundaries are developed by the youth or the organization is self aware enough to not exploit the worker.

[wpietri]

And I think it has to be both. I think the organization has to develop a culture where boundary-setting is normalized and encouraged. There are plenty of people who will burn themselves out without thinking twice about it. (I used to be one of them.) An organization that wants to be sustainable needs to a) keep them from doing that, and b) help them learn not to.

[LegitShady]

Exactly. Also depending on what kind of work you do organizations have to be aware of capacity - if there are operational times when I'm going to be handed emergency tasks but I'm already completely inundated with work because I was given the work for doing good work, then we lack the capacity to manage our heavy load times.

It's one thing if you don't work in any area with operational requirements that change over the course of a year but if you do then you need to have reserve capacity for new workloads even if the people involved are good at work.