What it usually means
It locates the problem in you. Sometimes it is there. Often the load is the shape of the job — a head office in another time zone, the work nobody else volunteers for — and a boundary is a negotiation, not a trait.
What else it can mean
- Structural. The late calls come with the org chart.
- Assigned. You get the work that nobody wants because you are the one who says yes.
- Yours. There is a habit you could change without anyone noticing.
What to find out first
How much of the load would still be there if you said no to nothing new. That part is structural.
What the research says, and where it stops
At one consulting firm, people who quietly reshaped their workload were rated well and none were denied promotion; those who made the same divergence visible — through formal requests or open refusal — were rated lower and denied more often.
Reid 2015, Organization Science 26(4). Limit: One North American firm; the author excluded offices outside North America because norms differ. Some of those who avoided the penalty did so by concealing their hours, which nothing here recommends.
Tasks everyone would rather someone else did are disproportionately volunteered for by, asked of and accepted by the people seen as most likely to say yes.
Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund & Weingart 2017, American Economic Review 107(3). Limit: The paper’s mechanism is about gender; applying it to the quiet person in the room is an inference.
Which door
This is The Cost — “I'm carrying too much, and it's wearing me down.”