What it is

Every person has a finite amount of time, energy, and attention. The Burnout Budget turns that invisible supply into a bag of tokens and asks students to spend it across thirteen categories of a working life, from bills and sleep to friendships and a sense of purpose. Students are handed deliberately unequal starting amounts, between sixteen and twenty-six tokens, and nobody is told that the amounts differ. There is enough to feel manageable and never enough to fund everything. As rounds pass, fixed costs appear, life events land, and students discover that the only way to protect one part of their life is to take from another. The exercise does not teach burnout as an outcome. It puts students inside the sequence of small, reasonable tradeoffs that produce it, and only names Conservation of Resources theory afterward, in the debrief.

How it runs

1. Allocate. Each student receives their tokens and spreads them across the thirteen categories however they choose. No guidance, no right answer, and no indication yet that anything will be asked of them.
2. Respond. Fixed costs arrive. Job or school responsibilities, bills, and sleep now carry minimums that must be covered before anything else. Students rebalance and discover what they are willing to give up first.
3. Adjust. Across three rounds the facilitator draws life event cards for the whole room. Everyone faces the same events with different resources. Students apply each card, absorb the loss or the gain, and restore any minimum they were forced to break.
4. Reflect. Students total what remains and compare boards. The debrief connects the pattern of their own cuts to loss spirals, recovery, opportunity cost, and the structural conditions that shape how much anyone has to spend.

The five domains

Thirteen categories, grouped into the five things a working life runs on.

The deck

Fifty life event cards in three kinds, each numbered. The facilitator announces a number and students match it on their own board.

What is at stake

Nobody starts with enough, and nobody starts with the same amount. Work, health, money, home, rest, relationships, and a sense of direction all draw from one supply. Fixed costs are non-negotiable once introduced, so the flexible categories are the only place left to cut, and those are exactly the categories that determine how the later rounds resolve. Success is not finishing with the most. It is arriving at the end able to explain what you protected and what it cost you.

What it surfaces

Burnout rarely arrives as one catastrophic event. It accumulates through defensible decisions made under constraint. Students feel the loss spiral directly: a thin category makes the next card worse, which thins another category, which makes the one after that worse again. Because starting amounts are unequal and unannounced, the room discovers partway through that identical choices produced different outcomes, which does more for a conversation about structural conditions and inequity than any framing offered in advance.

Running it

Live, project the facilitator view and draw for the room while students work their own boards on laptops or phones, or on paper if you would rather keep screens closed. Teams of three to six can share a board and argue their way to each decision. Online, the same page works in a synchronous session with the facilitator sharing the draw, or asynchronously by releasing card numbers on a schedule.

For the facilitator

The app handles the arithmetic: conditionals evaluate against each student’s actual board, losses cascade in the correct order, and broken minimums are restored automatically with the move shown so a student can audit or overrule it. Default is three cards per round across rounds three, four, and five, a deliberate change from a die roll, which can hand one section three events and another eighteen.

Access

The facilitator view is hidden from the student page. Reach it via the facilitator link above. Hand students the plain link only, so card outcomes stay out of sight until the debrief.

Authors

Woodard, Charles C. · Ward, Cassandra L. · Simon, Amy A.

Presented

Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (MOBTS) Annual Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, 2026.

References

• Woodard, C. C., Ward, C. L., & Simon, A. A. (2026). The Burnout Budget: Experiencing resource loss and recovery in real time. Management Teaching Review. doi.org/10.1177/23792981261458342 The published exercise. The hosted app is a later revision: five domains and fifty cards, where the article documents five different domains and twenty-five.
• Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524.
• Hobfoll, S. E., Halbesleben, J., Neveu, J. P., & Westman, M. (2018). Conservation of resources in the organizational context: The reality of resources and their consequences. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, 103–128.