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Lisa Hoover 0 Junior Poster

I'm sure this will come as a total shock to you, but a recent survey by IT consulting firm Robert Half Technology has identified what causes CIOs the most stress. Too much work.

Really?

To discover this fun fact, researchers interviewed the CIOs of over 1,400 medium- to large businesses based in the U.S. More than 36% said they're stressed out because they simply have too much to do. Frankly, I'm surprised the number was that low.

Also on the Best Stressed List was the evolution of technology (22%), office politics (18%), and balancing work/life issues (11%).

As companies hemorrhage employees and cut budgets, having "too much work" might sound like a wonderful option to the alternative -- but that's not necessarily the case. Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology tells the New York Times, "[O]verstressed IT workers are unlikely to perform their best. The pressure of mounting workloads, combined with ever-evolving technologies and office politics, can quickly erode morale and adversely affect productivity."


Of course, if you really can't take the heat in the IT kitchen, you could always change professional direction. CIO.com put together a list of . Some are meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek (phone sex?), there are a few that actually make a lot of sense. If you use your IT skills to become a psychologist or musician, let me know.

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's post nails the headline: CIOs are swamped. The survey she mentions frames the problem with familiar stressors — heavy workload, rapid technology change, office politics, and work/life tension. That diagnosis is fine, but readers need practical, short-term steps they can use to reclaim capacity without walking away.

Begin with a 90-day operational triage: list every active project and recurring responsibility, assign a single business owner, and score value/effort/risk. Use a simple sheet with columns like Item | Owner | Value | Effort | Risk | Status and mark low-value items to defer or cancel. Apply WIP limits (Kanban) and batch similar work to reduce context switching. Automate repeatable tasks and create runbooks so routine requests stop escalating to the CIO.

Change how work reaches leadership: start a lightweight governance meeting to decide trade-offs and enforce a "stop/start" list. Delegate delivery authority — promote or hire an ops/product lead to own day-to-day execution. Protect focus time with meeting-free blocks and rotate on-call so burnout doesn't concentrate on a few people. Track a few outcome metrics (cycle time, backlog age, MTTR) rather than activity-based vanity metrics; use those numbers to reset expectations with the executive team.

Leaving IT is an option many joke about, but reshaping work and boundaries often yields faster, sustainable relief. These steps won't fix everything overnight; start small, measure impact, iterate, and be prepared to push back on unrealistic expectations.

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