Open Letter to the Executive Director who hasn’t taken a real lunch break since 2019
- Little Lantern Co
- Feb 10
- 10 min read
Dear Executive Director,
I know you’re reading this at your desk. I know this because you are always at your desk. In fact, I’m fairly certain your desk chair has developed a permanent impression of your body at this point, like one of those memory foam mattresses, except less restful and significantly less fun.
I’m writing to you today because someone needs to say it, and your staff won’t because they’re scared of you (not in a bad way — in a “she’s so competent it’s intimidating” way), and your board won’t because they only see you for two hours every quarter when you’re wearing your “everything is fine” blazer.
So here it is: You need to eat lunch.
Not a granola bar inhaled over your keyboard at 2:47 PM. Not the cold remains of the bagel someone brought to this morning’s staff meeting. Not “I’ll grab something later” (you won’t). Not the three handfuls of trail mix you ate while standing in the supply closet pretending to look for printer paper.
A real lunch. With a plate. Away from your inbox. Where you sit down and do not multitask.
I know. Radical.
I Know This Because I’ve Been You
Before you write this off as someone on the internet telling you to “practice self-care” — let me be clear: I’m not coming at this from the outside.
I have been the person answering emails at 10 PM on a Tuesday because it felt irresponsible not to. I have been the person who skipped lunch so many days in a row that my body just stopped sending hunger signals during work hours, like it gave up on me. I have been the person who told myself that the reason I couldn’t take a break was because nobody else could handle things — and genuinely believed that was noble instead of recognizing it as a giant, flashing red warning sign.
I know what it feels like to be so deep in the chaos that stepping away — even for thirty minutes — feels like a dereliction of duty. Like the whole operation will crumble if you look away. Like you are personally holding the ceiling up with your bare hands, and if you let go, even to eat a sandwich, everything will collapse.
I also know that feeling is a lie. A very convincing, very well-intentioned lie — but a lie.
The organization will not collapse if you eat lunch. But you might collapse if you don’t. And I had to learn that the hard way.
A Brief Taxonomy of Fake Lunch Breaks
Let’s be honest about what you’ve been calling “lunch.”
The Desktop Sad Salad
You bought it. You’re proud of yourself for buying it. You told yourself this was self-care. Then you ate it with one hand while drafting an email with the other, and you didn’t taste a single bite. The croutons went everywhere. There are croutons in your keyboard right now.
The Meeting Lunch
“Let’s just grab lunch and talk about the strategic plan!” That’s not lunch. That’s a meeting with sandwiches. You know the difference. Your stomach knows the difference.
The Phantom Lunch
This is where you fully intend to eat, but then someone says “do you have a minute?” at 11:45, and by the time that conversation ends it’s 2:30, and now it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so you eat a Kind bar from the emergency stash in your bottom drawer and call it fine.
The Sacrificial Lunch
You bought lunch for the team! You ordered the pizzas for the volunteer appreciation! You picked up the catering for the board! And then you were so busy setting everything up and making sure everyone else had what they needed that you ate two lukewarm breadsticks standing next to the recycling bin.
The “I’ll Eat When I Get Home”
Narrator: She got home at 7:45, ate cereal over the sink, and called it dinner.
The Price Your Team Is Paying for Your Skipped Lunch
Here’s the part you don’t want to hear. I didn’t want to hear it either, so we’re in this together.
When you don’t take care of yourself, you are not your best self. And when you’re not your best self, your team feels it.
Maybe you’re shorter in meetings than you mean to be. Maybe you send emails at 9 PM that technically don’t require a response but absolutely imply one. Maybe your patience for a question you’ve answered before is a little thinner today. Maybe you made a decision at 4:30 on a Friday when you hadn’t eaten since breakfast and you were running on coffee and adrenaline, and it wasn’t your best call.
That’s not a character flaw. That’s a human brain operating without adequate fuel and rest.
And here’s what the research tells us: it’s not just anecdotal. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s State of Nonprofits 2024 study found that 95% of nonprofit leaders expressed concern about burnout, and 76% reported that burnout was directly impacting their organization’s ability to achieve its mission. Not just their personal wellbeing — their organization’s mission effectiveness.
Source: Center for Effective Philanthropy, “State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know”
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology has demonstrated that when leaders experience burnout, it shows up as lower managerial quality — and that leader stress actually trickles down through an organization, directly influencing employee stress levels. Burned-out leaders don’t just suffer individually; the effects ripple outward through every team interaction, every decision, every hallway conversation.
Source: Parent-Lamarche & Biron, 2022; Skakon et al., 2010; Harms et al., 2017 — as cited in Frontiers in Psychology
When you skip lunch, you’re not just hurting yourself. You are unintentionally creating a version of yourself that is less patient, less creative, less present, and less kind than the leader you actually want to be. And your team — the people who look to you for direction, stability, and energy — they’re navigating the fallout.
What You’re Modeling (Whether You Mean to or Not)
When you don’t take a lunch break, you are actively telling your staff that taking breaks is not okay.
You can say “take your lunch!” all you want. You can put it in the employee handbook. You can plaster it on the break room wall in a lovely cursive font. But if they see you eating a protein bar while running to your next meeting, they hear a very different message.
That message is: the work is more important than you are.
That’s not what you mean. I know that. But it’s what you’re communicating. And your best people — the ones who care the most, the ones who are already stretching themselves thin because they believe in the mission — those are the ones who will mirror your behavior first.
The Social Impact Staff Retention Project’s 2025 survey found that nearly 7 in 10 nonprofit employees reported they would be looking for a new job within a year. The number one reason? Too much work and too little support — cited by 59% of respondents. And the nonprofit sector’s turnover rate sits at approximately 19%, compared to 12% in other industries.
Source: Social Impact Staff Retention Project, 2025; Givebutter Nonprofit Burnout Statistics Report
Your people are exhausted. And many of them are watching you to figure out whether this organization is a place where it’s okay to be human. What you do matters more than what you say.
Time Optimism Is Not a Personality Trait. It’s a Problem.
Let’s talk about the voice in your head that says, “I’ll take a break after I finish this one thing.”
That voice is a liar, and there is actual science to prove it.
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified something called the planning fallacy back in 1979, and decades of research have confirmed it: humans consistently underestimate how long tasks will take, even when they have direct evidence from doing the exact same tasks before. We look at our to-do list and think, “I can knock this out by noon,” despite the fact that nothing in our entire professional lives has ever been knocked out by noon.
Source: Kahneman & Tversky, “Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures,” 1979
In one well-known study, researchers asked students to predict when they’d finish their thesis projects. They were asked to give a “99% confident” deadline — a date they were virtually certain they could meet. Fewer than half actually finished by that date. Not the optimistic estimate. The “I’m 99% sure” estimate.
Source: Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994 — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Sound familiar? You’ve been saying “things will calm down after this grant deadline / this board meeting / this event / this quarter” for six years. That calm window is not coming. You know this. Your Google Calendar knows this.
And here’s the part nobody talks about: your time optimism doesn’t just affect your day. It affects your team’s day.
When you underestimate how long things take, your team inherits impossible timelines. When you say “this should only take an hour,” your staff hears “if this takes you longer than an hour, something is wrong with you.” When you pack your schedule so tight that every meeting runs into the next, your team loses access to you for questions, decisions, and the kind of support that only happens in unscheduled moments.
Time optimism isn’t a cute quirk. It’s a systems failure that cascades.
Burnout and Being Busy Are Not Badges of Honor
Let’s just say it out loud: somewhere along the way, the nonprofit sector turned exhaustion into a measure of commitment.
If you’re busy, you must be important. If you’re overwhelmed, you must be dedicated. If you haven’t slept, you must really care about the mission. We wear our packed calendars like medals. We say “I’m so busy” like it’s a greeting.
It’s not dedication. It’s a culture problem disguised as a work ethic.
Burnout is not proof that you care enough. Burnout is a systems failure. It means the demands on you have exceeded the resources available to meet them — for so long that your body and brain have started to shut down the non-essential functions. Functions like patience. Creativity. Empathy. Joy.
You know — the things that made you a good leader in the first place.
The World Health Organization officially classified burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” in 2019 — not a personal failing, but a workplace condition resulting from chronic stress that hasn’t been successfully managed. And a 2022 Gallup study found that employees with unmanageable workloads are significantly more likely to experience burnout — and that when employees feel supported by their managers, they have a powerful psychological buffer against it, even when the work is hard.
Source: World Health Organization, ICD-11, 2019; Gallup, Employee Wellbeing & Burnout Research, 2022
In other words: the problem isn’t that you need to try harder or care more or hustle better. The problem is that the system is asking too much and giving too little, and nobody — least of all you — has stopped long enough to redesign it.
Being busy is not the same as being effective. And burning out doesn’t make you a hero. It makes you a human who has been running on fumes for too long.
The Part Where I Stop Being Funny and Get Real
If you can’t step away from your desk for thirty minutes without something falling apart, the problem isn’t that you’re too important to take a break. The problem is that your organization doesn’t have the systems in place to function without you for half an hour.
And that’s not a you problem. It’s an infrastructure problem. It’s the same problem that makes you the only person who knows the password to the donor database, the only person who knows how the budget spreadsheet works, the only person who can smooth things over when a board member gets cranky.
You’ve built yourself into a human single point of failure. And the first thing that fails is your lunch break. Then it’s your evenings. Then it’s your weekends. Then it’s your health.
I’ve seen it happen. A lot. I’ve lived it.
So Here’s What I Want You to Do This Week
I’m not going to ask you to overhaul your calendar. I’m not going to give you a ten-step wellness plan. I know you’d read it, nod thoughtfully, add it to your already-impossible to-do list, and then not do it.
Instead, I want you to do one thing.
Block 30 minutes on your calendar this week. Label it “Lunch.” When it pops up, close your laptop and leave your desk. That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.
You don’t have to go anywhere fancy. You don’t have to meditate. You don’t have to eat something Instagram-worthy. You can sit in your car and eat leftover pasta from a Tupperware. You can walk to the park and eat a sandwich like some kind of whimsical protagonist in a movie. You can sit in the break room and do nothing. Nothing is genuinely an option.
The only rule is: not at your desk, and not while working.
If you’re already feeling the urge to say “I can’t this week, but maybe next week” — that’s the planning fallacy talking. This week. Pick a day. Put it on the calendar. Let your team see you do it.
While You’re at It
If reading this made you laugh uncomfortably and then stare into the middle distance for a second, you might also enjoy some of the other things we talk about here at The Little Lantern Company — like why your nonprofit feels chaotic (and what to do about it), or the 5 signs your organization needs better systems.
Because the lunch break thing? It’s a symptom. The real issue is that you’ve been holding everything together by hand, and your hands are tired.
I help nonprofit leaders build systems that make their organizations run smoother, calmer, and without requiring anyone to be a martyr. If that sounds like something future-you would appreciate, stick around.
Want more hard truths served with a side of wit?
Now go eat lunch.
For real.
I mean it.
Close the laptop.
With aggressive warmth and zero apologies,
The Little Lantern Company
P.S. If you ate a real lunch after reading this, I want to hear about it. Tell me what you ate. I’m invested now.
Sources & Further Reading
Center for Effective Philanthropy. “State of Nonprofits 2024: What Funders Need to Know.” July 2024. 95% of nonprofit leaders expressed concern about burnout; 76% reported burnout impacting mission effectiveness.
Social Impact Staff Retention Project. 2025 Survey. Nearly 7 in 10 nonprofit employees reported they would be looking for a new job within a year. Top reason: too much work and too little support (59%).
Givebutter. “Nonprofit Burnout: Top Statistics & Tips to Break the Cycle.” 2025. Nonprofit turnover rate ~19% vs. 12% in other sectors; losing an employee costs 33–200% of their annual salary.
Frontiers in Psychology. Multiple studies confirming that leader burnout results in lower managerial quality and that leader stress acts as a contagion, directly influencing employee stress (Parent-Lamarche & Biron, 2022; Skakon et al., 2010; Harms et al., 2017).
Buehler, Griffin, & Ross. “Exploring the Planning Fallacy: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994. Only 45% of participants met their “99% confident” deadline.
Kahneman & Tversky. “Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures.” 1979. Original identification of the planning fallacy — the tendency to underestimate time, costs, and risks while overestimating benefits.
World Health Organization. International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), 2019. Burnout classified as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
Gallup. Employee Wellbeing & Burnout Research, 2022. Employees who can meet performance expectations are 70% less likely to report burnout; manager support identified as a key protective factor.
Johnson Center for Philanthropy. “The Nonprofit Workforce Is in Crisis.” January 2025. Comprehensive overview linking employee wellness to engagement, productivity, and organizational performance.
johnsoncenter.org — Full Articlee if you don’t. And I had
to learn that the hard way.
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