My Company Sent Me a Wellness Toolkit Instead of a Raise — I Used Every Single Item in It

Sometime around month seven of watching my workload expand while my paycheck stayed exactly the same, my HR department sent a company-wide email with the subject line: Feeling Overwhelmed? Here Are Some Tools That Can Help. There was a PDF attached. It had a sunrise on the cover.

I want to be clear that I did not throw the PDF away. I am a fair person. I read the whole thing, I took notes, and over the following six weeks, I genuinely attempted every framework, reframe, and productivity philosophy inside it. I kept a running document. I treated this like journalism.

Here is what I found.

The 'Bare Minimum Mondays' Suggestion

This one came with a lot of enthusiasm in the email. The idea is that you protect Monday mornings from meetings and heavy cognitive work, easing into the week gently so you don't start the cycle of burnout before Tuesday even arrives. Fine. Good, even. I tried it.

Week one: my manager scheduled a 9 a.m. Monday kickoff. I moved it, citing the new framework. She rescheduled it for 8:45. Week two: a client deliverable landed Friday afternoon with a Monday morning deadline. Week three: I protected my Monday morning and spent it anxious about everything I'd pushed to the afternoon.

Bare Minimum Mondays is a lovely idea that assumes your workplace will cooperate with your Bare Minimum Mondays. Mine did not get the calendar invite.

'Strategic Delegation' — A Classic

Page four of the PDF introduced me to strategic delegation, which is the art of identifying tasks that don't require your specific skill set and passing them to colleagues or direct reports. The document included a helpful chart.

Here is the thing about strategic delegation at a mid-size company that has been quietly understaffed for two years: there is no one to delegate to. My 'direct report' is technically an intern who works twelve hours a week and is not allowed to touch client-facing materials. My colleagues are doing the same math I am. When I brought up delegation in a one-on-one, my manager said, and I am quoting directly, 'That's a great instinct — you might just need to get more comfortable with prioritization.'

We were back to me being the problem.

'Thriving in Place' — The One That Made Me Laugh Out Loud

I had to look this up because I genuinely thought it was a joke. It is not a joke. 'Thriving in place' is a workplace philosophy that encourages employees to find meaning, growth, and satisfaction within their current role rather than constantly seeking the next promotion or external validation. The PDF framed it as an antidote to the hustle culture mindset.

I spent a week trying to thrive in place. I identified three things I genuinely liked about my job (my work-from-home setup, one specific coworker named Dana, and the free Spotify Premium through our benefits portal). I tried to anchor my daily experience around those things.

By Thursday I was still doing 52 hours of work in a 40-hour week, but I was doing it while listening to a very good playlist. Thriving in place, it turns out, is most effective when the place itself is not the issue. When the place is the issue, it is just rebranded endurance.

The Journaling Prompt Section

Pages eight through eleven were journaling prompts. I am not going to be precious about this — I actually like journaling. I did all of them. One asked me to write about a recent challenge I'd turned into a growth opportunity. Another asked me to identify my 'core work values' and whether my current role honored them.

That second one was not a good prompt to give me in month seven. My journal entry was two pages long and not particularly optimistic.

'Energy Management Over Time Management' — The Philosophy Reframe

This was the section I was most willing to take seriously, because it's based on real research. The idea is that instead of trying to cram more into your calendar, you map your natural energy peaks and schedule your hardest work accordingly. Mornings for deep work, afternoons for admin, that kind of thing.

I tried it for two weeks. And honestly? As a personal productivity hack, it's not bad. I do better creative work before noon. I already knew this, but the framework gave me language for it.

Here is where it falls apart: energy management is an individual optimization tool being applied to a structural problem. You can schedule your focus time all you want, but if your company has normalized 6 p.m. Slack messages, last-minute scope changes, and a culture where 'availability' is treated as a performance metric, you are just arranging deck chairs. Nicely. With intention.

What the Toolkit Actually Did

I want to give credit where it's due. A few of these suggestions, extracted from their original context and applied to a healthy work environment, would be genuinely useful. Energy management has merit. Protecting some mornings is a reasonable boundary. Delegation, when there are people to delegate to, is a real skill.

But the toolkit was not sent to me in a healthy work environment. It was sent to me — and I suspect to most of the people who received it — as an alternative to a conversation the company did not want to have. The conversation about headcount. About compensation. About the fact that three people left last year and were not replaced. About the expectation that the people who stayed would simply absorb the difference and, ideally, find a journaling prompt that helped them feel good about it.

The toolkit is not a wellness resource. It is a liability shield dressed up as a sunrise PDF.

Susie's Honest Take

I am not saying HR departments are evil. I am saying that when a company's response to widespread employee exhaustion is to send a document about managing your own energy better, they have made a choice about where the problem lives. They have decided it lives in you — in your habits, your mindset, your Monday mornings. Not in their staffing decisions or their compensation structures or their deeply optimistic project timelines.

Trying every item in that toolkit taught me one thing clearly: these tools work best for people who are mildly stressed in otherwise functional situations. For everyone else, they function as a very polished way of being told to cope harder.

I still use the Spotify Premium. That part I have no complaints about.