The advice I kept getting when I was burning out: 'set better limits.' Okay. What does that actually mean when you have a manager who messages on Sunday, a culture of always-on expectations, and performance reviews that implicitly reward availability?
'Set limits' as advice is not wrong, it's just incomplete. Here's what I learned from doing it badly and then doing it less badly.
What doesn't work: announcing limits without changing behavior first. If you say 'I won't respond to Slack after 7pm' and then respond at 8pm because someone marked something urgent, you've taught people that your limits don't hold. That's worse than no limit.
What works better: change the behavior first, communicate second. Start not responding after a certain time. See what actually happens. Usually: nothing. Then you can reference the pattern rather than making a declaration. 'I've noticed I've been signing off by 7 and it's worked fine' is easier to defend than 'I am now setting a limit of 7pm.'
The manager relationship is the key variable. If your manager models urgency culture, no amount of personal limit-setting changes the ambient pressure. This is the thing people don't want to hear. You can white-knuckle limits in a bad environment but you're swimming upstream constantly.
The highest-leverage thing I did: stopped attending optional meetings. Just started declining them with a polite one-liner ('I have a conflict, will catch up async'). This cleared about 6 hours a week and my actual work quality went up because I had focus time back. Nobody said anything for the first 3 weeks. Then one person asked if I was okay. I said yes and explained I was protecting focus time. End of conversation.
I still work in an environment with some pressure. But the difference now is I treat my capacity as a real resource with actual limits, not a variable I'm supposed to expand indefinitely. That reframe did more than any specific tactic.
Also: your skip matters a lot here. If your manager won't support you in protecting capacity, find out if your skip will. That conversation changed things for me.