Episode #313: How To Fix Burnout

Previously we looked at preventing burnout but what happens if we missed that tide and the ship didn’t sail? Burnout can be a gradual build up of tensions, stress and issues that affect our physical and mental health. There isn’t a buzzer that sounds to tell us we have hit burnout and the whole lead up phase is a bit vague. Is this burnout or am I just a bit tired after a big week, month or year? Many of us were brought up in cultures where you suck it up, soldier own and don’t grumble. The grumbling usually starts in intensive care, as the medicos rush to save our life, because we have pushed it too hard. Few people in Japan die from excessive hard work. They normally kill themselves instead because they are so stressed about their situation and so tired from the ridiculous hours they are working, that they want it all to end. No one pushed the emergency break to get off the careening, runaway train.

Burnout is beyond stress. When stressed we still care. With burnout, we are too exhausted to care anymore. Our self talk starts to sound like this: “Every day at work is a bad day, I hate going down there”, “My manager has given me unachievable goals, so why try”, “No one appreciates anything I do around here, so why should I care”, “I don’t have enough extra energy to care about my work anymore”, “Everyone always wants too much from me and nobody helps me with my stuff”, “The majority of my day is spent doing meaningless tasks”.

Overload drives the feelings of burnout, so we need to reduce the overload. That means we don’t keep adding tasks. We need to create some margin in our day so that every minute is not accounted for. This is an anathema to workaholics, but we have to change our thinking and build in some margin for ourselves. We are not a machine. Dale Carnegie said, “rest before you get tried” and it is good advice.

We also have to slow down to go fast. Rushing around often leads to mistakes. This is one of my constant struggles. I move fast, eat fasts, talk fast, think fast and get myself into trouble as a consequence. I turned up at the meeting the other day, at the appointed time, but a day late! I had been in such a rush when doing my diary note that I had missed the correct date. Fortunately the client was forgiving and understanding. Fast is good but too fast is not good.

When we are too rushed we can neglect the small things that build solid human relations. Building trust cannot be fast forwarded like a movie on a DVD. Being too busy for your friends ensures you won’t have any friends. Being too busy for your kids means you will be distant from your kids when they get older and you need them.

Technology is supposed to help us save time, but in fact we have unleashed a monster, that allows us to work seven days a week, for very long hours each day. We carry our phones everywhere with us, we sleep beside them, we check our email when we awake. We are slaves to the machine. Checking your messages constantly when you are trying to get some serious work done is like pulling up the plants you have just planted, to see how the roots are progressing. Move away from the computer or leave the phone away from you to concentrate on the task. Only deal with each message once – act on it, if it can be done in 1 minute, file it, delete it or forward it to someone else for action. Don’t keep going back to it.

Schedule email reading time for specific parts of the day and for the rest of the time ignore it. If it is that urgent, they will phone you. Once you get into this habit try and space the reading times further apart, as you realise 99.9% of your email is not urgent and 95% of it is pretty much irrelevant. I hate those services that ping you phone when the latest notification arrives. I turn them all off.

Don’t be afraid to turn on the Out Of Office message to give you some air cover to escape from everyone else’s expectations of how you should work. Remember you are the one facing burnout issues and you have to protect yourself. Forget about their priorities for you.

Take holidays. Japan is a crazy country where people don’t take their leave. I have to meet with my admin team every month to check how many leave days each person has, because they are storing up their leave, but never using it. When I see people with masses of days I need to talk to them about using it. Refreshed people are happier and work a better clip than tired people bogged down in the rut of life they have designed for themselves. This includes us the bosses too, by the way.

Action Steps

1. Monitor our self talk for the danger signals of burnout
2. Build some margin into your day so it is not packed from woe to go
3. Go slow to go fast sometimes, not everything needs to be done in a manic rush
4. Decide who is the boss – you or the tech