Stop Working Until You Burn Out

Have you ever felt emotionally and physically drained to the point that you stop caring? If so, you’ve likely experienced burnout. At its simplest, it’s the result of accumulated stress. You feel as if you’re buried under your responsibilities with too few resources to dig yourself out. You feel overwhelmed. With time, you become discouraged by your circumstances and begin to view the foreseeable future as bleak and hopeless. Your enthusiasm for your work deteriorates and you eventually find reasons to avoid it altogether. The result? Your productivity plummets to the point that finishing tasks, even simple ones, becomes a monumental chore. Meeting deadlines becomes a fool’s errand. The causes of burnout vary from person to person, and differ according to environment. For example, many people burn out because they feel have little control over their workflow and output. Their entire day is spent responding to the needs and whims of others. Other folks feel drained due to their workload. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Still others burn out due to insufficient sleep, an unhealthy diet, over-responsiveness to others’ needs and a lack of supportive friends. The point is that burnout is real, can occur for a variety of reasons and will have a significant impact on your ability to get things done. Hence, it pays to take steps to prevent it. That entails being able to recognize the telltale signs: Do you feel unmotivated to take action of any kind? Is the quality of your work slipping? Are you indifferent to your poor-quality output? Do you find yourself becoming irritable with others? Are you having difficulty sleeping? Is your outlook overly-cynical? Do you often feel tired, even after a good night’s rest? Have you lost your appetite? Do you no longer find joy in spending time with your family? These symptoms indicate you’re working too hard and consequently, feeling both mentally and physically fatigued. They signal that your current circumstances are unsustainable. Something must change in order for you to get back on track and regain your lost enthusiasm. In the event you lack the motivation to make the necessary changes, it’s worth reviewing how burnout affects your productivity.

 How This Bad Habit Hurts Your Productivity 

Burnout interferes with your ability to get things done in five notable ways. First, it induces a feeling of helplessness. You become convinced that you lack the necessary influence or resources to change your circumstances. That, in turn, consigns you to perpetuating the cycle of stress that led to your burnout in the first place. Second, it makes you more inclined to be resentful toward others. You begin to feel as if your bosses, coworkers, friends or family members are taking advantage of you. Resentment saps your energy, which prevents you from focusing on your work. Third, burnout sets the stage for exhaustion. Emotional fatigue gives rise to physical fatigue. Before long, you may reach the point at which you’re unmotivated to get out of bed in the morning much less do your best work. Fourth, it fills you with an enduring sense of failure as you continue to miss deadlines, make mistakes and produce low-quality work. In that way, burnout becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of stress. Stress drains your energy and taxes your emotional health. That causes your work-related performance to slip. Your slipping performance leads to feedback from your boss and coworkers, which prompts additional stress. Fifth, the more stress, resentment and lack of motivation you experience, the further your productivity will decline. So much of your energy will be spent coping with negative emotions that little will be left to help you get things done. The good news is that there’s a solution for burnout. The following steps will help you to prevent it, or recover from it if you’re currently caught in its grasp.

Action Steps

 1. Perform a monthly self-evaluation. Look for common signs of burnout (see above). There are many ways to approach this type of self-analysis. The method I’ve found to be most helpful is to create a list of questions, each of which asks whether I’m experiencing a particular symptom of burnout. For example, I ask myself “Am I regularly frustrated with my daily workflow?” and “Do I feel overwhelmed with too many tasks?” I’ll then score each question from 1 to 10 to reflect my current perspective and attitude. A “10” indicates I’m nearing my breaking point. Come up with a set of questions that highlights the personal circumstances you face on the path to burnout. Answer them once a month.

2. Schedule breaks throughout the day. Treat them like mini-appointments with yourself. Don’t miss them. This step is often overlooked or dismissed because of its simplicity. It’s almost pedestrian. But taking breaks can mean the difference between maintaining a high level of productivity throughout the day and teetering on the verge of burnout.

3. Commit to ending the day at a specific time - for example, 6:00 p.m. If your boss asks you to stay late, resist and explain your reasoning (you need to rest so you can perform at your best level tomorrow). Too often, we’re tempted to put in extra hours to get more work done. The problem is, doing so on a regular basis takes a toll on our mental and physical resources. Moreover, it’s a sign that you’re either overloaded with responsibilities or not working productively during normal work hours.

4. Take weekends off. Set aside unfinished tasks for Monday. Don’t allow work to encroach on time that is better spent relaxing and recovering from the previous workweek. Doing so may make you feel as if you’re getting more things done in the short run, but increases your susceptibility to burnout in the long run. To be fair, there may be times during which working on the weekends is unavoidable. But those times should be the exceptions that define the rule.

5. Limit the amount of time you spend on your phone. As we noted yesterday (see Day 28), your phone can be a constant source of distraction. Few people can resist the temptation to check their texts and email when they hear the pings alerting them of new messages. And once they check their messages, it’s easy to rationalize checking Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The problem here is twofold. First, the continuous stimuli prevents your brain from taking a break. Second, you’re always connected to others. You’re always “on call,” even if that’s not your intention. If you routinely respond to texts and emails as soon as you receive them, people will expect you to do so whenever they reach out to you. Put your phone away during times you don’t need it.

6. Periodically review your responsibilities and evaluate how they align with your short and long-term goals. You may find they no longer do so. Take the opportunity to free up extra time and reduce the amount of energy you put into low-value tasks. Purge any and all that have no bearing on your goals. Assign a lower priority to tasks that contribute to your goals, but do so in a negligible fashion. 7. Stop multitasking. We talked about the practice in Day 16, but it’s worth mentioning again in the context of avoiding burnout. When you multitask, you force your brain to switch back and forth between concurrent activities. That increases the amount of pressure you put on your mental faculties. You becomes less able to concentrate, less able to filter extraneous information and less able to commit new data to memory. With time, the added pressure to maintain your job performance increases your stress levels. Work on one thing at a time. There are few emergencies that warrant dividing your attention.

8. Start each day with a morning ritual designed to motivate and inspire you. Your ritual will set the tone for the rest of the day. Many people drag themselves out of bed, dump coffee down their gullets and jump into their vehicles to fight traffic on the way to work. That’s a depressing way to start the day. You can do better. Think about the activities you enjoy doing when you have free time. They might include practicing yoga, going for a brisk walk or writing in a journal. Wake up 15 minutes earlier each morning and spend that extra time doing one of those activities. You’ll find that it puts you in a calm frame of mind that’s less vulnerable to stress.