It’s been a while since I’ve woken up and looked forward to my job. I’m usually just looking at the clock or the exit while going through the motions. It’s crazy to think that roughly two-thirds of workers are burned out at some point at work, but that’s the world we live in. Unfortunately, it’s 2020, the year of Covid-19, so the stakes are higher than ever to keep going. You probably can’t afford to take the time to detox from the modern hell that is corporate America, but hey, you can at least work around it as best you can.
I worked full time in college while taking an average of 20 hours a semester. Not because I wanted to, but because I was in a race against my diminishing funds, and the fees were fixed, but the hourly cost over 15 was negligible. I worked hard, studied harder, and learned to live off of 5 hours per 24 hour period of sleep (it usually wasn’t a block). This isn’t some hustler badge of pride or other nonsense; it was a desperate race to avoid ever going back to the poor house. Life has a way of kicking you in the knees every time you stand up and you either fall or you get back up. I don’t want to get up; I need to.
I’ve dealt with burnout many times before, and it’s not a fun process. I’ve basically spent my entire adult life going between being burned out and decompressing just enough to get burned out again. Along the way, I’ve seen the many forms burnout takes and learned to at least skirt them enough to not lose my job before I moved on to the next great thing and moved the clock back an hour.
Dealing with burnout while continuing to work involves learning what is causing it, how to rebalance your work and life around it, and to hang on for the sake of the future. You shouldn’t have to, but you should learn how to, just in case. This isn’t going to be some inspirational patronization that things get better, but how to survive. Let’s do this.
Classes of Burnout
The (ideal) mailman doesn’t get disillusioned with his stack of mail because if it doesn’t get done, it gets hit later because there’s a process involved. The (ideal) doctor doesn’t get stressed out from her surgeries because there are other doctors to take over when fatigue hits a certain point. We have an expectation that there’s some kind of team which covers for others and holds everything together. Unfortunately, this isn’t how most places do business.
I divide burnout into 3 main types: cognitive burnout, adrenal burnout, and focal burnout. While there may be more types, these three are enough to account for pretty much everything I’ve dealt with. You can mix and match as you want since virtually none of these exist in a vacuum.
Burnout boils down to a loss of control over the process. Burnout is arguably the depression which results from a loss of autonomy and control over your situation. I don’t want to be force-fed more work than I can handle, but unfortunately I’m typically effectively a wage slave with extra steps, so I don’t have a choice without an escape plan. How you lose control dictates what you can do to recapture enough semblance of structure to feel you have some degree of control over the process.
Cognitive Burnout
Cognitive burnout is where you get completely overloaded. It’s where you have too much work, and the cognitive load is too much. You have too many complex systems you need to be aware of and fluent in.
It’s not mindless work, it’s the stress of having to constantly keep track of more than you can. You have to manage a team, manage a project, manage a project which should have been handed off, and no one is there to provide relief for any of it. You are the party ultimately responsible for every question and every issue with any of your wards.
For software, it’s writing the invoicing system, writing the API integrations, building the security system, writing the user management portal, building the automation jobs, scaffolding the database, creating the entire user workflow, managing the system management, unit testing each piece and owning it, and so on. Oh, and you also have to write the documentation and deal with other teams who can’t seem to do anything without having their hands held. It just keeps piling up higher and higher. You’re not burned out just because it’s an insane ask, you’re burned out because it’s an impossible amount of information you have to keep track of for each step.
Adrenal Burnout
Adrenal burnout is where everything is always an emergency or on an impossibly tight schedule. You reach the point you just don’t care anymore and just can’t be bothered. When everything is the number one emergency, nothing is. Cognitive burnout often feeds into this, but doesn’t have to.
The nature of the work is often irrelevant to this type of burnout, what’s more important is that everything is a fire which needs to be put out and you can never rest. A nurse running down the hall having to give every patient in a specific ward their medicine because its life or death is just as bad as the doctor having to do multiple surgeries in succession as far as this type of burnout is concerned. Quantity over quality matters for this one.
Everyone is having an emergency, so whose emergency matters? When I worked in security, I got to the point I would flip a coin to decide whether to act on a given emergency or not. I reached a point of apathy where businesses were on fire and I literally didn’t care because I was out of the energy to do so. When there are 3 20-40 hour emergencies in a day, what I am supposed to do? You reach a point that caring isn’t the deciding factor anymore, so why even bother caring at all?
Focal Burnout
Cognitive burnout is where there is too much complexity to keep track of, but focal burnout is where there are too many tasks to feel like you’re accomplishing anything. The tasks are easy, but they’re so plentiful that nothing feels like it gets done. Each task is a head on the hydra, one goes down and many more take its place. You reach the point you’re just going through the motions, and each display gets weaker and weaker.
You’re running in place. While this fits the description for the average service job, the reason most service workers don’t get as badly burned out is that their work “ends” when the night does. The major difference is when no one else owns the stack of tasks. If you’re literally the only dishwasher, then you’re probably going to hit this point as badly as an IT person having to deploy software to tens of thousands of machines. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done, and people get angry at you even if the ask is too much.
This form of burnout is often accompanied by a lack of control over the way a process goes. It’s one thing to have a lot of work, it’s another to have a lot of mindless tasks that don’t make sense. You can also be frustrated from your voice not being heard.
Rebalancing Work to Reduce Burnout
These are the result of poor management in most cases, but let’s be honest, you’re probably not going to be able to solve the management woes. You can either run screaming from the morons, or if you’re effectively trapped (a la 2020), you can shuffle work and life around to try and survive until you can make the next jump.
To reshuffle your work around to solve your frustrations, you have to know what’s causing them. What bothers you about your job and how can you move it around to make it less miserable? I’m human and I have a limit. If a company needs to lean on me so hard, they also need to know that I’m a structural element which can’t just be pulled out. There are two sides to the coin. If management has so little understanding of what’s entailed with your job, the also probably have no real understanding of what you do.
If you’re overloaded with cognitive burnout, it can be worth making the pieces less efficient, but easier to put together. I’ve written boiler plate libraries which are slower, less efficient, but make the process more manageable. You tend to trade one resource for another, so trade the efficiency of the process for your sanity.
When everything becomes the priority, just pick what you like or what balances your last task. If the last task was insanely difficult, pick the easy task, and vice versa. If nothing matters, then just do what can matter for you. Those 3 sites got infected with ransomware? Well, this one is actually nice and small, and I need a pick me up, I’ll start with them.
If you have a bunch of mindless tasks, do the bare minimum to get the stack moving then pick a class of task and work it until it’s almost boring, then switch gears. Make it a game even. Variety is the spice of life, so might as well throw something besides salt on the pile.
Batching Tasks
Another technique which can help is to learn to batch tasks. Each shifting of the gears is going to have some inherent cost. When you jump from email back to a portal, you have to physically get there, then you have to figure out what you were doing. This just gets worse the more intense the task is.
Don’t multitask, batch tasks and work through them faster. You may not be able to do this the most efficient way possible, but you can at least move the bar. Do you need to check your email every 5 minutes, or is an hour enough? With an hour, you can get away checking every 50 minutes to stay ahead.
Even if you need to check every few minutes, you can still put off some responses and batch them together. Some people are key interruptions which can’t be ignored, but others just need to be dismissed. You can probably float the focus on a task if you just need to hit a few unimportant emails, but by pushing the less important emails together, you create a block of time dedicated to a task rather than interrupting more important tasks.
I can’t even go to the bathroom without hearing about an emergency if I don’t respond within minutes of a communication, so I don’t need to constantly monitor my email. I check between 2-4 times a day tops. Anything that matters will have to get to me, so why should I waste time with email?
Moments of Peace
Meditation has drastically changed my outlook on work. You need a chance to detox from your job. Constantly feeling the same amount of pressure will just crush you over time.
Pain and pleasure are defined by the each other. The more pain you’ve felt, the more pleasure even the most mundane will feel. A lack of one can feel like the presence of the other.
Don’t look for excitement, look for calmness. You can work hard and play hard, but factor some down time into the equation to prevent just burning yourself completely out. Force it to be factored in as blocks. If you don’t get bored sometimes, you’ll forget what stopping is like. You lose touch of what reality really is and define a new baseline.
If you get burned out, you typically can’t just give up. Find ways to create a gap in the suffering and fill it with a different task. Even if you have to work around the clock, you can maintain for longer by cycling tasks and types in accordance with what frustrates you. It’s not ideal, but it will have to do unless you have an out. That little bit of extra push can be the difference between long-term success and failure.
Image by LEEROY Agency from Pixabay