This post is a warning. It is also quite personal. Some of the things I say will not apply to to everyone who reads this in the same way that they have applied to me. I want to talk about this stuff as I think it is genuinely helpful to do so, but please try to avoid getting offended if I express myself in a way doesn’t quite resonate with your experience, especially if their are factors influencing your situation which I clearly could not understand. I want to discuss the relationship between burnout, productivity & time management and help us all to avoid the cliff edge.
I want to discuss the relationship between burnout, productivity & time management.
I want to do this because of my own experience but also because I seem to have joined a twitter community of young people who are either early in their experience of creating content or setting out as Solopreneurs. This conversation is relevant to us all.
What is Burnout?
I am not a psychologist. Therefore, the best I can do is give you a clinical definition I have researched on the internet. Burnout is a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. I think it is worth flagging here what burnout is not. It isn’t just being tired after a busy week. I have seen tweets where people indicate that they are suffering burnout after a busy week of work and that having a clear day sorted it out. This is tiredness, or even exhaustion, but it is not burnout. Whilst being tired or exhausted after a busy week is not a good thing, sadly it is not abnormal (especially if you have kids) but this can be recovered reasonably quickly with a few days rest.
Burnout is what happens when the physical, mental and emotional demands that are placed on you, by yourself, others or life circumstances, do not let up to any significant degree for a prolonged period. How long depends on a number of factors such as the level of pressure and stress placed on you, the mix of physical, emotional and mental stress, the opportunity and ability to recover in part physically, mentally and emotionally, during the prolonged period. Many things.
When it hits you, you cannot really recover by taking a few days off or by having a holiday. In my case, the reason for this was because I had grown accustomed to the experience over such a long period of time that I have genuinely forgotten how to switch it off. I watched an episode of The Grand Tour (Amazon’s version of Top Gear with Clarkson, Hammond and May). On another of their epic road trips, Clarkson’s car developed a fault where at tick over, which is the engine’s speed when no acceleration or ‘gas’ is applied, it had settled at 6,000 RPM. A normal car has a tick over speed of about 800 RPM. This is where I got to. Whether it was because the neural pathways in my brained had been deeply furrowed by repeated use or simply because a mental habit had formed re-training the way I thought to be deeply destructive, the mental and emotional stress I was under, at rest, was excessive.
I had grown accustomed to the experience that if I was not on top of things, then no-one else would be and so I had to be on top of everything and be sure I was. Letting my mind rest, was accompanied by guilt that I wasn’t pulling my weight or fear that I would miss something.
Real burnout is not a simple thing to recover from.
Productivity & Time Management
Productivity and time management gurus have inadvertently made a blunder. This is not something that I say lightly or without a lot of thought. Let me explain with an example. The whole point and purpose of David Allen’s ‘Getting things Done’ methodology is to enable people to live stress free. The reason for this is primarily that because they have a trusted system and have effective habits and processes for capturing things into it and then organising them, the point is that you only have to think about things as and when your system tells you to. Any thought that pops into your head will either already be in your system or can be quickly captured and forgotten about. So you can live stress free, knowing that your system is trustworthy.
This idea expands to things like August Bradley’s Notion Life Operating System, PPV (Pillars, Pipelines & Vaults). The idea is that this system applies to your whole life as there will be many things that are important in your life that are not related to your work. Therefore having a system that covers your whole life is essential to ensure that all of your priorities are given adequate attention.
This is good, in theory. But there is an inadvertent blunder. This approach requires that every aspect of your life is treated as a part of your system. This can lead to the feeling that you are always ‘on’ and have no down time. It can also lead to the sense that only through having a system that is not only trusted, but perfectly trustworthy, can you be sure that you will remain on top of things. It can lead onto to a state whereby the continual focus of your mind is directed towards ensuring that your system maintains this status of being 100% trustworthy. So the very thing that is intended to aid you in living stress free, becomes itself the source of your stress and anxiety.
Now it does take a certain personality type to make this mistake with the approach to having a time management or productivity system. I am that type of person and you may not be. I also suspect it is influenced by the type of work that you do. If you work for yourself or are starting a business, or in some kind of ministry, then this ‘whole life’ thinking goes with the territory. If you have a 9-5 with a discrete set of tasks to oversee and complete and then you go home and don’t need to think about it until tomorrow, then perhaps less so. However, since lockdown, with the natural barriers between work and life being eroded as they have, it is becoming more of an issue for us all.
What is the problem with this?
In short, the problem is burnout. It takes a long time for the impacts of real burnout to be felt. As I said, the length cannot easily be predicted. For me I think it was about 3 years of prolonged physical, mental and emotional stress with little to no let up (I vividly remember at the end of this collapsing in a bathroom at someone’s wedding from sheer exhaustion and then sleeping for 19 hours straight), which was then followed by about 5 years of lower level stress that I was just about keeping on top of or ‘breaking even’ on. That was further followed by 3 years of prolonged and heightened emotional, mental and physical exhaustion where I was basically running on fumes.
The problem is burnout. I’ve heard a principal stated – I think by a Norwegian Team attempting to reach the South Pole – that you shouldn’t do more in a day than you can effectively recover from the next day. This is wise advice for general living and working. For most of we don’t have a one day on, one day off, work cycle but over time the principal holds true. The problem is that with the wrong approach to a productivity system or a LifeOS taken mentally, we never allow ourselves to mentally recover. Whilst we may take a day off work, the way of thinking – every minute counts, I need to maximise the benefit I get from every second, I need to be using time to be doing the most important, biggest impact stuff, I need to be making sure that what I am doing is definitely the absolute best use of my time now – remains in place. And this isn’t even considering the likelihood that whilst we will be ‘off work’ we may still be mentally engaged with it all.
This kind of non-stop, never letting up, mental engagement is what can, over time, lead to burnout.
I also see a lot of people who love what they do and so make the most of their down time or quieter times to keep working. I also know of many people who will do their planning on a day off as that is when they are most relaxed and least likely to be distracted. Since planning isn’t working this is ok, goes the argument. I am not going to say that it is wrong to do this, I can see plenty of reasons why it would be a good idea. But I do not agree that it is right to say that since planning your work and your time for the week is not producing output, that it does not qualify as work. That therefore, since all of your work time needs to go to producing output, then planning needs to be in your rest time.
Even if you love what you do and even if you love taking the time to plan as much as I do, burnout can still be looming in the future if you do not let up.
How to avoid the cliff edge?
The answer is not to abandon any kind of system. Not even one that covers the whole of your life. A good system, approached with a good mindset will move you towards what the experts promise – less stress.
The solution has a few elements, some practical but mostly a mindset shift is required. Once this shift has been made, you can start to change things practically to reflect it.
You cannot be the first, last and only line of defense and you shouldn’t be
Or – it doesn’t all depend on you.
Atlas carried the world on his shoulders
I will say something for solopreneurs in a moment. If you work in organisation, a company or even a small business with at least 2 employees, it doesn’t all depend on you and it should not. It is not reasonable for every person in the organisation to be able to do everyone else’s job and to be loosely keeping track of everything so if one person goes down, they can be easily replaced. We are not the Borg and this is not a Hive Mind. The reality is that you will have knowledge and responsibility that others do not. And that’s ok.
However, if you run an organisation or a department, it is worth thinking about things like Standard Operating Procedures, Job Descriptions, Role Profiles, written documentation of what needs to be done when, by who and how to do it. It is also worth considering contingencies and plans to cover sickness and absence. For all of us, it is worth considering these things for the role we have.
If you are a solopreneur, then I’m sorry, but it does all depend on you. But, you are also responsible for your own expectations of yourself and your own output. Guys like Matt D’Avella and Thomas Frank have written at length and produced videos on this. It is better to produce and to grow consistently, at a slower rate than in it is to go all guns blazing and then flame out in a blaze of glory. Slow Growth. This is the way.
This mind shift towards humility of our own status is invaluable. It should not all depend on you, nor should it all depend on you going all guns blazing all the time. So, we need to put in place things to reduce those demands and expectations that will require us to be always on all the time.
You are limited and cannot be always on all the time
This is a mindset shift that is hard to employ when we are young. Why take a day off when we feel absolutely fine? Well, if you get to the point of feeling like you need a day off, then you probably should have had it yesterday! That obviously isn’t realistic. The point is that our bodies, minds and yes, our hearts, need input and recovery as well as output. We need rest, relaxation, refueling and restoration.
If we cannot accept this, then we will continue to encounter difficulty.
So what will this look like? There are many things we can do/try:
- Effective Morning and Evening Routines to start and end our day
- Having an end to our working day and processes we follow for closing down our work.
- Having fewer tasks/objectives for our days off
- Setting those objectives to be things like
- Spend today with my children
- Go to the Cinema
- Go to a cafe for coffee and only take my novel to read
- Go for a long walk today
The idea with those last two is to physically limit what you have access to aid you in switching off. Before you know it, a habit is formed.
The point is, not to abandon your system on your day off as there may be home related stuff that you do need to do and you still want to be able to capture and write down any thoughts, reminders or commitments that pop up during this time. But this is where planning comes in. You can plan your rest and restoration time with a clear head and with intentionality rather than just getting to your ‘day off’ and hoping it is restful. If you don’t think through in advance what you are going to do, I guarantee you will default to the well furrowed paths of asking ‘what needs to be done today? What is the most important thing? What jobs can I crack on with?’. If we do not plan to rest, then our brains, much more used to thinking in these terms, will not allow us to rest.
So, if you want to avoid burnout, plan in your rest. Not in overwhelming minute by minute detail. But have a plan that will be conducive to you actually recovering.
I have a few other posts that are relevant to this topic and you can find them here:
