How to Navigate Out of Burnout Land

Your alarm clock goes off in the morning after being snoozed for the third time. You drag out of bed to get ready for work. Once you’re there, you slog through your workload, feeling like none of it has a point. And as soon as you’re home, you’re dreading going back to work the next day.

Welcome to Burnout Land. Current population: you and roughly 50% of working folks.

While the description above may sound similar to feeling stressed, burnout is more than just stress. In fact, it’s characterized by three main factors:

• Physical/emotional exhaustion
• Cynicism
• Sense of ineffectiveness or a lack of motivation

Since burnout, like stress, doesn’t have a definite medical “diagnosis,” it can run on anyone for a while. Some signs (insomnia, pessimism, lack of enjoyment, increased irritability) may mimic symptoms of mental illnesses, making it even harder to spot.

In the modern workplace, the rate of burnout is worse than ever. Brad Stulberg, co-author of Peak Performance, states that burnout rates across all job fields in Amerca stand at about 40–50%. Individuals in high stress positions like physicians, nurses, teachers and social workers can have even higher rates of burnout.

Fortunately, trips to Burnout Land can always be a round trip. So how do we come back from all this? It all comes back to resting and finding (or reconnecting to) a sense of purpose in your work.

Burnout Recovery

The process here is going to require a long hard look at your schedule. Again, like reducing your stress levels, if you don’t clear some time off for yourself, it’s going to be very difficult to recover from burnout.

So, pull out your calendar and start by looking at the next two weeks in your schedule. If you haven’t already, put your current commitments on the schedule in blocks. Next…

Determine What’s Necessary

There are only two types of tasks: the absolutely necessary and the “essential” (note the quotes).

We all have obligations that we have to meet. Whether that’s a job, taking care of family or volunteer work, we are the only ones capable of tackling the task. These obligations are absolutely necessary. We will be working the rest of your burnout recovery around these activities.

At the same time, we also have commitments that are “essential. These activities are the things that we do because we feel like we should. We say: “I need to do X” or “I really should do Y.” This usually contributes to a cycle of taking on too much, which leads to stress, which on a chronic basis leads to burnout.

To give yourself available recovery time, you’ll need to ruthlessly reduce these “essential” commitments (the process for which we’ll be covering a bit later in this article). Before we can do that, we need to determine which ones are “essential” rather than absolutely necessary.

It comes down to three simple questions:

Are you the only one capable of doing this?

What would happen if you didn’t do it?

If the task isn’t done, will it result in catastrophe?

The criteria for absolutely necessary tasks looks a bit like this:

You’re the only one capable of doing it OR If you don’t do it, no one else is available/willing to do it

AND

If the task isn’t done within a certain time period, it will result in some form of catastrophe (i.e. losing a job, permanent relationship damage etc.)

In either case, the “catastrophe criteria” is very important. There are some tasks that may rest solidly in your lap as far as capability and willingness. But, if it’s not going to cause some form of major issue for you, it may not need to be done right now. It may be an “essential” task.

“Essential” tasks typically:

• Could be handed off to someone else
• Could be postponed without causing major problems for you or those relying on you
• Could be left undone without major damage

So take a few minutes and mark off the to-dos and time blocks on your schedule that are absolutely necessary. Circle them, star them, underline them — just something to let you know that you have to work around that.

But don’t do anything with your “essential” tasks just yet. We have another round of ranking to take these through.

Energize/Neutral/Drain

A quick note before we begin here: I can’t take any credit for this system. The original concept appeared in a fantastic article by Cathryn Lavery, but I was first introduced to it when I came across BestSelfCo’s Weekly Action Pad (In fact, BestSelfCo was founded by Lavery and her co-founder Allen Brouwer. I haven’t used the WAP myself since I stick to digital systems for my to-do list, but it looks like a great potential choice for anyone with a more analog bent.)

While Lavery applies this topic to a weekly review, it’s useful for assessing burnout recovery as well. Essentially, you’re ranking tasks by whether they improve your mood (energize), have no effect (neutral) or negatively impact your mood (drain).

So look at the “essential” tasks on your list for this week. Break them down into components as needed. Depending on how burnt-out you’re feeling, your task analysis may need to be more or less granular. Only dealing with moderate burn-out? That forty-five commute to your friend’s birthday party downtown might not be a big deal. You might not even feel the need to list it as a task on your list. But if you’re feeling like a used up matchstick, you might need to mark the commute down as a potential draining activity, regardless of how excited you are for the party.

Now, mark E for any energizing tasks, N for neutral and — you guessed it — D for drain.

So with our task rankings in hand, let’s look into:

Cleaning Up Your Schedule

As I said at the beginning of the article, you’ll need to cut down on your “essential” tasks to get time to truly recover from burnout.

So, for each of your “essential tasks,” make a note of which ones are energizing. Consider these your “recovery” activities. You may not have to do them, but you want to do them and thus we want to keep them on your schedule.

For the draining tasks: get as many of these off your schedule as possible. You may not be able to eliminate all of them, but you can get rid of a few. With the tasks that you can’t eliminate, try to give yourself time before and after to prepare and recover from the drain.

Finally, the neutral tasks are the tricky ones. Here, I would suggest keeping the ones that you think you can do without much stress or the ones you feel will positively benefit the people you care about. If a task isn’t going to make a big impact or if it requires a great deal of stress to make that impact, you might want to let it go.

Once you’re finished with this process, you’ll have a new version of your schedule. Take a look over it and see if you can work in any stress relieving activities into your schedule now. Like we discussed last week in the stress article, you want to make appointments with yourself and keep them.

Burnout Prevention

So a couple of weeks of “taking it easier” may help you work yourself out of a burnout rut in the short term. But how do you prevent future relapses?

All the advice points to one thing: a purpose in your work.

With a grounded purpose for your work, you’ll be more motivated and able to move forward even when your motivation is flagging. Work turns into something that you’re doing for a greater purpose, rather than just something you’re doing to get by.

So ask yourself: why did you want to get into this line of work in the first place? What impact did you want to make with your work? Really take time to drill down on this answer.

And if you’re not in the line of work you wanted to get into, look for the good you are doing. Maybe your coworkers are appreciative of your work. Maybe you got a smile or a laugh out of a client. Or maybe you completed a particularly difficult project and felt proud of what you accomplished. Gratitude is key.

Unfortunately, some of us are in jobs that we can’t find any good in and we can’t seem to find a purpose. In these cases, more drastic measures like a career change may be required. Give a decision like this due time and consideration. In the meantime, work to keep your stress levels as low as you can.

No matter the category you fall into, don’t rush this process. Use the recovery tactics until you’re truly able to connect (or reconnect) to your purpose at work.

Whether you’re feeling just a bit singed or like charred up ashes, you can bounce back from burnout. Simply remember to give yourself some slack while you’re recovering and on your search for your purpose in your work.