Burnout: The point at which you don’t care

In these strange and uncertain times, people in Tech have had it relatively better than those working on the front-lines or in jobs that cannot be done from home. We can work from the comfort of our homes and stay safe and get our essentials online. Given the time-savings of commute, the reduced in-person distractions of office, a lot of people find the WFH regime very employee friendly. On the surface it does look like a win-win.

But like with everything else, there are some downsides. Here are some of the challenges of the WFH regime:

• Longer working hours
• Little to no separation between work and personal life
• Lack of social interaction
• No time-off outside of your normal weekends etc.

While speaking to a colleague recently, I realized that another COVID impact for tech employees (and perhaps any WFH employee) has been the increased speed of burnout. When you take the longer working hours with little time off and no separation between work and personal life, COVID induced WFH policies have increased the speed at which people hit the burnout stage.

What is burnout?

It’s really hard to exactly describe the feeling. It’s that feeling where you lose the energy or the motivation to work. The point at which you are like I don’t even care. It is usually a feeling of mental exhaustion and detachment from work. It can be accompanied by physical tiredness and exhaustion but it doesn’t have to be.

You go through the day in an autonomous mode, you show up to meetings, you talk to people, you write the code or the document but something is missing and you are unable to find the enthusiasm to really put in more effort into any activity.

Once you hit this mental state, you are constantly emotionally exhausted and it impacts your personal life and relationships as well. You might be edgy or irritable constantly as well.

How does it happen?

Generally for me, burnout starts during the highly productive periods at work. You are doing something intense for a few weeks, you are working hard, you are enjoying it and pretty soon you are working at peak productivity. But peaks don’t last. Slowly you start coming down from peak, you are unable to find that same level of energy, intensity or motivation. At this point work becomes a drag.

Following such a state, even if you work very little hours (even 1-2h a day), it starts making things worse. You spend the week waiting for weekends and the weekends don’t end up helping as much. By this time you are emotionally exhausted all the time, especially thinking about work.

The battery analogy
Discharging: When you are working hard or working at peak intensity, the battery drains faster. If you are really enjoying your work and it is fulfilling the battery drain is lower than otherwise.
Charging: The evenings (when you are awake and not working) charge the battery a bit, the weekends a bit more.

So it’s basically a constant fight between keeping the battery charged enough. But when the weekend starts to add lower amount of charge and work starts to take more power, sooner or later the battery runs out. When you start running on fumes, that’s burnout.

What can you do?

Taking care of your self

Be aware: The biggest challenge is that we don’t realize what’s happening until we have hit 0 battery. By being aware of how you are feeling, you can prevent the chances of hitting absolute low and take actions at an earlier stage thus preventing burnout.

Burnout disproportionately impacts more-productive people: Don’t get arrogant thinking that I am doing great, I am super productive and burnout can’t hit me. The more productive you are, the faster the battery drains.

Put yourself first: Sometimes we feel that we are not being responsible by taking time off as it would put extra burden on the team. Believe me, once the burnout hits your team would be better off without you and you will need a longer recovery period. So putting yourself first early on might be the better decision for your team in long term.

Vent: This might sound completely stupid but having friends at work or otherwise with whom you talk to regularly to vent about all your challenges and frustrations has a positive effect. By talking about it, you are acknowledging the challenge and it reduces the weight of those worries in your mind.

Psychological safety matters: If you don’t feel safe at work, chances are you will hit burnout faster. That’s because you are constantly worried or have to keep your guard up which takes up valuable emotional resources. It’s not always in our control, but we can do our best to surround ourselves with a psychologically safe environment.

Recharge better

Weekends might not be enough: If on successive mondays, you feel like you have lower and lower energy that is a sign that weekends are not helping you reset enough.

Earlier intervention is better: Taking a 3-4 day weekends regularly (in current COVID world state) might be better than hitting absolute low and needing to take 10 days off (which might not be enough).

Take time-off even if it means being at home: In the COVID world, we forget that we can take vacations. Or we feel like we might be wasting vacation days by taking time off to be home. This is dangerous as you are better off not getting burnt out. Once you get to burnout, you will end up having to take that time off anyhow and you will need much more.

1-week might not be enough: Depending on your state, sometimes you might need to take longer time off. Of course, it depends on the flexibility of your company / manager / team. Luckily I have been blessed with good managers and teams and on past occasions I have taken 3 months’ time-off to just reset which has helped me to come back with fresh mindset and new ideas.