Burnout

I lost respect for my free time, and begun to view my free time as this currency I could cash in to reduce the stress at work.

Burnout is a real problem. I see way too many of my colleagues, of all ages, frothing at the mouth to work an extra hour or so. Believing their jobs are the most important thing around, getting worked up over nothing. It's sick, have some respect.

You want to be successful, I get it, but learn that you can only do it in 40 hour chunks. The rest of the time is needed to rest, seeing friends and family, going to movies, working on side project, playing games, going on holiday, ETCETERA because you can't be successful in your 40 hours, if you are not looking after yourself.

It's for my career

You will not be able to bring your 100% to work if you are sleep deprived and haven’t had a weekend in four months. Sacrifice now, to benefit later’ mantra does not work. You will burn out before you benefit, the human body starts to fail pretty quickly when it’s being pushed too hard.

You also can’t predict the future, which means you won’t be able to predict when it will ‘pay off’ and you can return to normal.

It👏will👏never👏stop, so👏don’t👏ever👏start.

The work had to be done / XX relied on me

Management commits to a delivery date without talking with those who would be doing the work. Everything is urgent, and always comes with some really important names attached to them. And yet you will never be paid fairly for that level of ‘power.’

• Working extra because someone else made a bad decision, means they will do it again.

• Allowing people to blackmail you by dropping names is something that will continue to occur as long as you allow it.

• The consequences of you not meeting their expectations are a fraction of what they claim it to be. The company is not about to fail, nor is it about to loose a trillion dollars. In the slim chance that is actually the case, run, it’s beyond saving.

How to avoid this? What you spend your 40 hours a week doing, is the responsibility of your direct manager. If they urgently want X, then something has to give, and it’s their responsibility (and why they are paid more) to sign off on that. Do not keep your managers in the dark, they will happily let you do this.

Learn that companies can withstand a lot of failure. Just because you can directly see the impact of not doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually that significant. In the grande scheme of things, most failures are forgotten about within months and don’t actually result in that much customer loss.

It’s not costing me anything more than ‘time’

Your time is finite and recovery is very important. You need to recover from work. The research shows that you shouldn’t work at anything more than 8 hours and that you need those two full days off. So stop working late and weekends.

I tell my staff to never work in the weekend. If they owe the company time work late during the week. Those two days off are vital to recovery.

If you don’t know what to do with your time, find a hobby. If your struggling to find a hobby, congrats because finding a hobby is now your new hobby.

I work for ‘the’ company

Company prestige is certainly a thing in our society. What I am certain about is that no dream career or company is worth getting burned out.

Don’t work yourself into the ground trying to get into your career or you won’t have anything left to give when you start it.

If you arrive at your dream company or career and you are being forced or pressured to work extra then sorry this ain’t your dream. Highly doubt you dreamed about working for a company and the dream involved being treated like a slave.

Also learn to spot the difference between a work perk and a psychological trap. Google talks about having food within 100m of every employee. Sounds good, but they did that to discourage you from leaving the building to eat. Keep you at your desks for the maximum amount of time. Banks traditionally offer favorable mortgage rates to employees that of course expire when the employee leaves. Sometimes a perk can be the thing that traps you in your job.

It looks cool

One of the saddest things I hear people do, is use their suffering as a badge of honor. Colleagues bragging about how many hours they worked or how their work week was worse than others.

How cool is that someone was working 18 hours for free? It's ridiculous. We should be championing someone who got all of her work done, only worked 40 hours, and got to have a life.

I changed jobs which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I got a clean cut away from the people and the environment that had made me so sick, a curse because learning a new job is stressful.

Will you look back in a year and be thankful that you worked those two extra hours?