I’m burned out.* Since I’m a data analyst, librarian, and engineer, you are, of course, unsurprised to learn that I’ve spent part of my “please, I am burned out, I need two weeks off, as soon as possible” week off (they talked me down to one week) reading about burnout. I’m trying to stick to layman-level distillations of information and advice, because I regularly read papers in three fields already and do not want to add psychology or sociology to the mix. We’ll see how that goes.
Anyway, NPR’s article from last year was somewhat helpful, as was The Atlantic’s. (Nothing written before 2019, when burnout was recognized as a real condition, is worth the time spent loading the page.) I say “somewhat,” because the main takeaway is that there’s an extremely limited amount that one can do, on their own, to recover from burnout while they’re in the same environment that caused it. I sort of knew that—I’d read the Atlantic’s article back when it was new—but it’s still a bit disappointing.
Just as an academic exercise, in an attempt to see what my employer could theoretically do, I also read this Forbes article and this very good writeup by Gallup. If you’re in leadership at a place that employs humans (not even necessarily me, I mean this for literally anywhere), please give those two articles a look! Because I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but pretty much everyone who is not blithely ignoring the realities of the pandemic and the ever more concerning political environment is probably a bit burnt out, even if their work environment itself is very good. There is probably something concrete in one of these two articles that you can do to help your employees.
As for me and my workplace, though, first off, I have to acknowledge: some of my burnout is because I’m in the wrong role, and that’s going to be a real challenge to fix, for reasons that would be tedious to go into here. I was hired into a hybrid of three roles, and I’ve ended up trapped in the one that is the worst fit; part of that is bad timing, part is decisions other people made (despite my best efforts to sway them), and part is politics, most of them occurring above my pay grade. Tied to that, and most acutely to blame for my feelings of burnout, was a risk I took, not even realizing it was a risk, during Q4 of last year and the fact that it really did not pay off—I did tons and tons of work, and it exploded in my face, figuratively speaking. I got an apology for how it went down, but nothing changed, and I was trapped in the role that’s a bad fit; so, here I am, blogging about burnout.
But, yes, also, some inevitable burnout that I expect most of my company’s employees will end up having to contend with, at some point, is because the company is a startup, which means that these articles’ primary advice to leadership—to model good boundary-setting and work-life balance for their teams—will not (perhaps cannot) be taken especially seriously in this environment.
The specifics of my situation aside, I have to say: employers (even, maybe especially, startups) really need to take a hard look at what they need from their employees right now, versus what would be nice to have during ideal times, and shave their requirements/KPIs/OKRs down to the bare minimum for a little while longer. If upper leadership isn’t taking this advice, managers need to [gently, respectfully] push back on behalf of their teams. This comes to mind as my first advice because I’m reading about bullet journaling, now, in addition to the burnout reading: while I think there’s a ton of value in looking at each item on my own todo list and asking myself “what happens if this doesn’t get done?” I feel like there would be significantly more value in the leaders at any given organization asking themselves the same question and taking things off each department’s todo list, proactively. None of us is at our best right now; you really have to acknowledge and deal with that, at the organizational level, or you’ll lose good people.
My other advice to organizational leaders—and this one strikes very close to home, for me—is to make sure employees have as much flexibility as possible. My company’s remote, so I’m referring to scheduling flexibility, but if you’re a leader who is considering forcing people into the office unnecessarily, I would definitely advise against, and not just because it directly harms immunocompromised and otherwise high-risk people and those who live with us. Obviously, flexibility helps people with caregiving responsibilities, but it also helps those of us with disabilities. Honestly, I think this is one of those things where making the accommodation, knowing it helps some groups, will actually help everyone.
Unsurprisingly, I’m on the job market, for places willing to do a slow-hire. (My current manager, my two previous managers, the CEO, and probably the COO all know this. I’m nothing if not transparent.) I explicitly do not want to start a new job (or a bootcamp — a data science and engineering bootcamp is a possibility I’m considering, because I could come in as a near-Senior if I filled in a couple of knowledge gaps and brought a credential with me) before the end of March. I know that I will need approximately one month to recharge, whether that comes now or later; frankly, the only reason I’m willing to admit publicly that I’m burnt out is that I can show I understand why (and therefore how to avoid it in the future), and more importantly to potential employers, I plan to take the time I need to undo the damage and start fresh. Having this posted also conveniently answers the inevitable question, “Why did you leave a job without another job lined up?” So there’s all that, but also, I think we don’t talk enough about professional hurdles we’re facing; usually, when I share something unwise-to-share like this, people send me messages saying they’re glad someone’s talking about it. So. Let’s talk about it!
* Am I still burned out from over a year of trying to teach people in crisis, during a time of tremendous world-wide suffering and trauma, with zero institutional support? Maybe, a little. I only took a couple of weeks off between positions, and I knew it wasn’t quite enough. But I had started to feel better, at one point, enough that I took initiative and showed leadership on several fronts, while teaching myself large parts of a whole new subdomain of software engineering. Not all the way better—I have been locked down for nearly two years, now, so “better” is very relative—but certainly, I had motivation and energy, for a time. And now I feel worse than I did when I was forced to leave the community college. So I think this is new and different burnout. How exciting.
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