Does your job have a burning sensation?
Here’s how you can escape burnout — and the mundane crap trap
With apologies to Childish Gambino, this is America (2021 remix):
If those two met for coffee, I bet their differences would be pretty subtle. But Twitter isn’t known for subtlety.
Being a great teammate is one of the best skills you can have, in work and in life, and there are times you shouldn’t take off, like an accountant in early spring. Then again, the most important week of my 45-year career was one I spent on vacation.
I was 24, feeling fried and not exactly enthralled with my newspaper job when a friend and I went to New York for a week. We saw “A Chorus Line,” ate at Lutèce, watched Reggie Jackson hit a home run, heard George Benson sing “On Broadway” in Carnegie Hall.
Sometimes an epiphany is just your inner voice saying, “Yo, dumbshit!” It told me how lucky I was to be on a trip that many people my age couldn’t have taken, and if my imperfect job gave me the time and money to have weeks like that, maybe it wasn’t so bad.
I’d have future weeks with better jobs, raises, awards and far more exotic vacations, but I’m not sure any would have been possible without that week. It helped me focus on what I had instead of what I didn’t have. It made me a better writer, a better teammate, a better person.
Those are the weeks we’re losing right now.
As struggling companies get by with skeleton crews, they’re burning out their best workers and burning down their futures. People can stay in crisis mode for only so long, and we’re way past that. I was going to say that newspapers have a lot of burnout, but are there any jobs where people aren’t burned out?
Three ideas:
Save your best people from themselves. Bosses love the path of least resistance, assigning everything to their best workers. Sure, give them the plums — but not the prunes.
People rarely burn out from hard work. They burn out from uninteresting assignments, unrealistic expectations, unrelenting pressure and unappreciative bosses.
Long hours are often the product of bad habits and poor management. Distracted people need 50 hours to do something that a focused worker could handle in 40. Others take 60, but 20 are spent brown nosing. Some even take 70 or 80, but it’s because they have no lives. Embrace those who value their time — and yours.
If a great teammate is overwhelmed, offer to help. Not only would it make their life easier, it might encourage your bosses to share the load.
And speak up if you’re about to become roadkill on the path of least resistance. People will forget in a week that you had an overwhelming workload, but they’ll remember for years that you screwed up. So will you.
If you’re in a funk, it’s easy to feel like you’ve hit a wall, and maybe you have. Time off, even unpaid, lets you reflect on whether it’s time to move on.
But you need to get away, mentally at least. Avoid the media (including social media) as much as possible. Spending time in nature helps with creativity, but even getting out of your rut can work wonders. Fresh ideas are more likely to come if you’re on a real treadmill, not a metaphoric one.
My long-ago vacation helped me realize that I hadn’t hit a wall — just a plateau. I took a deep breath, got my shit together and kept climbing.
Fight back, subtly. There’s a line from journalist Bob Woodward (which I’m taking horribly out of context): “All good work is done in defiance of management.”
(Warning: You need to establish yourself as an indispensable teammate before you fly the Flag of Defiance. Otherwise you’re just a pain in the ass.)
When I wrote for an afternoon paper, we started our shifts around 7:30 a.m., and had to file late-breaking stories by 9 or 9:30. I often filed in the afternoon, so the editors would have less of a deadline crush each morning. I had plenty of non-deadline stories I could tackle at the start of my shift.
But one editor didn’t plan well. So at 8 a.m. a lot of days, he’d come up with some mundane crap of an idea to fill his section. And who would get a heaping helping of crap du jour? Why, the reporter who filed early, of course.
Funny thing, though: That ol’ “path of least resistance” thing works both ways. I started saving my stories so I could write them on deadline in the morning, and the editor had to peddle his mundane crap elsewhere. Or, you know, plan better.
If you reward people — including bosses — for bad habits, they will never fix them. So join the resistance.
Besides, saying “yes” to your boss isn’t always the best thing for the company. My frequent visits to Mundane Crap Island took me away from far better stories.
You also might notice things that your boss doesn’t. An overworked waiter might see customers get upset with long delays and cold food, and realize something needs to be done or they won’t ever come back.
Being a great teammate means performing at your best. Steph Curry is one of the greatest basketball players ever, but he can’t play 48 minutes a night. If you try to work 52 weeks a year, you’ll have diminishing returns, too.
Creativity and camaraderie are two of the biggest casualties of burnout, so take your damn vacation. And stand up for colleagues who might be too intimidated to fight for theirs.
You want your bosses to love you, but they need to see other people.
Redefine “urgent.” In 1996, our paper let you message people with two options: urgent or routine. How quaint.
Everything is “urgent” these days, and that adds to burnout. It’s amazing how much people can get done in one uninterrupted hour, and how much they can decompress during a break. As a boss and as a worker, you want to make sure those hours exist, interrupting people only for something that’s truly important — not mundane crap in an “urgent” wrapper.
If your messaging system can’t limit interruptions while still letting something crucial get through, turn off your alerts and put your phone on Do Not Disturb, with your boss’ number as an exception.
You’ll miss a few calls, but the gains will outweigh the losses. By a mile.
If you’re a boss who bugs an employee three times a week during breaks and off hours with “urgent” messages, you two should switch jobs. Because they know what they’re doing, and you obviously don’t.
Just as a restaurant might have to turn away customers rather than overwhelm its servers, companies might need to sacrifice a couple of thousand clicks to build a less toxic environment. Workers need real breaks, with time to talk with friends or go for walks or relax over a meal rather than repeatedly glancing at their phones like they’re ferrets on meth.
For those who prefer visual evidence, we found some rare video of what a lot of jobs feel like these days. This is America (“I Love Lucy” remix):
Murphy Slaw
Something old: Writers try not to miss deadlines, but sometimes we fail miserably. Here’s a 1945 telegram from one of the greats.
Something new: This waitress in Buffalo got a nice tip, but the note was priceless. Her customers knew that a semicolon tattoo is often a symbol of hope for those who have thought about suicide. Even grammar novices know that a period marks the end of a sentence; a semicolon shows that you intend to keep going. May we all.
Something borrowed: Gun control isn’t exactly the best subject for humor in our terrorized world, but comedian Steve Hofstetter does a good job with this bit, which he retweets after every mass shooting. He’s been retweeting it a lot lately. Sigh.
Something blue: If you’re among those who have been struggling with all kinds of tough emotions the last 15 months, this New York Times article has tips and exercises that might help, with lots less gibberish than most self-help stories.