#SharpenTheSaw: Dealing With Burnout
Recognizing your work style
Everyone has a different working style. Some are able to draw clean boundaries around the work day, clocking a strong 8 hours and rarely “bringing work home” at the end of the day. For others (like me), those boundaries collapse and we ride work momentum like a wave that could carry us for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
Surfing the momentum is a double-edged sword. When the current is strong, I feel like there’s no end to the projects I can take on and the problems I can solve. Inevitably though, my appetites exceed my capacity and burnout creeps in.
Recognizing burnout
Early in my career, I wasn’t able to recognize burnout. Burnout is the definition of the frog in hot water effect. All I knew was that at some point I had started to feel awful — tired, negative, emotionally unstable — but couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it started or why. I would find my mind full of cognitive distortions, but I couldn’t “think” my way out of them.
Because of my “surfing” work style, it was especially difficult to accept that I was burnt out and take time to recover. I kept paddling around searching for fresh momentum that I could keep riding, and my distorted thinking made me feel like any time off to recover would only make things worse: the work would pile up, I would let my team down, and the whole thing would fall apart.
Dealing with burnout the wrong way
Eventually, nature would take the decision away from me. I would hit a wall physically, crawl into bed, and nap for hours. After a few long naps and a weekday or two off, I’d realize that I was magically thinking more clearly, my negativity had faded, and I was able to see reality again.
When it comes to self-policing my own behavior, I’m a slow learner. I have to be beat over the head several times to make any lasting change. Burnout was like that for me. Even once I started to see the pattern, I still had a hard time taking the medicine. The nature of burnout — what it does to your mental state — makes it even more difficult to rescue yourself when it’s happening.
Eventually, I started to try to get ahead of it, but my early attempts to self-correct were also counter-productive. Instead of embracing my natural work style and simply learning to round the edges a bit, I tried to whiplash myself over to the “clean boundaries” style (work 8 hours every day consistently, “turn it off” after work, etc.).
But that didn’t stick. It made me feel like a car that was stuck in 2nd gear watching other cars lap me, knowing I could go faster, but feeling that if I didn’t govern my speed I would crash. In other words, I created a false binary: stay in 2nd gear or burn out. There was no happy medium.
#SharpenTheSaw
It was applying the “sharpen the saw” principal that finally unlocked this for me. I realized that I needed to surf the momentum—it was in my nature—but I also needed to sharpen the saw along the way. It was in my DNA to saw until I was sweating and exhausted and the saw was dull. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the adrenaline. The feeling of hitting the plateau of a challenging problem and pushing through until I solved it. The caffeine binges. The juggling of 100 projects. The travel. But then I needed to stop working completely and sharpen up. And I needed to reframe my intentional breaks from work as sharpening the saw so that I could get back to sawing effectively, instead of thinking of it as wasted time or, worse, a sign of weakness.
Now, when I start to feel that the saw is dull, I let the people close to me know. I take a weekday or two off. I sleep, I read, I write, I exercise. I let my body and my emotions lead the process instead of my analytical, critical mind. And when I’m done, the saw is usually sharp again.
