Living on the red line.
On burnout culture and saving ourselves.
“What are you going to do on your sabbatical?”
I posed this question to a client of mine. He’s a sales leader for a public tech company, and after several years of leading a large part of the global sales org, he had earned himself a well-deserved 2 month break from work.
His answer didn’t surprise me. His plan included all sorts of productive activities. Working out. Reading. Studying leadership and his craft.
His goal was to make the most of this time off and come back a different and better version of himself (my words, not his).
“What is your current burnout level?”
That was my next question. This time his answer did surprise me.
“9 out of 10. I’ve been at that level for years. I’ve just adapted and learned to work with the burnout.”
Ouch.
Unfortunately, I intimately understood what he meant.
Our modern work culture enables and approves of burnout. Our task, or so it seems, is to find the red line and put our toes just a smidge before it.
The late night Slacks. The open loops that never get closed. The constant fire fighting. The expectation that people do hours per day of calls and meetings on top of their actual job. The persistent pressure from somewhere above. The frenzied reaction to a new strategy, tactic, or problem each and every day.
It’s exhausting.
But it also doesn’t have be this way. The path out is obvious (not easy).
Take back your time.
Many of us are terrible at protecting our time. Our calendar gets filled day to day with meetings that provide a nominal amount of value, if any at all. A 1on1 to talk about…nothing at all? Sure, why not. A team meeting to talk about things I could read in a report or dashboard? Sure, why not. A cross-functional meeting about some random project I haven’t paid attention to? Sure, why not.
Meetings feel like work. Couple that with our desire to be seen as a high performer and team player, and it’s easy to see why our calendars very quickly become the property of everyone but us.
There is no other way to put it. The only way out of the chaos is through owning your calendar.
Do an energy audit.
Our energy is constantly in flux, with a lot of contributing factors. Sleep, sunlight, stimulants (coffee), depressants (booze), food, people. The list goes on.
But one that slips under most people’s radar?
How we spend our time.
Think of work tasks as debits or credits to our energy. Tasks that are challenging - either because we’re not good at them or because the people we’re working with on the task are challenging - deplete our energy.
On the other hand, tasks that we’re good at - that we can find some measure of flow in, or that we get to work with people we enjoy on - give us energy.
Our energy is depleted at the end of the workday because we spend so much time on things that drain us. Things we don’t like doing. Things we aren’t good at. Things that waste our time, and in turn our energy.
Look at your calendar for the past week or two. Write out each task or meeting from that time period. Next to the task or meeting, simply write whether that task or meeting is energy giving (+), energy draining (-), or energy neutral (=).
You’ll quickly grasp whether your burnout is a product of where you spend your time, or something else.
And if it’s the former, that’s in your control to change.
Do more of what gives you energy. And less of what drains you.
Get better at saying no.
Not no to everything.
No to the things that don’t contribute to your primary goal.
We are all tasked with a core function in our work. In sales, that’s revenue. In customer success, that’s retention. In development, that’s releases. But we are pulled in a thousand directions that don’t contribute to our primary goal.
Our burnout is almost always rooted in cultural chaos, not an inability to do our job.
And that cultural chaos makes it infinitely harder to do our job, which is why so much of this boils down to protecting our time.
Because guess what? We get fired if we don’t perform.
And if that random meeting, useless 1on1, or cross-functional project doesn’t contribute to that performance, then it’s on us to take that time back.
More of what gives you energy. Less of what drains you.
More no. Less yes.
More focus. Less distraction.
More high performance. Less burnout.
Want to become a leader worth following?
Let’s chat.
✌️ and ❤️,