How Startup Owners Can Avoid Burnout During Vacation Season
Psychology Today defines burnout as “a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who work with people in some capacity”. Said differently, it is a condition when you lose motivation and control over your work and become indifferent to it. Not a promising perspective, right? As any other unpleasant physical or psychological ailment, it is better and easier prevented than cured. The one thing you should know about burnout is that it can happen to anyone, no matter how much they love and enjoy what they are doing.
According to Forbes, the main reasons of burnout are the lack of control, insufficient reward, work overload, conflict of values and absence of fairness. Work overload is what entrepreneurship startups have to deal with on a daily basis. As they operate in the conditions of great uncertainty, there is often stress and overwork. Even when you are following your dream and implementing your best idea successfully, there is a fair possibility to get an emotional burnout unless you balance out all the spheres of your life well.
So, how to prevent burnout if you are a startup owner for whom the vacation season is fuller of work than of sunshine? Below, you will find top five tips that we’ve picked for those who search for ways to avoid burnout during popular holiday periods.
1. Take care of your work-life balance
We totally understand that your business is your priority. Of course, you invest the most of your time and energy into your work, but without taking a breath of fresh air and looking around, where will you get your inspiration, ideas, and creativity from? Finding a balance between work and leisure should be in your cards if you want to lead a full life of an energetic and proactive entrepreneur. While working out in the mornings is a great way of staying bright-eyed and bushy-tailed all day for some, others need an hour of quietness in the evening to slice and dice the day that passed.
2. Master your time management skills
One of the major causes of job burnout is an overwhelming amount of work a person has to deal with over extended periods. Entrepreneurial startup owners usually have to keep in mind nearly every aspect of their work, which can easily lead to job burnout. Training your time-management skills is as important as getting all those tasks done. Set a positive mindset. Remember that you do not spend time working, you invest it into something bigger. Visualize your annual personal and company goals so that you could take a glance at them every time you need to remember why you have to keep doing whatever you do.
3. Don’t work when you are sick
This is one of the major rules to follow when trying to figure out how to avoid work burnout. You may think that this advice is totally trivial, but let’s be honest, very few of us follow it. Regardless of the fact that all doctors around the world constantly remind that working when falling and being ill brings more harm than good, workaholics keep coughing, sneezing, popping pills and struggling through their workdays. Doing so, you risk to prolong your illness, add complications to it, make more mistakes in your work and infect your coworkers. Do you still think it’s worth it?
4. Stop trying to control everything
Employees burnout is not a better thing than business owner burnout. Don’t let seduction of procrastination put your personal and professional goals sway. Don’t also try to help your employees with everything they do. If you feel that you are losing control while the work is piling up, it’s just about time to change things. Micromanaging is not a good solution because it deprives your employees of independence and undermines their assertiveness. Be an example to them showing that balance between work and life and success in both is not a myth.
5. Take rest when you need it
Of course, when planning your vacation you need to make sure that the number of unsettled questions is minimal. Limit your assistance to your employees so that they are more independent and your absence does not block their work. When anyone takes a vacation, reassign their tasks to other people. Employees should be able to support each other, and there should be no irreplaceable people without whom it is impossible to do a task.
The extended version of the article is available on MLSDev blog, together with other interesting publications.
