How to be More Productive and Prevent Burnout
Last week, after reading an insightful post written by Joel Peterson, Chairman of Jet Blue Airways, I wrote an article, “5 Signs You’re Seriously Burnt Out”, which spoke to my own recent and repeated experiences of burnout. Writing this stimulated me to delve deeper into my own behavior and seek to find techniques and tools to help prevent myself from suffering the same fate any time soon. I am hopeful that by writing this, and bringing it into my focus, it will enable me to more easily incorporate these techniques into my own everyday life, making them a habit not an effort.
From my own experience, I have found that there are some key activities and measures that I can take to help palliate and delay the onset of burnout. These consist of taking exercise, reading, sleeping, doing yoga, and taking time to switch off. The measures are made up of processes that help me fully benefit when I do stop to recharge.
I have broken down these things into the following obvious, and not so obvious, key steps:
1. Forget Balance, Find Harmony
I have said it and indeed you may have said it, those repeatable and ill-thought through words, “it’s all about your work-life balance”. Uttered unthinkingly many times as a reassurance that your key to rest and peace is balancing the scales of work with something rewarding and happy in your personal life. Taking the assumption that work is the “thing” that is cause for tiredness, anxiety, and stress is the entire basis for this statement. To me (I too am guilty of this) the people who say it’s all about work-life balance are wrong. Fundamentally I find nourishment and personal satisfaction doing anything in which I find value, passion, and harmony. In this state things suddenly become effortless to achieve and far more enjoyable — things like being part of a connected and caring team, providing value for customers, and making differences in their lives. I know for certain I would burn out much faster working 5hrs a day at a job where I was unfulfilled and unsatisfied than in one where I worked 15hrs a day fulfilling my heart’s desires.
2. Take Incremental Steps and Disengage Your Brain
How many times have you found yourself chasing your own tail for a solution to a problem? Oftentimes futile, this hamster-wheel effect of chasing a solution to a problem when you are tired or cognitively sub-optimal only leads to greater mental stress and tiredness. In Sarah Greenfields, recent book, A Day in the Life of the Brain, she explores the varying states of consciousness the brain experiences throughout the day. Describing ‘thought and thinking’ in the following way.
“Thinking is a movement confined to the brain. A thought has a beginning, middle, and end; you always end up in a different place — and how did you get to that place? A sequence of steps — ‘a movement confined to the brain’”.
She goes on to talk about how one can amplify this step-by-step process by bringing it into our physical reality, and outside of the confines of our brain.
“In the same way one takes a long walk to clear one’s mind can. This step-by-step process can strengthen and amplify one’s own thought process.”
Many times, I have unwittingly put this into practice, and, when struggling with a mentally challenging problem, I have quietly taken time away to myself to walk out a problem. By the time I am finished, the solution has seemingly come out of nowhere, forming a resolution.
Next time you hit that mental brick wall, step away, relax, and take a walk. Enjoy the moment — running in circles is exhausting, and creating a repetitive pattern of constantly hunting down and overcoming a challenge is both exhausting and unsustainable. Take time and steps to let the problem solve itself; you will preserve energy and be more productive by doing less.
3. Live With Mindfulness
This, for me, has been the hardest barrier to overcome, Andrew Thomas of SkyBell Technologies, Inc. says this:
“Personally, I find the best way to avoid burnout is to have an ongoing focus on mindfulness rather than only when on breaks and vacations. Find ways to detach during the week in a way that works for you. Yoga and exercise work for some, while meditation works for others. Be mindful of those moments. Try to take consistent mini-breaks throughout the week to detach and re-center.”
When you are on the treadmill of life with deadlines, engagements, dinners, drinks, holidays, parties… (I am feeling exhausted just writing that one sentence), it can be hard to find time for mini breaks. The habit of moving from one thing to the next is engrained in the work and social fabric of our society. Take mini-breaks, power naps, walks — whatever is required to break the cycle.
4. Build Small, Great, Powerful Teams
If you think that vacations are the way to recharge, you might be sorely mistaken. We all have experienced the ‘Sunday scaries’ more than a handful of times in our life. However, the vacation scaries are ten times worse, with the first two weeks back fraught with stress and mountains of work. So, what is the way out of this?
You need to be part of, or build, a small, powerful team that is there to support you when you are away and when you get back. Positioning your teammates and yourself for a soft landing when you get back to work will enable you, and them, to fully absorb the benefits of the mental and physical break you have just enjoyed.
For me, small, powerful teams are the key to success in life, personal relationships and work. You must build strong, high-performing teams of specialized talent, the perfect Venn diagram as it were. Knitted together with a strong bond and focused goal, small teams are optimized for efficiency, execution, and velocity.
Think of it like this, in the fall of 2001 a small task force of US military special forces arrived in Afghanistan. They were tasked to work with the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban and uproot terrorist training camps. It took fewer than 200 Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and Air Force Special Tactics personnel to expel nearly 100,000 entrenched Taliban and al Qaeda forces. So, what is the secret sauce?
The term ‘special operations forces’ (SOF for short) describes mixed (small) teams of highly focused and specialized individuals, each with a unique, highly-focused set of skills. When operating in their team, they become an unrivaled adversary — each magnifying the others’ contribution to create a team that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Each person in the team is skilled and knowledgeable enough to step in and carry the other in a time of injury or crisis.
These ‘small, passionate, and powerful teams’ — SPPTs — should become the internal fabric of your culture and organizational structure. In both your personal and professional life they amplify efficacy and enable the support of your teammates. Thus, allowing you to step back and be mindful in both sickness and good health. If you are out on vacation, turn your work email off, submerse yourself in the moment, have your teammates manage the day-to-day. Then return to order and structure feeling refreshed, raring to go, and highly effective.
5. Meditate Daily — ‘Create Mental Space’
The term ‘meditate’ often conjures up the image of the cross-legged yogi chanting a mantra and seeking their ‘Zen space’. For me, meditation is a far simpler concept and you don’t need incense, sage, or Tibetan Singing Bells to be successful. If even for 10 minutes, spending time (especially in the early afternoon — right around ‘I need a coffee time’) to sit, close one’s eyes and breathe is extremely powerful. While sitting, imagine something you love, something that brings joy and peace into your life. It may be a loved one, a pet, a view of the Sierra Mountains, a stream — anything that brings you a sense of peace. Simply focus only on that, allow the racing thoughts to come to your mind, but don’t fight them, you will soon find them drifting away. This keeps me fresh and sharp, and provides my brain and body time to rest — it is truly very powerful.
I truly believe that taking some of these steps and incorporating them into your personal and professional life will allow peace and happiness to flow while helping to prevent the insidious onset of burnout. The stark reality is that in our everyday lives there are few situations that are near to life and death in magnitude — nothing is worth burning out for. You will always find a very good excuse to not sit, not meditate, not take a vacation, not go for a walk. But, what is 10 minutes’ worth to you and what is the cost of not taking that time? I guarantee that stopping for 10 minutes every day as a bare minimum will amplify your productivity, health, and contribute to you being less burnt out. I wish you luck on your journey and hope we are all successful in our pursuit of peace.
Do you have any favorite techniques for preventing burnout? Please comment or share them on my Facebook page here.
Happy holidays.
