Beating Burnout: How Jonnie got his groove back
My Propeller Career so far
The world was different in 2017. We had just discovered Salt Bae, pandemics were ancient history, and I was an engineer with no experience in the tech industry. Propeller only employed 35 people, but had invented AeroPoints, had a drone-surveying customer base and a 3D in-browser platform for looking at and measuring earthworks.
This was five years ago, and what a ride it has been since.
I started on our fledgling sales team and remember sitting in the basement with our CEO and other salespeople taking turns cold calling people with absolutely no success. After some time, I did have some success in the role, but it was mostly six months of trying my hardest at something, and not doing a great job.
Thankfully, Propeller gave me the chance to try something else — Customer Success (CS), a team of one. I was much more suited for, and successful in, this role.
After six months or so, I was promoted to Team Lead for Data Success, our data processing and support team. This role remains a big highlight for me — they’re all legends who welcomed and helped me. I helped them, and the team grew from 7 to 23 in the two years I was with them.
During this time I learned about Product Management, and the more I learned about it, the more I realized that it was my dream job. So I worked towards attaining this role, and after a couple of years, an opportunity arose and I jumped at it.
Over the past couple of years in Product Management, I’ve had some key wins, like Composite Surveys and PDF Overlays and have learned a lot, but I still very much feel like a beginner with much more to learn. Maybe I’ll always feel like this, which is probably a good thing.
Burnout
Over the course of my time at Propeller, I always:
- see things that need doing,
- see that we don’t have anyone to do them yet, then
- start doing them myself, regardless of whether it’s my job or enjoyable work.
This trait has been pretty useful in a start-up environment, as there’s never a shortage of work that needs to be done, and there’s always a lag between needing to do the work and hiring people to do it. This cycle has two major downsides, however:
- Your actual job doesn’t get 100% of your effort, so others need to step-in and help.
- It’s exhausting.
For four and a half years, I put in my absolute best effort at Propeller, working long hours and doing all the things. For most of that time, I felt good about it and hungry for more — until one day when I didn’t.
In 2021 I spent six-plus months sick and busier than ever, and didn’t take time to rest and recover like I should have. This, on top of a year that was difficult for everyone due to the global pandemic, really took it out of me physically and mentally, and I realized that I was burnt out — I didn’t feel good about work, and was not hungry for more. In retrospect, the contrast is clear.
Thankfully when I brought this up to my leaders, I received nothing but kind words and concrete support. This support continued through telling them that I felt the need for a six month break, handing over my work, and the support still continues today.
Recovery
When you tell people that you’re taking that much time off, there’s an expectation that you’ll spend the time doing great things — traveling, leveling up skills, or working on a big, fun project. However, when you’re burnt out, these aren’t what you need. It took me months to realize that burnout is like an injury, which needs to be treated and rested in order to heal.
I also thought that if I took everything off my plate, that I’d feel better. One less thing to worry about, right? So that’s what I did. Then when I woke up one day with absolutely nothing on my plate, I didn’t feel better, and this realization made me feel much, much worse.
I found myself questioning things that I wouldn’t have considered until I retired — like what is the meaning of life? Why bother doing anything since everything is temporary? What am I without my job? What is my purpose? I found myself starting each day dreading the fact that I had to exist for another entire day like this. Bad times.
My ego would love to say I figured all of this out myself, but I didn’t, and that’s OK — I sought professional help which was, and continues to be, incredibly valuable to me.
So in the end, I spent my time off:
- Recovering from burnout — meditating, exercising, and stretching every day.
- Catching up with old friends in my hometown.
- Making music (@jonniemusics).
- Traveling — the highlight was swimming with whale sharks!
Back to work
When it came time to go back to work, I was a little nervous, but I was mostly excited about the prospect, and was hungry for new challenges again. I had been following along with some of our key company-wide meetings, so catching up on things wasn’t a big leap.
As I’d hoped and asked for, I also came back to the company with a new focus on:
- Helping the product team make more data driven decisions, and
- User expansion (get more people doing more stuff on our platform).
These new focusses are equal parts daunting due to their scale, and exciting due to their potential impact on Propeller’s trajectory.
If I were to offer any advice around burnout, I’d say:
- If you’re sick, rest.
At the time, getting a project up and running seemed more important than anything, including my health. To be honest, to some extent I’m still happy I did because of how well it’s going now. However, I should’ve rested, because then I wouldn’t have been sick for so long, and I wouldn’t have been burnt out. - Take time off.
Having weeks of leave up my sleeve seemed great, but really I should’ve taken that leave when I could, instead of waiting until I was burnt out to give myself any rest. - If you do burn-out, be transparent, reach out for support and give yourself the right time and environment to heal.
There’s nothing more important than your health and wellbeing.
There aren’t many places where you can admit burn-out, and only receive positivity and support from all levels of the business, but that’s how it’s been for me at Propeller. It’s always in the lowest moments that you see what the people you work with are made of, and from my perspective, it’s pure gold. I love working here.
