Beating Burnout

Many of us have suffered from being burned out and learned our lesson afterward. Inspired by this fascinating article "Beating Burnout," I would like to share my experiences and thoughts of going into and coming out of burnout.

At Uber, I have had many intense experiences. When we started to focus on India market, we rushed PayTM integration in a month, which was the hard deadline that RBI plans to shut us down without it. When we were trying to catch up in China, we built the Uber Commute product in three months to avoid losing commuters to other platforms. When we burned tons of dollars in the market, we worked 24*7 to improve the burning efficiency with two groups working in daytime and nighttime continuously.

From the past intense experience, I learned that there are three components of burnout as the article summarized and would like to share with you:

• Exhaustion: this is the part that most people are familiar with and easiest to be realized. When you find you can not focus enough, do not want to come in the office or only feel drained, you are exhausted and need to take some action to beat burnout.
• Cynicism: we typically do not consider this component as part of burnout, but it makes more impact than exhaustion. You will start getting distracted by making wrong assumptions, questioning the mission and become less engaged.
• Inefficacy: working longer does not mean getting more done. As a result of being burnout, you might get to the situation of working harder but not smarter. You try your best to be hustling but end up with more slips.

I experienced all of three feelings often and here are my ways to prevent or recover from them:

• Increase the priority of your vacation plan and prepare for it: I heard many people postpone their vacation plans again and again due to "meeting deadlines," "urgent emergency" or "no one can cover me." Without organizing our vacation plan, we always find it is hard to get ourselves out of work even for a single day. Document projects and find people to cover you. Organize the deadlines and communicate them clearly to the team. Identify potential problems and address them in advance. All these actions will help you have a refreshing vacation.
• Be open minded and have a bigger picture: when we are burned out, we tend to consider our piece of work only and not to think from other perspectives. Hence others with different opinions look not being reasonable to us. To avoid this, we need to keep open communication, listen to different angles carefully and fit our projects into a bigger picture.
• Set clear expectation and know when to push cross the red line: there are always more projects than what we can do. Set a clear expectation to others what you already have in your queue, how much extra you can take and how you prioritize them. Only push yourself cross the red line for top priorities and switch back after.
• Talk to your manager and peers: we are one team, and we are here to help each other. Understand the pace of others and what your managers need you to be will provide you more insights.

Burnout hurts our body, mind, and confidence. To be a world class marathoners, we need to beat burnout as much as we can. Understanding whether we are burning out and how to get out of it will help us get more work done with a higher quality in the long run.