Burned Out. Who me?

I vividly remember returning to my office in the late afternoon, after a day of back-to-back meetings, and sitting down to get my “real” work done. My computer screen opened to my inbox, with probably 100 email messages I hadn’t read confronting me with jarring bold-type subject lines, at least eight open windows of responses to emails that I had started to reply to and abandoned mid-sentence, three Word documents in various states of composition, and two spreadsheets, one on each giant monitor.

I started frantically clicking on windows, trying to compose replies, read emails, edit documents, review spreadsheets. I just clicked back and forth, sometimes writing a single word, sometimes reading the first line of a new email, but mostly I wasn’t doing anything but clicking. I was overwhelmed and paralyzed. I remember thinking, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I concentrate?

And in disbelief of my actual experience, I continued this bizarre clicking paralysis for probably half an hour. Literally getting nothing done and becoming more and more overwhelmed. It didn’t occur to me to stop, it didn’t occur to me to go home, it didn’t occur to me to do anything differently than I was doing in that moment, let alone give myself some compassion. I was only judging myself.

And then I started crying. I was so frustrated at not being able to focus for long enough to reply to a single email. What was ordinarily mundane was suddenly challenging.

I finally left the office, depleted and despairing. But this was the beginning of a pattern that repeated itself on most days. I would do OK in meetings, able to engage with others and have coherent discussions, but my to-do list was growing as was my inability to focus on tasks.

I continued to think I was suffering from some inherent flaw when I sort-of casually mentioned to a good friend how weird it was that I couldn’t concentrate on my work, that I had all these open windows and couldn’t manage to complete a task. She said, “oh hun, sounds like you’re burned out.”

I remember thinking that I couldn’t be burned out. That only happened to people with really important jobs that were much harder than mine. Who was I to be burned out? After all, I liked my job. I liked my colleagues. And it wasn’t like people’s lives were in my hands.

These comparisons only intensified my misery. She was right. I was burned out. I had fully bought into the notion of long hours, climbing the corporate ladder, doing just one more thing, sacrificing myself and my free time on the pyre of getting ahead, and it caught up with me. I was exhausted.

That was years ago, and I’m still making sense of that experience. Now, reading Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee, I’m gaining even more perspective about how the external factors of our work-centric culture cause us to internalize beliefs that our self-worth and value is tied to our productivity and contribution. That as individuals we equate purpose with productivity, and measure ourselves on the basis of busyness, which is worn as a badge of honor.

Importantly, Headlee reveals that it is possible to work less and still produce, and that by putting intention behind that, and not getting caught up in the zeitgeist of “busy busy busy,” we actually can be more productive and significantly happier.

Organizations have benefitted from the prevailing “busy-worship” attitude and workaholic culture. Though paradoxically, Headlee demonstrates that they stand to gain even more in productivity by requiring fewer hours because it’s what employees want and need.

Prior to the pandemic, I felt like in order to break free of corporatism and have the life I wanted, I had to leave that world entirely. And I can state unequivocally that it has had the desired effect. But now, in this once-in-a-generation moment of reckoning, so much more is possible.

It’s time for all of us to do less. With intention.