The Quiet Part Out Loud On Burnout

If you’ve read this blog even a couple of times, you might know my general take on burnout is that it’s a big deal, and we should care more, but it’s not a “crisis” by any means, because for something to be “a crisis,” people with decision-making authority have to care, and executives do not care about burnout. They see it as the cost of doing business, they often will regard someone who is clearly burned out as “hustling,” and burnout seems like something you see a shrink about — and you can see that shrink off the clock. I mean, we still pay you benefits, right? (Is there a way we can talk about ending those?)

In sum: for people that matter in organizations, burnout is actually a badge of honor, not something to be “solved.” Until you realize that, you’re deluding yourself on this topic.

Still, though, here’s Cal Newport writing on overwork for The New Yorker , and this part jumps out:

In an article for the MIT Sloan Management Review, from 2018, titled “Breaking Logjams in Knowledge Work ,” the business scholars Sheila Dodge, Don Kieffer, and Nelson P. Repenning argue that office work should follow the lead of advanced industrial manufacturing and move the assignment of tasks from a push to a pull model. Most knowledge-work settings deploy a push paradigm: when you need something done, you push it onto someone else to accomplish — with an e-mail, or a request made during a meeting. As the authors note, this leaves overloaded individuals to make complicated prioritization decisions on their own, which in turn breeds disorganization. “When knowledge work processes are managed via push,” they write, “it’s difficult to track tasks in process because so many of them reside in individual email in-boxes, project files, and to-do lists.”

Ah, the true rub.

Let’s talk for a moment about priorities

Work is not a priority-laden place. It’s usually a “go go go” or “plow ahead” place, where the badges of honor are busyness, meetings, and shipping and selling things, even if selling those things or shipping those things creates a ton more problems on the back-end. Movement and doing stuff are very important. Thinking and establishing priorities? Significantly less so.

This is backed up by tons of research, although another elephant in the room is that most managers and executives utterly ignore academic research, receiving it in emails and saying “Thx.” Still, we know most managers cannot set their own priorities very well — and these are the same people supposedly setting priorities for those who face customers. What a joke. There are basic sets of priorities that managers should embrace , but again — being real for a second here — most managers spend all their time managing up, because that gets them more for their families and makes them feel relevant and successful. Ideally managers would know what matters most to a client or project , but sadly that’s rare too.

And yet, despite all this — despite the priority vacuum that modern knowledge work so often becomes — how most managers choose to manage is:

• “I got this thing that needs done.”
• “Let me offload it to this person over here.”
• “Oh, another thing.”
• “I’ll also offload that. Dan seems competent, so even though I gave him the first thing, I’ll give him the second one.”

Eventually Dan has four things, and now the responsibility is on Dan to prioritize what’s what, even though Manager Marty hasn’t provided that clarity — just pushed over the tasks. That’s how 90% of managers I’ve seen work. It’s almost “Warm Body” management, i.e. “Hey, can I grab you for a second to do this?” That’s part of why the whole hybrid/remote work thing scares the shit out of managers — because while you can “grab” someone on Zoom or Skype, it’s a bit harder than if they sit 10 feet from you. PS managers are also often lazy.

This is ultimately why people burn out

Because they get pushed 12 priorities, but no one is capable of setting the order of those priorities, so now the person with the 12 priorities has to set the order — prioritize the priorities, ha — and at the same time, actually work on them. And usually people that get pushed 12 priorities also get invited to about six meetings per day, so now you’re at let’s say 3 meetings of 30 minutes = 90 minutes and 3 meetings of 1 hour = 3 hours, so 4.5 hours of meetings a day (that’s half a workday) and oh, those 12 priorities are still there. Plus you’ve got to eat, ideally you’d work out, maybe you’d have sex, maybe you want to watch a show, you want to spend some time with your family, etc. Oh, your mom is old and lives in your fourth bedroom? Right, another priority. So now we’re at like, 4.5 hours/day of meetings, 12 work priorities, 8 life priorities, and you’re awake about 16 hours.

How you gonna do it? How you gonna prioritize your priorities and other people’s priorities?

Right there is why people burn out or disengage (“not tonight, honey” or “Can we reschedule for three Tuesdays from now?”). It’s because the shit can all get to be too much.

Can we solve this?

Yes, but it’s challenging.

• Managers need to PUSH less: Most managers would smack you across the face with a tennis racket if you said this to them, but they need to push less and pull more.
• Managers need to distribute work more evenly: They tend to give almost all the work to 1–2 people they feel they can “trust.”
• People need to manage their own time better: This is doable. I actually manage my time pretty well, despite notable flaws in other areas of my life. Honestly if you read this far and want a life hack, put every single app that your company communicates through on your phone, in a folder, and allow push notifications. This means when a push comes across you can instantly say “On it!” Once you say “On it!” to a manager, you just bought yourself 10 days. All they ever care about is that someone is “on it,” not it actually gets done — the next time they will bring it up is when their boss is on their ass about it, which is probably, again, about 10 days from now.
• People need to realize what really is important: It’s not KPIs. It’s people.

What else you got on this?