Burnout is Avoidable

If you love what you are doing, it takes a lot to burn you out. That’s why this Saturday, my son had no problem catching during his morning baseball game and then immediately heading into the pool for a water polo match.

For those of you who aren’t big sports fans, let me provide a little context. Catching is a very tiring position to play in baseball, because each pitch requires you to squat and then pop back up. So If there are 50 pitches in the inning (which isn’t out of the realm of possibilities), that’s 50 squats in just that inning! And then there is water polo… A sport that requires you to sprint and/or tread water (while being attacked by the opposing players) the entire time. When I swim laps, I swim 30 to 45 minutes, but they’re definitely not all sprints and I don’t have anyone climbing on top of me while I do it!

So how is it that he could do all of those things and not be exhausted? The answer is because he loves them.

The same can be true in the office, when you are doing tasks that you love, projects that you find interesting, and work, the positively engages your brain, you can do them for a long time before you feel burned out. If however, you aren’t good at the you were assigned, you don’t feel connected to the people around you, and you aren’t energized by your projects, you will feel the tug of change much quicker.

If you were currently feeling burnt out, and you are considering making a change, let me encourage you to spend a few days, capturing your “love/loathe list”.

For a week, I encourage you keep and list of tasks that you “love” by documenting every time you are doing work that makes you happy, makes sure you lose track of time, or makes you proud to accomplish it. On a separate list, capture all the tasks you “loathe.” These are tasks you dread, the ones you put off, the ones that drain your energy.

Once you have your lists, you cannot I leverage them to identify new opportunities that better fit your preferences, but in the interim you can use this data to help you find ways to do more of what you love and less of what you loathe. By doing this you might just find that you don’t need a new job after all but even if you do decide to make a change, hopefully the time while you are waiting will be a little better.