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Understanding Burnout
Cognitive Dissident writes "New York Magazine has posted a feature story about the growing phenomenon of 'burnout' and the growing interest of both healthcare professionals and even corporate management in this problem. Probably the most surprising thing learned from reading this article is that work load is not the best predictor of burnout. Instead it has more to do with perceived 'return on investment' of effort. So work places are having to learn to adjust the work environment to reduce or prevent burnout. From the article: '"It's kind of like ergonomics," [Christina Maslach] finally says. "It used to be, 'You sit for work? Here's a chair.' But now we design furniture to fit and support the body. And we're doing the same here. The environments themselves have to say, 'We want people to thrive and grow.' There was a shift, finally, in how people understood the question."' NPR's Talk of the Nation also had a recent feature story based on this article."
I'm a very busy individual with peaks and valleys -- I go from 80 hour weeks for 3 months to 5 hour weeks for 3 months (on purpose). I see a lot of people in my fields burn-out regularly, and I wonder if it really has to do with workload, or if it has to do with a lot of other secondary causes. For me, the closest I came to burn-out was during a time of my life when my workload wasn't excessive (maybe 20 hours a week of billable labor and 20 hours a week of secondary support work). The workload was feeling stressful, but it was everything else in my life that was really having an effect that I didn't realize. I vented at the job, but it was carryover from other problems. I had a house that was too big ("housing prices always go up!" they said). I had big new cars that we replaced too often ("never buy anything on credit that depreciates"). I didn't take time to congregate with family and real friends -- my only friends were either employees, customers, or people in my field of work. I didn't take time to really have a vacation -- vacating from "reality." I wanted the newest toys, and I wanted them before others ("bragging rights.") My relationship with my significant other was cluttered with just that -- clutter. We had junk everywhere, and when we got our big 4 bedroom home, we had to fill it with more clutter or it felt empty. That clutter around me ended up cluttering my thought process peripherally, adding to the stress.
So what did I do? I downsized the clutter (physical, emotional and labor) and upsized the real personal time. I don't discuss business or politics or religion with my real friends and family -- instead we talk about reality, the now, the past. I "fired" a few of my worst customers who never seemed to pay on time but always called with this or that emergency. Sure, the billable rate was great, but the peripheral stress didn't balance out. I sold my home (and bought a few mobile homes throughout the regions I work and vacation in). I sold all 3 new cars and bought 2 used cars. We sold almost all our possessions except for our books and heirlooms (including all our technology, clothing, household goods, etc), and when we moved into our tiny 2 bedroom home, we bought new items that would last until our grandchildren would inherit them.
Now life is much easier. Work never stresses me, even when deadlines happen. I don't feel like I have to worry about traveling or spending time with my aging parents or younger siblings. I am able to really work on building real friendships of honesty and caring. My relationship with my significant other is so much better because we actually have time for one another, not for the junk and clutter we used to have. I actually work MORE now than I ever have, but I still have time for myself and for others.
Many of my old friends are burning out right now -- a few of them are millionaires who can't keep a grasp on living for today. I'd say a huge percentage of them are in major debt (50%+ of their gross income), some are living way beyond their means even though they're in the top 5% earning bracket. They hate their job, their spouses, their kids, their homes, their cars, and their lives -- because there is just too much. Where do they vent it? At work -- the place they spend 8-10 hours a day invested in. Their offices are clutter piles, their cars are messes, and their face and eyes show it.
If an outsider met them, they'd say that they work too much. They wouldn't blame the (leased) BMWs, the (mortgaged) McMansion, or the (on-credit) Armani sunglasses. They'd not even notice that they're living 1 person to a bedroom and practically 1 person to a bathroom, whereas historically we've seen the average around 2:1 on both, even 3:1 in some cases. They don't realize that the more you have, the more your mind is occupied on some level with all that stuff. On top of all that overhead, they're also paying probably 40-50% of their gross income to all the various government taxes, fees and costs. That's something most forget
Friends and I would stay up all night smoking pot and playing Nintendo. Around dawn we'd be useless sacks of shit. I still freak out thinking of the "Death" monsters in Gauntlet.
Trolling is a art,
It is not the amount of work that causes burnout, but the fitting of the person to the role they are performing. Make bad fits and the people get frustrated and burn out easier. Make good fits and the creative energy flows.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Burnout happens because we live a soulless existence working on worthless things to gain money which will be spent on worthless material things.
When you don't do anything that seem important to you, you simply stop being able to do it.
At some point, your brain figures out it only has one life to live and it's being wasted. So it "burns out" to get itself out of the current, unhealthy environment.
If you burn out, it's not really your fault entirely.
But you should recognize it as your brain and body telling you to get out now, you're killing it!
this is just my theory, of course.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I don't know about you but whenever I feel burned out I go to http://slashdot.org/
Always be polite.
I haven't been to work in about 3 months. Basically living from my savings and a porn website (check my sig! ;) ).
I thought I was young, invulnerable, but working from 9am to 7pm just got to me, after about 4 years. Now I just can't agree with the idea that I have to go and do stuff for someone ever again.
And I feel happy without that. I think something just broke, and I don't want to fix it.
I just don't have time to read it, I have meetings to go to.
If I am working on something where I see great results that positively impact my company's clients, I feel great ... even if I'm working 80 hour weeks. If I am doing something that I view as trivial or unnecessary (but cannot get out of doing it), I quickly feel burned out within a few weeks.
... and we wonder why our kids hate school and aren't doing well.
I almost gave up IT this year. I was working at a financial institute and the work was fun. I wrote a BlackBerry app using java with a .Net backend. Fun stuff. But my manager was a complete jerk. Constantly moody. At my review he said "99% of the time we love you, but that 1% is killing us". I was out for a few days earlier in the year when my son's babysitter almost died, and this was brought up. "I don't care about your babysitter, I don't care about your kid. I just want you to be here for eight hours a day." I gave my notice at the end of the week. Turns out he lost all of his developers in that review month. He must have read somewhere that reviews were the place to smack your employees around.
Although it wasn't the work that made me quit, I was very reluctant to go through the same crap with a new manager. Instead of giving up IT entirely, I went out on my own again. I barely had enough work to pay the bills through the summer, but DAMN I was relaxed! By the end of the summer I was able to stomach another corporate job. It's boring work (See: Read Slashdot), but they are flexible. My old manager was anything but. I'll give it a while and if I get too bored, do my own thang again.
Burnout may not be something you can control, but you can fix it.
If I'm working on a project and not making any progress, another four hour day at work seems unbearable. If I'm making great progress and enjoying way I'm doing, I'll forget lunch and dinner and find myself starving and exhausted 14-16 hours later, but quite happy. Progress I think is the key.
Dekker Dreyer
I'd wager that overall health is a big factor, too. I recall a study that ended up on the front page here. Rats that were injured and under stress both took longer to heal AND were a lot less active. Speaking from personal experience, any sort of lingering pain/injury can really contribute. In my case, it got to a point where the injury kept me from sleeping well, which made getting up and going to work awful. When I was there, I was horribly unproductive as I was always distracted/unable to concentrate, which ended up causing more stress as work piled up. When I got home, I'd need to wind down before I could get to sleep.
The end result was that I was always tired, hurting, and totally unable to get anything done. It was one massive negative feedback loop, and I found myself just wanting to quit everything. The end result was depression, burnout, and suffering.
I'd say staying healthy is one step in preventing burnout.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
I call bullshit. I've seen burnout first-hand. TFA says it best: "Getting the most out of people didn't actually mean getting the best."
An employer is *stupid* to "extract as much productivity as their morals allow with no consideration for burn out.'"
You sound like Stalin; marching an infantry battalion through a minefield is defintely an effective way to clear it, but don't expect the troops to be up for much of a fight the next day!
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
There is a strong physiological underpinning to burnout, as years of constant stress and little sleep take their toll on the brain (in fact, the last stages of burnout are very much like those of a clinical depression). It is possible to recover, but it can take *years* and it's a difficult process.
A while back I wrote an article for Kuro5hin on this same subject, and that got plenty of positive responses. It was later expanded and wikified into a Wikibook which you might find interesting: Demystifying Depression
(Yeah, sorry for the shameless plug, but this is important stuff that all of us in IT should be aware of. Besides, the link is to a public wikibook, not to my personal blog or anything.)
What they're really pointing to as "burnout" is really a lack of personal growth. Call it the "working dead" if you will. You're working, but never "productive" enough for advancement. you have all the other things but aren't really "alive".
John Mayer even has a Song about it "Something's missing"... you can buy it on iTunes with your credit card to put on your iPod, in your in car stereo adapter, on the way to work!
In my view, burnout occurs due to the reason that people do not have a well-conceived goals.
Understand that, and work for it - you wont have burnout at all. People with real well-conceived goals, work for 100 hr weeks and they are the happiest there could be (cant say the same for the family though )
But, if you are working for the sake of working - or to just to feed yourselves and family, they you are a prime candidate for burnout.
I have come pretty close to burnouts - and it is not during the time when I worked 85 Hrs/week; it was when I was doing stuff for which I had no interest at all. Even though I knew it all along, I understood that money was not my goal in my life pretty much late in my life. Once I understood that, everyday of work was a horror. I was working maybe 5/6 hours a week - and still I was close to burnout.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
We've had 4 burnouts. 2 of them were managers. 2 were programmers. The cause is definitely lack of satisfaction and not excessive hours. There is a 100% correlation between rapid company growth and declining individual influence that causes burnouts. They tend to be very ambitious. 2 of 4 quit when another person was promoted above them or hired to fill the role above them. Another aspect not mentioned by the media is that burnouts tend to lock themselves in their cubes and never be seen.
People forced to work excessive hours usually go somewhere else but don't burn out. They actually don't quit or take long vacations to make up for it, which shows they probably bring the long hours on themselves.
I can happily work long hours when I know it will make a difference. But too often there's somebody causing a disconnect between the work and the reward. That's what causes stress, the natural confusion arising from the mind having to override the body's strong desire to beat the living shit out of some asshole who desperately deserves it. Maybe we should start a fight club.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
From the abstract:
How this is a surprise is precisely the root of the problem.
The biggest reason for burnout, from the perspective of one who has suffered a lot of burnout, is almost entirely the return on investment issue.
When you work long, hard, thankless hours, or do work that others have no idea how to do, and do not get either of adequate recognition, appropriate remuneration, or personal satisfaction, it piles on you until, one day, you end up looking at where you've been and where you are now, and see that your standard of living is not any better (possibly worse), or that you don't have the respect or position you feel you have earned, or you simply do not feel that you are achieving what matters to you in your life. And on that day, you feel either inadequate, slighted, or unappreciated. The result, in all of those cases, is that you burn out.
While some people might tell you to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and take life by the horns, it is not always so easy to do --- especially if you try and try and nothing seems to change. It can be demoralizing at best, and the peception of getting nowhere just makes it ever harder to pick yourself up and try again.
The answer for employers who want to stem the effects of burnout is to help their employees achieve meaningful, real satisfaction from their work.
Providing wages that (at least) keep up with cost of living, making available opportunities to advance one's position, offering employees ways to share in the profits of their work, supporting employee achievement of what is important to them, giving them recognition and appreciation for their contributions, and simply respecting them as people are the tools you need. A nice chair doesn't hurt, but it doesn't stop the burnout. Burnout is more psychological than physical.
Now, employers don't have to just give things to their employees on a silver platter, either. It's all about reciprocating peoples' efforts in a meaningful way. Unless they're starving, a holiday turkey once a year isn't as meaningful as some people think. Neither is a gold watch after thirty or more years of work. If employees can look back just one year and honestly say to themselves that they are better off now and are on the road to achieivng what is important to them, you'll see the burnout rate go down and the productivity rate go up (probably exponentially).
Most people actually thrive on a challange, but only when the potential reward is right. While stress plays a factor in burnout, it is simply contributing to the phychological complications that are at the root of the problem. A sense of achievement is a very real queller of stress. People can handle schedules, deadlines, and crazy hours. It just has to be worth it to them.
Now, if you are the one suffering from burnout, what you need to do is to take proactive measures to accomplish something meaningful in your life. It can be all at once or baby steps. It doesn't matter which. It doesn't have to contibute to getting that mansion on the beach, or the expensive sports car, or even popularity and fame. You just need something to reaffirm that you are capable of getting to where you want to be in life and that you are getting something from your work --- that you are not just a slave to the grind.
If your mind constantly wanders to money issues, look for a better income opportunity or some supplemental income opportunities, like moonlighting, freelancing, or merchandising. If you yearn for more respect, appreciation, or personal satisfaction, you would be amazed how much you get from doing some charity work or pitching in to help out with community projects. If you just need to get some inkling of enjoyment from what you've earned instead of funnel
I don't see what's so surprising about this observation.
Anyone who's ever done double shifts for a month to meet a deadline knows that you feel pretty great when it all comes together. You bond with your team mates, eat pizza and rock out in the halls out 3am, brainstorm to come up with elegant solutions to challenging requirements, and generally make the world a better place in some small way.
On the other hand, you can start to feel pretty shitty when you're working regular hours for years and years on a project, where there are no written requirements and the customer keeps changing his mind, repeatedly obsoleting big chunks of your previous work.
Oh yeah, and don't even think about refactoring that old code to better reflect the new requirements, because that would require us to test it again. Just add some new functions to the old classes.
"Classes? What are these "classes" you speak of?", asked the team lead. "I don't see why all the variables can't be static. After all, there's only ever one socket connection.". I shit you not.
One day you wake up and realize that four years of your life have gone by, and all you have to show for it is a mass of spaghetti, (that would probably take you six months to redevelop if you started from scratch tomorrow), a few bucks in the bank, some new grey hairs and a collection of cute puffy stress toys.
So yeah, I think it's pretty obvious that return on investment is a more important factor than workload, in causing burnout.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
I consider myself "burned out", pursuing my efforts now on a personal level or for friends. In a way, it seems a shame I am "wasting" such precious insights that 35 years in design work ( I mean *real* design work ) gives a designer. Yet, I elect to live at a near poverty level in lieu of having to "sell my soul" to the suited-and-tied corporate types. I want so bad to go back to the time that I actually meant something to the company, and not be considered just another commodity.
My burnout occurred as I had spent years learning and perfecting a set of software I liked to use on PC's where I could write my own device drivers to make the computer do ANYTHING that it was capable of doing. These were .COM, .EXE, and .SYS files, written in C++ and assembler, running under DOS. I had collected every tool imaginable to let me do any sort of DSP, control any interface, or let me do any mathematical equations ( differential calculus ) on my machine.
I was in the midst of a dream project where I was trying to build a wide-range VCO, yet have the extremely low phase noise which would be required for using it as a local oscillator to drop 256QAM to baseband. The managers came in and demanded I do my work on some lousy 386-SX based machine running Windows 2.1 ( which was current at the time ), running doublespace. My machine at the lab was a 286. But I knew what I was doing with that one. I had no idea how to make my stuff run under Windows in a supervised environment.
I had no interest whatsoever in the fancy graphical output of Windows because I had no idea how the get the machine to do what I wanted, and do it without all the bloat which took forever and a day to execute. My mind was still set on how to use amplifier gains to increase the Q of my resonant circuits and configure the short term phase error through one varactor and the long term frequency control through another varactor, so I could simultaneously reap the benefits of fast phase correction without perturbing the frequency setpoints.
I know if you are not into RF modems, the above looks like gibberish. What I am trying to say is I already knew how to do what I needed to do, I just had to do it the way I knew how to do it.
Hiring somebody to come in and tell me that I can't do it my way - without giving him the onus of showing me exactly how to do it his way - did not help matters one bit.
He came in expecting me to take like a duck to water with his paradigms. Giving me closed-source proprietary crap to build on, citing I had no "need-to-know" how it worked - to me - was tantamount to giving a lawyer legal documents, written in Swahili, to approve. Just tell the lawyer which ones do what and have him approve them.
I thought of myself much like a pianist, with years of experience on the keyboard. Some manager comes in, forces me to use another piano whose keyboard starts with all the A notes, followed by all the B's, and so on... all in order. The manager patiently sits behind his desk, considering me not to be a team player because I hate that piano. He patiently keeps asking me what the problem is, can't I understand? Here it is again, all the A's are here, all the B's are there. All in order. Can't I be flexible enough to use it? Just point and click.
I know just as soon as I take the time to play my music through that machine, the manager is just going to redo the keyboard again. I have no return on my investment of effort whatsoever. Its like trying to put a lot of effort in improving a rented house.
I realized this guy has his experience in presentations, which I consider to be corporate propaganda more than anything concrete and useful. I could not consider him actually designing anything. Yet his training prepared him to find corporate executive types who could be persuaded that his efforts were more valuable than mine, and I should work under him.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
My family, however, are extremely conservative Christians who are in denial that I grew up and realized that their religion was just one of many and completely uncompelling. I have to sit calmly and let comments like "God is looking out for you!" float by after I comment that I just got a nice bonus for my hard work on a project at work. I'm cool with that. I'm the bigger person. I don't say "Wow that was lucky!" when they claim that their god was the root cause of some pleasant event in their lives. If I stood up for my beliefs the same way they shove theirs in my face knowing that I reject their claims of a god...there would be unhappiness.
I feel for you. I'm a Christian, and I would NEVER say anything like that because I believe (and I believe the Bible supports this thought) that God stopped "looking out" for everyone 2000 years ago. That was the reason for Christ's birth, death, conquering of death and return -- to remove God's demands for obedience from the picture, to replace it with what Christians call the Holy Spirit -- something that guides you to do right. God's not there killing people and promoting people, He's in His Kingdom ruling forever. That's it. You got a raise? I say be thankful that God created you with those hands and that mind and that drive. I say be thankful that the Spirit leads you in proper decisions, even if you're not a Christian and don't believe in the Spirit. A Christian that wonders why God doesn't answer prayers is one who isn't reading their Bible and is instead listening to some blowhard pastor who also isn't reading their Bible. A Christian who condemn loss of others as "Satan" or "God's Will" is in that same group. I am embarassed by these Christians because all I see is them wasting their lives, and ruining a good faith for others.
When Christians start living their lives based on what Jesus said and did, the feeling of hypocrisy and ridicule will go away -- maybe even opening the door for others to look at the faith from a perspective of how to better their own lives, and avoid judging others. God's rule over this fleshly world is over -- He's done what He needed to do, and He left us all with a very simple and basic path that really isn't all that difficult to understand. It's the egomaniacal pro-force Christians that have ruined it for the world, methinks.
I apologize for your family's distasteful comments and lack of allowance for you to live your life as you wish. They're probably "turn or burn" Christians, right?