My friends called it…

I’ve been travelling a lot for work in the last few months, and there will be more plenty more in the immediate future. There have been times when inspiration has been difficult to come by and motivation may not be totally there.

One of my friends called it before I recognized it, I’m approaching burnout.

I’ve been here before, taking a few moments to look I recognize the symptoms and about the only surprise is that it’s taken this long to get here. So what do I do about it? How do I handle it?

First, work less. Doing what I do it’s way easier to say “work less” than actually do it. I’ll start small, lets say no weekend overtime for the next month or two.

Then reduce what I work on from home by leaving my laptop at work and only take reading and editing stuff home. From experience, working less does not always mean getting less done; it means being more focused on what I do work on and delegating to my group more.

Hand in hand with not working, as much is a little redefining of what a good or successful day looks like. Progress on the program can be somewhat stop-start. The goals can be huge and occasionally unrealistic. I think I deal with it better than most, but the frustration of a perceived lack of progress is obviously felt by many around me. Maybe it’s time to step back and examine the goals. Are they achievable and is the time line realistic? If not they need to be changed.

I see progress, positive progress towards the ultimate goal (proven processes in place and metrics showing cost saving), but I’m also too close to appreciate what we’ve achieved as a group in the last few months. First glance I see what’s left to be done, rather then what we’ve done. The overarching plan that I first saw six months ago is “chunked” into very large blocks. Stepping down a level and examining the project work breakdown got us to somewhere with a little more granularity. These steps are way more achievable and make recognizing the progress we’ve made easier and more fulfilling.

That’s work dealt with, what about real life? It’s that delegating thing again and looking after myself. My lawyer is very good, we had a discussion last week and I trust her to take care of what needs to be done. She is the professional and looks after my corner. So far I’m very happy with that.

There is one last part of this, if after taking it easy for a month, getting more sleep, more exercise, reducing stress and so on and I feel the same way, then perhaps it’s just time to apply myself and get on with it. Not use burnout as an excuse, manage my stress and health and ignore the fact that I feel burned out, and just work through it until I can take a couple of weeks off in the spring.