Sunday Roast: Long hours causes Burnout

Welcome to the second edition of Sunday Roast. If you haven’t seen the first one, you can catch up here. This week’s roasting is for: long hours causes Burnout. I’m going to carve this up to show you that long hours is a mask for Burnout, not a cause.

Starter: diminishing returns

We’ve all been there: a supposedly simple task has taken much longer than it should and now we’re having to work even more to catch up with the stuff we should have been doing in the time we were wasting carrying on with a never-ending task. And so it is with Burnout.

Main course: quality over quantity

I believe Burnout isn’t caused by long hours in itself, but by not being invested in the value of the work you’re doing. I’m sure you can relate to this: you’re working on a project about something you really care about; there’s something that’s important but not urgent but you carry on anyway because you’re enjoying it. You look up, it’s 10pm and you hadn’t even noticed. You never feel empty in that situation.

This is because you feel invested in what you’re doing and the value it’s creating. When you lose this, you’re on the path to Burnout not by working long hours alone.

Don’t take my word for it. Payspective released research which showed some interesting things:

·       56% of professionals work a minimum of 50 hours per week

·       Working up to 60 hours a week doesn’t negatively impact job satisfaction

Have a read of those links for their full articles but I think that’s important insight. Quantitative evidence that working hours alone are rarely the problem.

But I do think that people who are burning out tend to start working longer hours. When I was burning out, I didn’t feel invested in the things on my list, so I went in search of more tasks. Just one more project, one more thing would be the missing piece of the value jigsaw. I was at the task buffet, piling up my plate in the hope that just a bit more food would make me hungry. I was wrong.  

And here is the Burnout spiral that leads to long hours being mistakenly labelled as the culprit:

·       You have no motivation to do your tasks

·       Boredom can be mistaken for tiredness

·       But you committed to these deliverables now so you have to do them. All of them. You have to eat the whole plate you took from the task buffet

·       Each item takes longer to eat because you’re not hungry enough to eat it. The tasks artificially inflate in size and complexity

·       You’re not motivated so you’re easily distracted

·       The tasks take longer because you got distracted

And so it goes on and on.

But none of this is caused by working hours alone. Having a big plate from the task buffet and taking a lot of time to eat it isn’t a problem if the food is tasty. If I take a tiny plate from the task buffet but still don’t know why I’m eating it, that’s the bigger problem.

Dessert: don’t worry about the size of your plate

Often people try to cure Burnout by trying to reduce their working hours alone. That’s fine if you intend to use the time to evaluate the real cause of your Burnout. But if you’re expecting that doing the same work in the same situation just less of it is going to cure all then I think you’ll be disappointed. It’s not about the size of your meal, it’s about knowing why you’re eating it.