3 Daily Habits to Prevent Burnout

Some of the other things I've done to stop burnout, I remember that when I send emails or messages to people, I try to write less to be more effective. I try to say no to the most critical or to a lot of things, and I say yes to the critical few things. I pick three things every single day that I'm going to knock out today. To really prioritize health. I stopped drinking. I haven't had a drink now in 53 weeks. Making sure that we take time in our day to drink water in the morning, to not drink alcohol, to eat healthier foods. The burnout is not there because your boss is putting too much on your plate. The burnout is because we are allowing too much to come on, or we're taking too much on, or we're working too hard on stuff that doesn't actually matter and we're not taking care of ourself as a racehorse. If you go back To October of 2000, I was the technical definition of burnout. I was written up in the Wall Street Journal, in the physical paper in October of 2000 as being one of four supernovas whose careers went very high, very quickly and flamed out with stress. And I was suffering from a nervous breakdown and some clinical depression and stress. And it was because I didn't take care of myself. So, yeah, I was actually written up in the Wall Street Journal about that. So I've been through. So for me, the symptoms were I was actually feeling or tasting a bit of a mechanical, like a metal, aluminum foil, metallic taste at the back of my neck is the best I can, Des. I felt very tense in my shoulders and my neck all the time. I thought I was handling it fine. I was going out at night and having good dinners, drinking bottles of red wine and having some Manhattan's and Grand Marnier. I was still smoking a little bit back in those days. I haven't had a cigarette in 22 years. Wasn't getting any exercise, but I thought I was fine. What I was doing was pushing so hard that I was clinically redlining. I think that's how I would define it, as more of a feeling is what I feel. One is that I'm honest about it. And I remember having this discussion with the current mayor of Vancouver. His name is Ken Sim. And when Ken and I were chatting, he asked me, I was up in Whistler years ago, and he asked me how I was doing. And I said, good, I'm really well. And then I went, oh, what? No, it's not true at all. I'm really, really struggling. And that was the first day that I think cognizantly decided to tell the truth. I didn't think I was ever lying before. I was just. I wasn't really listening to the question. I was kind of glossing over the question. And now I've gotten to the point that if someone asks me how I'm doing, I listen to their question and I answer it in a more truthful way. Maybe I don't do it with the grocery store clerk. Like, if she's asking me how I'm doing, I'm not gonna go, well, I'm really struggling. But. So that's one is I kind of own it. Two, I recognize that 7 billion people would give their life to have my life. That no matter how hard it gets, this is very much a first world problem. And I can. I can kind of compartmentalize that. I've learned some skills of just writing it down, writing down what's going on, writing down what I'm burning out with. And then I try to just get some exercise and decompress, like, get to the gym, go do yoga, go for a walk, do some meditation, some breath work, where I'm very cognizant about those things. And those were very much learned skills from back in the day when I was really struggling. Yeah, I think it's just again, recognizing, who do you want to be in your career? Where do you want to be in your career? Where are you now? And almost doing, like, a bit of a SWOT analysis on you. Like, what's going well, what's not going well? Where are you stuck? And really owning that. And then also just remembering that growth is good. Right. That I think growth and improving is always good. And so if part of that is just you accepting that you're burning out, how do you improve that? The other part of it is kind of also dealing with some of our own, realizing, like, life isn't going to be absolutely easy. Work is called work for a reason. It's hard. This is not supposed to be, oh, look how wonderful everything is. Like, I think we're also very much trapped in this Instagram lifestyle. And I heard something the other day that was interesting. Every single day you go on Instagram, you see someone's amazing party or an unbelievable trip or fantastic day, or this epic adventure they're going on, and you think, my life. Well, they're showing you one day, but you're seeing everyone's one day, 365 days in a row. And you're comparing it against your normal life. You're not seeing their normal life. You're seeing that epic snapshot today and you're seeing someone else epic snapshot tomorrow. So the comparison is really dangerous. And I think we have to remember that, that everyone else is going through some sh t. Everyone else is going through struggles too and not feeling like your life is supposed to be absolutely so perfect or your job isn't supposed to be absolutely perfect. Some of it is just we need to also learn to toughen up and deal with our stuff. Right. I needed to learn how to keep working hard, how to keep being focused and how to deal with the stress of life and the stress of business. But it wasn't how do I make my job easier and how do I work less hours and how do I have less workload? And that's not reality either. I heard a story years ago about two of the best at the time world's leaders, and it was Ronald Reagan, who was President of the United States, meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, who was President of the Soviet Union. And they were having these all day meetings and trying to figure out how to solve the world's problems and how to actually stop the Cold War between Russia and the United States. And during their all day meetings, Reagan's listening over his headset in translation and Gorbachev is listening over his headset and somebody would come running into the room screaming and getting upset and Gorbachev would say something and then laugh and smile and the person would walk out of the room and Gorbachev kept saying, remember rule number six? And that was pretty much all he ever said to the person. And they would laugh and smile and they'd walk out of the room. It happened three times throughout the meetings. Person was coming in very upset and very frustrated and very stressed. And Gorbachev would laugh and say, remember rule number six? And at the end of the meetings, Reagan said, I only have one more question, what's rule number six? And Gorbachev said, rule number six is don't take yourself so effing seriously. And Reagan kind of laughed and he said, well, what are the first five rules? Gorbachev said, there aren't any. There's only rule number six. And I think that's something else we need to remember in our careers as well is like none of this actually matters. This is just what we're doing to make money. We need to slow it down and release and surrender into this and enjoy the journey a little bit. Because sometimes this stress and burnout is self imposed and you also touched on something we take on more because we haven't learned how to say no artfully. Sometimes we're our own worst enemies. And sometimes we need to learn how to lead up and tell whoever we're reporting to we have enough or we can't take on this project. Or if I take that, something else has to go into the parking lot. It's learning some of those skills. I'll give you another way that the work shrinks. Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the container of the space that we give it. So the more hours you allow yourself to work, the longer it's going to take everything and the more you're going to take on. So here's a couple of things that I had to learn over the years. Number one, I don't work nights and I don't work weekends. I give myself a smaller container. And the reason is I'm never going to catch up. So this whole like I'm going to keep working to catch up is a lie that I'm telling myself or I'm telling my spouse or I'm telling my kids or I'm. I'm too busy. The reality is I'm too uncomfortable in my situation or my own skin to have the free time and the hobbies or I've lost touch with the hobbies. So I'd rather work. So number one is stop working nights and stop working weekends. Cut your day off at 5:30 and stop. Because you're never going to catch up. Even if you got everything on today's to do list, if everyone watching wrote down everything that's on your list right now, you're not going to magically get it all done without adding a bunch of more stuff to it anyway. The whole I'm going to catch up is a lie. So allow yourself maybe one or two hours per month to work at night total, and maybe a half day per month on a weekend that you're going to work to actually catch up. But that's it. Second part is, this is only what we do to make money. Do not make your career your entire reason for waking up in the morning. It's a very, very dangerous treadmill that you'll never get off of. Make it important, make it impactful, work really hard at it, but make sure that you actually have a life and have hobbies outside of work. Some of the other things I've done to stop burnout, I remember that when I send emails or messages to people, the more that I write, the less that they're going to read it, which causes more conflict and more problems. So when I actually write less, which doesn't stress me out as much and doesn't take as much time, I'm more effective. So I try to write less to be more effective, which is an interesting one. I try to say no to the most critical or to a lot of things, and I say yes to the critical few things. And that's impactful. The other biggest one has been that I pick three things every single day that I'm going to knock out today. And if I only do three big things a day multiplied by 250 operating days a year, that's 750 impactful things I've done in my career or in my job or in my company. And that's way more than most people do who wake up and just start working and being busy and saying yes to stuff. So I'm very, very critical about the critical few things I say versus the important many. Another thing that I've done is to really prioritize health. I stopped drinking. I haven't had a drink now in 53 weeks. I go to the gym. I'm going to the trainer again. In about two hours I'll be with the trainer. Even though I just got off a plane with insane jet lag. Working out with a trainer and being in a gym is very powerful to me. Making sure that we take time in our day to drink water in the morning, to not drink alcohol, to eat healthier foods, to get exercise, to spend time outdoors and getting the sunlight, to spend time with friends to have proper sleep at night. Those things are really critical to avoid burnout. And again, the burnout is not there because your boss is putting too much on your plate. The burnout is because we are allowing too much to come on or we're taking too much on or we're working too hard on stuff that doesn't nationally matter and we're not taking care of ourself as a racehorse. The last part of this is perfection is not actually going to help you in your career. Momentum creates momentum. It's a bunch of solid base hits is going to get you to win the game. Don't try to make every single project perfect because perfect actually doesn't scale and your company's not really in search of it. So perfectionism is a real kind of pre symptomatic condition that leads to burnout. I've seen quite often. Jim Collins in the book Good to Great talked about that the best and most effective leaders were the disciplined leaders with disciplined thought and disciplined action. And discipline wasn't like a hard nosed autocratic discipline. There was a discipline and a rigor to the way that the individual showed up for themselves as a leader in their day to day. Like they set plans and they worked on their plans, they prioritized their management. And I think that those people don't struggle with the burnout because they're able to say no. They have disciplined thought, they're able to say no. They're working on the right things, they're slowing it down and they're critical with their time. So burnout is often because we're just on that treadmill and we're running so quickly and we're not aware. When I clinically burned out 24 years ago and I mean, it was clinical burnout. I've spoken about it on stages. It was because I wasn't cognizant at all about the work that I was doing or the way that I was showing up or who I was as a person. It was just going so fast, but it was all self induced.