Avoiding Burnout: The Myth of Overworking

Name: Avoiding Burnout: The Myth of Overworking
Uploaded: 2023-06-28T12:34:29+00:00
Duration: 33 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this segment of the YouTube video "Avoiding Burnout: The Myth of Overworking," speaker Jason M. Lemkin recounts his decades‑long experience in startup…

28 Jun 2023 · 1 min

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In this segment of the YouTube video "Avoiding Burnout: The Myth of Overworking," speaker Jason M. Lemkin recounts his decades‑long experience in startup environments, beginning in the dot‑com era. He describes a personal history of working 80–90 hour weeks, even sleeping under his desk when public transit was unavailable. Lemkin argues that such chronic overwork is unsustainable, leading to burnout, brain fog, and a decline in work quality. He notes that despite the perception that longer hours equal higher productivity, the opposite occurs: mistakes increase, focus deteriorates, and overall output drops. The speaker uses his own anecdotal evidence to warn against the cultural myth that overworking is a path to success.

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So I think my intent was, so I'd been in startups since the dot-com era, and I'd been that person that worked, you know, 80, 90 hours a week. I remember sleeping under my desk because the BART had shut. It's not sustainable. It leads to a lot of burnout. It leads to people just not doing their best work is the other thing. I learned that, you know, I was working more hours, and I would come back and look at my work the next day, and I had made so many mistakes. And if I was like in this brain fog, I wasn't doing great work. So it's not a productive environment. You think that you're working more, You're really getting less done.