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Sean Everett argues that sustainable pace beats short sprints for long-term productivity. He recommends walks, music, and mental-health breaks to avoid burnout, and warns that pushing too hard causes companies to lose their best people.
Sean Everett argues that sustainable pace beats short sprints for long-term productivity. He recommends walks, music, and mental-health breaks to avoid burnout, and warns that pushing too hard causes companies to lose their best people.
Good morning. Today I want to talk about burnout, specifically as it relates to productivity and duration of your company. So as we know, duration is one of the most important aspects of any long-term viable business. For example, if you only earn $1,000 once, then your total income was $1,000. But if you can earn, let's say, $100 for 10 months, you make $1,000. But as soon as you get to that 11th month, you've then made more than $1,000. If you can extend that out years, decades, a century, then you're really starting to talk about a long-term viable business. Okay, so what does that have to do with burnout? Burnout, as every high performer will know, and even Regular folks will know, if you keep doing the same thing for an extended period of time, years, decades, and at a very high clip, you will reach burnout. I've put myself in the hospital multiple times. I have really good friends, other coworkers that have pushed themselves to the limit. And basically you could, you know, when you have it, you can recognize it. You're just not in a good place. So how do you deal with it? A couple aspects. You can go for a walk, you can listen to music, you can crank that volume button down on the output a little bit. Because ultimately, it's a marathon, not a sprint, right? So the more that you can find a sustainable pace that feels good for you, that you could do forever, both in terms of what you like doing, and how long you can do it, then that will be the true measure of success. Because otherwise, you'll just burn out after A day, a week, a month, a year, 10 years, 20 years. And so, I think that first piece, find your fascination, is so critical. And then find other people that are just sort of built the same way, and it's all about fit. So, that sort of integrates into productivity, which is, you know, every business wants their employees, wants the people they work with, their partners to be more productive. You see this now with the big tech companies who are doing some layoffs because their productivity measures have decreased. This is mostly because they've added a bunch more employees, the revenue has stayed the same, so they're not getting the same return. And especially over the last 2 years in the pandemic, people have been at home, they've really been pushing very hard for 2 years. They just forget about like mental health days and time to just decompress. I mean, remember, it's a sprint, right? So one quarter's results doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things if you own a business for decades. So the bigger issue is your greatest high-performing employees and your best talent are just going to leave and go somewhere else that feels good. So that feeling, how does it feel every day when you wake up? Are you excited? Do you jump out of bed? Not every day is going to be that way, but if If you find the right fit, the right culture, the right thing to work on that you're fascinated by, that sort of gives you energy rather than take it away, then you're probably in the right place. So anyways, that's a couple thoughts on burnout duration and productivity. And let me know if you've got other tips, tricks, or what else you got cooking. All right, have a great day, everybody. Talk to you later. Bye. Thanks, Sean.
