I still remember the moment when I realized something had to change. It was around four o’clock in the afternoon on a late summer Sunday at my local coffee shop. I planned to spend the day the same way I had spent my Sundays for the last six months. I had arrived at 6:00 a.m. waiting for the place to open, armed with my work laptop and a stack of papers, ready to quietly and valiantly strive to “get caught up” on a project I was managing that seemed to be perpetually behind schedule.
I was not in a good place. I was stressed and sleep-deprived. When I woke up in the morning, I would reach for my phone to check the latest text messages from my overseas counterparts. I’d respond to belligerent 7:00 a.m. phone calls complaining of personnel issues 4500 miles away. Once awake, I would painstakingly review data scans until the figures swam before my eyes. I obsessively wrote and rewrote report drafts. I struggled to get my budget to add up.
On this particular Sunday, after six months of being on autopilot, I looked up from my laptop to see the sun starting to lower in the sky. I realized the summer was almost over… and I’d missed it. I hadn’t done anything fun in weeks. The weight I had worked so hard to lose the year before was back. I was running on fumes and sugar-laden iced chais. If you asked me what was new in my life, the only thing I had to talk about was work.
Project managers are supposed to be part of a team, but I was behaving like a team of one.
When you’re in the middle of burnout, you don’t realize you’re burning out. Most of us believe burnout means reaching a place where we’re so done that we’re ready to quit. But we know what quitting looks like, and we equate it with defeat. So, for whatever reason, we often decide to stick out almost any situation just to avoid the stink of that supposed failure.
What few of us are willing to admit is that burnout happens a lot sooner than rock bottom. Burnout occurs when you are no longer capable of functioning like your old self. Instead of controlling your work, your work controls you. Worst of all, you feel like you don’t have any other choice. At the time, I remember telling people that, if I didn’t work as much or as hard as I was working, I would fail. The project would fail. The world would end. And I firmly believed it would.
If we were talking about two weeks of high-intensity output culminating in a well-defined work product, it would be a different story. Short-term pain is not the same as a constant diet of 60–80 hour work weeks with no end in sight. Most people can’t function on this type of schedule. After a while, the intensity and stress and fatigue consume you.
I didn’t like the person I had become. I couldn’t go 30 minutes without checking my phone. When people tried to engage with me, I had trouble concentrating on what they were saying—my brain was already contemplating the next obstacle ahead of me. I was nervous and snappy and didn’t take the time I desperately needed to unwind after a long day... or week. Month? What month were we even in? I didn’t always know. Something had to change.
And change it did. I bought Kesha’s Rainbow album so that I could learn to let go. I cleaned my apartment and checked out a slew of productivity books from the library. Taking the time to educate myself and reflect on my priorities truly changed my life. Reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done taught me that I needed a system for logging to-dos that wasn’t connected to my email. So, my team and I created Kanban boards for each of our projects to understand our work backlog and manage evolving priorities.
The more I documented, the less crazy I felt. The more my team understood what work needed to be done (and when), the more work they were able to take on without me. I learned to block out the last hour of my calendar every day to plan the three things I would accomplish the following day. I didn’t always use the whole hour, but it prevented other things from taking up that time and it made me better prepared to tackle my to-do list the next morning.
As I began cultivating habits designed to stave off my tendency to burn the candle at both ends, I also learned what didn’t work well for me. I couldn’t give up on foldering all of my emails or striving for inbox zero, even if those behaviours were allegedly counterproductive. Everyone seemed to be telling me that meditation would bring a new level of clarity that I wouldn’t find anywhere else. The only clarity I got was that it didn’t help me whatsoever.
And once the day-to-day was under better control, I set my sights on the big picture. I had always set annual goals, but I didn’t revisit these goals in any systematic way. The productivity literature I voraciously consumed emphasized the importance of conducting monthly and weekly reviews to break big goals down into smaller, manageable chunks. Now that I was reviewing my progress daily, weekly, and monthly, I wanted to know how I could accomplish more with the time I had.
I read up on chronotypes and realized I do not function well between three and five, so I shifted my workout routine to the early evening. I started signing online earlier in the day to take advantage of my peak brain function and made sure my most demanding tasks were the first things I tackled. I set aside time every week to brainstorm my toughest problems which were scheduled to take advantage of my creative zenith. Within six months, I deleted my work email from my phone. I still haven’t added it back. There have been no casualties.
Two years after my burnout epiphany, I still work long hours. But now I also recognize my own limitations. I’ve learned to take two four-day staycations each year—one in September and one in February—to recharge and recalibrate my goals. I just had my Labor Day staycation, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve learned (painfully) that this is what I need after a hectic summer, and I’m proud of myself for paying attention to what I need.
Coming out of a difficult project, I didn’t want my fear of burning out to stop me from taking on new and challenging endeavours, both professionally and personally. Rather than rejecting new assignments out of fear that I couldn’t handle them, productivity and self-care became my antidote to the perils of overcommitment. If I hadn’t learned how to manage my time better, and thus feel less distracted during the workday, I would still be stuck in the place I was back at the coffee shop—tired and distracted as life passed me by.
Because I now give advice on how to be more productive, people assume that I’ve got it figured out. More than one person has told me that my productivity “crusade” can be intimidating, arrogant, or even downright bitchy. In reviewing earlier talks I gave on project management and productivity, I could see where they were coming from. My early presentations committed the original sin of project management—focusing on the processes instead of the people. I babbled on excitedly about the research I had done and the tools I used, but I never explained why anyone should care about those tools or approaches. The truth is that I was afraid to tell my burnout story. I hid the flaws so carefully that people only saw either perfection or hypocrisy. But productive doesn’t mean perfect.
For example, this week, I’m grinding on a few big deliverables that are due Friday, but distractions and my anxiety are starting to creep into view. So to counter those, even though I got to work at 5:30 this morning, I left at 3:30 for the gym. I prepped a healthy lunch and dinner ahead of time. I am enjoying a drink and listening to Bollywood music and writing because I’ve learned that, for me, writing is breathing.
In short, I’m doing what I need to do to care for myself and unwind after a long day. I’m sure the emails are still flowing in. I could give in to the temptation and start to work through them. But those emails are best left for another day. Today is done. I didn’t accomplish as much as I had planned. I could have done a better job of limiting distractions and focused on the urgent tasks instead of more compelling assignments. So be it. I could have done lots of things. But right now, I’m concentrating on the right stuff—doing what I need to take care of myself.
Productivity, like growth, is a perpetual work in progress. Try not to forget that. Make habits out of taking care of yourself and your teammates. Take time to breathe and think and write. Focus as much time thinking about what works for you as you do on what work you need to get done. Don’t forget the people behind the projects and processes. As long as you don’t forsake yourself and your team, you’ll stay ahead of the game and out of the fire.
