Is burnout just around the corner? (wait, just lemme reply to this email)
Derek Featherstone in Box Of Chocolates has a great post today on the very modern disease of working crazy hours. He says in part,
I’m tired of seeing my friends across the globe at the wrong times. I shouldn’t be awake and neither should they! My friends on the west coast of North America? If you’re still awake and working at 3am when I’m waking up at 6 or 7 am, then something is wrong. Those in the UK and Europe? When I’m doing a bit of extra work at 9pm at night and its 3am for you? Not cool. My Kiwi and Aussie friends? Get. To. Bed.
And later,
Over the past few months I’ve realized that the sacrifices I have made haven’t always been the right ones — partly because I’m conflicted. I’m sure we all feel this pressure in some way: in order to provide for my family I feel more pressure for the business to do more — take on more work, expand what we’re doing, have more income so that I can provide more comfort, more food, more whatever. more. more. more. But at the end of the day, it just feels like less and less and less.
Great post, and I agree. Why is it happening? I think there’s three reasons: technology, knowledge work and wealth.
Technology has allowed us to bust work out of the workplace and distribute it unevenly through our lives so that it can reach us wherever and whenever it needs to. Blackberry, iPhone, browser-based apps, Skype, calendar-sharing and collaborative file sharing have fundamentally changed how and when we work.
Working in teams across timezones and on projects for customers on the other side of the world is increasingly common (would have been almost unknown outside IBM, BBN and diplomatic service 30 years ago.) More of us work for globalised organisations, and more of us work for ourselves. In both cases, technology has allowed us to find the best team members, not just from our office, but from a global pool of talent.
I’m on a team with people in another office in Sydney and someone on the NSW North Coast, plus some people in Switzerland and some in India, with clients in Australia, Europe and the US. I don’t say that to big-note myself — I’m nobody special. If you’re not yet working that way, it’s because “the future is unevenly distributed.” You will be sooner or later.
Another part of the equation is that when you’re a knowledge worker, you really can achieve much more by putting more in. When you’re working on an assembly line, punching out widgets faster than the rest of the assembly line can use them just creates a backlog. When you’re operating a cash register, your working hours are set according to when the customer expects to find your store open. As a knowledge worker there have been times when I’ve helped achieve enormous changes in the space of a frantic, crazy few days and nights. Doing it once or twice a year makes you feel like you have superpowers. But superpowers can be addictive.
Final reason: wealth. As knowledge workers we’ve seen how workaholics have created incredible wealth for themselves and we know that our capacity to earn is directly related to the time we spend working. Some of us are better at resisting burnout than others but our cultural heroes have become the borderline Aspergers Syndrome-afflicted founders of the latest generation of internet startups. I was listening to This American Life while walking the dog this week and they mentioned the amazing fact that the ‘global pool of money’ that nearly dried up as a result of the global financial crisis is not only back, it’s now about 20% larger than it was when it caused the descent into crazy risky loan products. How’d it grow so fast? Knowledge industries.
Nowhere in the media have I seen the celebration of young, intelligent leaders who’ve gone surfing for a month or worked for a charity overseas for a year. The people working the hardest are the people we have aspired to be.
I’m nobody’s hero — aside from my house and some memorable travel experiences, all I have from a decade spent in startup teams is reading glasses, a terrible posture and some great friends. But I’ve been doing my best to achieve some work/life balance since I left Yahoo! in 2002.
I have to admit I’ve met with varying levels of success according to the work opportunities facing me and the expectations of the people I’m working with. Most recently I’ve chosen not to pursue a partnership in a business where I felt the other partners were working at unsustainable levels that would create a company culture of burnout.
I rebound into bad habits all the time — this week I was on my Mac past midnight one night, just working on my writing and my web hosting setup. And another night I picked up my newly-arrived copy of World War Z at about 9pm, telling myself I’d read until I was sleepy. It was a great book, I couldn’t put it down, and it was 2.00am when I’d finished it. The whole book.
That’s not a good habit, and I wouldn’t even be able to do that and get through the next day if I wasn’t an old wreck of a startup guy. Derek’s right: it’s usually not worth it, you owe it to your relationships not to do it, and it will make you unhappier and unhealthier if you keep it up.
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Isn't a part of the culture the expectations that everyone has though? How many of us hold off sending an actionable e-mail on the weekend out of respect for the weekend?
There have been times when I've switched off for the day/week, only to receive e-mails, followed by Skype messages, sometimes even followed by phone calls to attend to something asap. In my support role, I can sometimes receive multiple emails from the same person over the span of a few hours demanding attention for an issue.
Maybe we all need to collectively back off?