Burnout: That feeling that makes you feel slow and stupid in the head
I always have this problem of having a tonne of work to do and then trying to be a superhero and doing it all. Those eight hour days make me feel like I am not doing enough and just treading water, so I got that little voice in my head telling me to ‘do more, do more’. It gets to the point where I come home and feel accomplished from what I completed and achieved. If I keep this up towards the end of the week, my brain starts to go through a phase where it slows down and is not as quick as it was earlier that week. The ‘pain cycle’ starts and I find myself eating more than I should, smoking a cigarette when I don’t even smoke, binge-watching Netflix or not waking up on time in the morning for a good workout. It’s a sucky feeling and one which I could never get my head around or overpower.
The simple answer is yes when I get a huge workload I should learn to make adequate deadlines for it and to share the workload if too much has to be done in too little time. But this is hard as being that someone who just started a business three years ago, I’m very focused on pleasing my clientele to ensure the longevity of the business. Taking on a subcontractor is usually the first idea that comes to mind. But if the subby breaks my trust, I risk losing my customer to someone. It can tear the relationship between the customer and me, and I can’t guarantee that the subby will have the same work ethic as I have. It’s weighing the cost of managing a workload by getting stuff done in adequate time. Plus my customers trust me and give me a weird vibe when I tell them I am delegated the job to someone else.
The 40 hour week was tested and invented by no other than the man named Henry Ford. They did a test on how efficient workers would be if they worked X amount of hours each day and each week. The conclusion was, that when a worker works more than 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week their performance starts to dwindle. This is where the concept comes from but is only practised within big companies nowadays. Even the big companies have regular workers pushing to do overtime now since the cost of living is getting higher and higher. In my scenario, only so much can be achieved in an 8-hour window, and especially with commercial and industrial workers, a lot of the work cannot spread into next week. So thus I cannot limit my hours for the satisfaction of having a mind working at 100%.
The work-life balance portion means to have a life outside of work. As soon as I started the business my first priority was to get it up and running and working as quickly as possible. I’ve put so much time and energy into it, still to this day I am wrapping my brain around how to make the business work most efficiently and how to in turn be healthy in the process. So far, my social life is limited, I have no dating life due to my lack of social life, but I can honestly say my health is actually above average since fitness, in general, is something I never neglected. Slowly the work-life balance if getting more awareness but it is getting harder the more the business grows and the more demanding it gets.
Just last week I hit the initial stages of burnout. I can’t say its due to stress, my customers weren’t too demanding that week, the workload was just high. 70+ hours in one week, combined with morning gym sessions, writing nearly every morning and getting as little as 5 hours sleep most days. My brain got to the stage where it took me 10x longer to figure something out. It took me longer to do a mediocre job, and just making small talk with someone took too much energy out of me. I had to pause and slow down. The amount of work I had to do caused a siege on my feeble brain. I thought of one of the systems I put into my business culture about work: ‘despite occasional setbacks build a business that doesn’t suffocate but helps me live a great life’. Was the business doing this for me right now? The answer was no.
The reason I was so pushy this week was because of a book I read earlier this week called ‘the total money makeover by Dave Ramsey’. This book made me feel shit about all the dept I’ve earned. For the last 2 weeks, I’ve been hammering and earning to get rid of my 70k of debt as fast as possible. Now I have come to this point where I am burnt out and not ready to endure another week of torture. It just brings me deeper into a ‘pain cycle’ that will motivate me to invest my time and money in pain relieving investments. If I logically calculate it, then I would be losing more money if I worked over a certain threshold due to burnout and stress. Moral of my story, know your limit if your customers have any empathy and treat you like a human being they will understand that you are overworking yourself and that you need time to relax.
In this day and age, ambition is seen as something like a badge of honour. You look at these guys like Gary Vee, or Casey Neistat talk about working 100 hours in one week dedicated to their craft, and how they survive on 2 hours sleep or something ridiculous like that. I am not saying that hard work is terrible, but you need to be doing it for the right reasons and for god’s sake you are a human being! You need to be focused on giving in life, but you need to be able to take a break and enjoy life’s gifts as well.
Keep on living!
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