http://blogs.bnet.com/entry-level/?p=1410&tag=nl.e713

Job burnout is perhaps the single biggest fear that an organization should have. it is the ten ton elephant that sits in a room and plagues both managers and professionals alike. Nobody, regardless of how much they can profess enjoyment for what they do is immune to these affects.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel as Jessica Stillman of bNet and Tai Goodwin from CAREEREALISM have come up with a fairly good rundown of this symptom.

First are the warning signs:

1. It’s Monday 10 am and you can’t wait for Friday
2. Your meeting status: unprepared and uninterested
3. You’re more inspired to make an excuse than make a deadline
4. You day dream about getting sick so you have an excuse to stay home
5. You avoid people because you’re afraid of getting more work
6. People avoid you because they don’t want to hear about your workload
7. You use the 50/50 rule: you spend 50% of your time trying to figure out how to get out of 50% of your work

And their suggestions:

Get Real: Acknowledge how you are feeling about your work-life. Journal it, talk about it with someone you don’t have to sensor yourself with, but stop holding it in. The more you try to ignore how you really feel, the more anxiety and frustration you will feel about your situation. The sooner you identify how you feel, the sooner you can address it.

Get Inspired: Find a book, audio CD, or MP3 – something that tells someone else’s success story and read it or listen to it.  The focus here is to connect with their ups and downs on their journey and the challenges they had to overcome to reach their goals. Let their success motivate you to press towards your vision despite how you feel right now.

Take Control: Are there too many meetings and tasks on your to-do list? Become a guardian of your time and energy by mastering your schedule. Limit the number of meetings you have a day: if your limit is 4 meetings, then meeting number 5 that comes to your invite box gets declined or proposed for another day and time. Set up a system for managing emails and prioritizing request. Make sure you get outside or get to connect with other people so you are not functioning in isolation everyday.

Play a Different Role: Are you the team member that organizes everything? Or are you the ad-hoc tech support person for your team? Maybe you’re the one everyone goes to when there’s a last minute crisis. Taking on a specific role within your team may have boxed you in and now you can’t get out. Whatever hat you normally wear – take it off. Changing how you engage can change how you feel about your work and your colleagues.

Make a Plan: It can be really hard to stay motivated if you can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. Most people stay on the road to no where because they haven’t made a map to go anywhere else. Start putting together a plan for how you are going to escape or move into another role. It could mean going back to school, updating your resume for a lateral move within your company, expanding your professional network – the point here is to move from being dominated by feelings of frustration to a place of action.

Let’s first take a look at the symptoms. We all have cases of the Mondays. This is where Monday roles around and you just can’t seem to get your internal engine to turn over. We’ve all had this, and this by itself isn’t necessarily a warning sign that your on the verge of burning out or have already reached that point where you are burned out. But it does mean that there is something that generally is stuck in your head, whether it is the game that you watched on Sunday that you can’t get out of your head, or the lazy feeling you’ve gotten use to over the past 2 days in the weekend, but understand your Monday feeling and determine if this is ordinary or abnormal. It’s when you realize that this is abnormal or the feeling of Monday dread comes with other baggage.

To add to this list, I will also mention the following:

You know you are burned out or getting there when all your thoughts are consumed by the idea “No matter what I do, this is not going to be enough”.

We all know this feeling. This is the feeling that you get when you anticipate that the work you are doing is nothing more than movement on the gerbil wheel and when you are done with that, there will be more meaningless work. And when I say meaningless work, I am not referring to work that is by it’s very substance meaningless to the company, but work that just keeps on coming as if there is an endless source of pain that keeps spilling out all over your desk and email and its all you can do just to wipe things down before more of it spills over your workspace. This is that feeling. In this economy it is very easy for companies to ignore their organic resources and push them to points where the work is simply not realistic and the quality over quantity argument really needs to be asserted by not just your line manager but all the way to the top. The work will never get done unless someone takes it, owns it, and finishes it. If nobody wants to do that, all you get is a culture of people who will shuffle work around to each other and creates more work for everyone instead of a lot of work for a small group of people.

Another addition to this list I would assert would be the following:

You are intentionally slowing yourself down so as not to finish your current task because you want to prolong the time before getting your next task.

This is classic passive-aggressive behavior that isn’t wrong and a lot times people don’t realize that they are doing this. But they do it out of self-presevation with the rational that if I slow down the pace at which I do my work, I am still doing my work, but I am just not asserting myself to 100% capacity to get through this work and move onto something else. Under circumstances where we want to engage in a project or task, we find ourselves more than willing to put as much effort into that activity as necessary to take in the full enjoyment of the task.

There is a silver lining to all of this!

Actually there are two ways that you can deal with this, and really one is something that you should incorporate into your day to day regardless. Ultimately it will be your decision on whether or not you want or are interested in continuing your current employment. Don’t let the figures out there regarding unemployment fool you–there are jobs out there! And if your current job is not something that you feel is reconcilable, then you need to do yourself and your peers a favor and move onto your next stage in your career ladder. Stop the nonsense and loathing each day and move on. This is a common mistake that people make and the result is not just an unhappy person, but you make the people around you just as unhappy (even if they are fairly content with their jobs or up until your comments were content with their jobs!).

If on the other hand there is an option to stay with the current job, the single greater thing you have to master is to stop getting railroaded all the time. Part of what makes you feel burned out is the never ending stream of stuff that comes in beating you over the head with emails, calls, twitters, jabbers, skypes, taps on the shoulder, knocks on the door, etc etc etc. This constant stream of interruptions can cause anyone to go batty and forces you to think that you can’t finish your job because your helping everyone else with theirs! You have to take control over your own situation. Your work needs to take priority, and so do you in terms of managing that work. Some key points that I will add here are:

1. Your email is not for everything. I am a firm believer that we have made our emails more than what they are. Emails are PASSIVE modes of communication. Not everything should be emailed. This is a common issue that I see emerging in companies as folks try and CYA (cover your ass) and most of the times emails are just a way for people to do just that. You need to stop propagating this behavior by breaking the cycle. If multiple people need to feedback on something and you need to get this urgently done, organize a quick call, get everyone on the phone who would have been on the email thread and thrash it out on the phone. Email has stopped, everyone organized and on the same page. The cycle has stopped spinning out of control.
2. Do you organize your emails? If you organize emails you are doing 3things. First you are going to drive yourself crazy, and second you will cause yourself more headaches because you can never find anything.  Lastly you will be faced with a HUGE email folder list, and that by itself would cause anyone to have a foreboding feeling when they even look at the email client! To solve this, you should reoganize your email using simple GTD driven philosophies.  See this article on how you should organize your email client.
3. Create office hours. This really only works if you work in a single building with all your peers, but create office hours where people can stop in and ask questions–or sign up to be queued for some of your time. It’s less rigid than having someone create a meeting invite and you can zip through everyone on your list as they should be prepared with a list of questions that need your approval, insight, perspective, or other.
4. Discuss your work. This is a tough one as it requires you to be somewhat aware of not just yourself but tactful enough to discuss your issues without being abrasive or thought of someone who complains about everything that you get. You need to have an understanding of how much work you have and when you’ve reached a point where you can’t effectively work on everything that is on your plate. Reach out and find out from them how they would achieve the tasks in front of them–this isn’t to say you are asking them to solve your problems! But if you genuinely don’t know how you would ever complete all of this, reach out and ask. Make it aware that you are having problems. Let’s face it, we are in a culture where if you show signs of weakness you are perceived as the weak link in the chain and you will be voted off the island. Or at least that’s the threat that looms over you. The reality is that with more transparency you can alleviate yourself of the mindset that your boss or bosses boss doesn’t know how this is affecting you. Have discussions regarding your work load and understand where their expectations are and how you are meeting those expectations and if not, how you can help improve your abilities through growing and learning from their experiences or view points. Be open and willing, and you’ll perhaps learn something in the process.
5. It’s ok to let something pass. Sometimes we feel compelled that if we aren’t involved in something, that we have somehow been overlooked and that is taken as negative sign that you are being forgotten or your abilities are not being noticed. Get over that feeling right now! It’s ok to share the work, and in fact you should encourage yourself and others to take things on without feeling like you were left behind. If you need to be involved, be involved in the small bits and pieces that are required, but allow others to take the lead and push forward. Together many hands make short work, whereas if you were to take this on yourself solely it may be a different situation and you might end up feeling obligated to finish even though you feel this detracts you from more important or critical issues.