>In my experience, burnout is cured not by vacation, time away, switching teams, or switching companies. These are (attempted) implementations of the real cure: change of perspective.
This resonates with the published research on Burnout (mostly Maslach): she argues that the causes of burnout are best understood as mismatch between expectations and workplace reality. E.g. customer support firefighting can be tolerable if you don't expect yourself to be spending time on strategic thinkiing.
However, when burnout has happened, change of perspective / removing causes just won't do (those are preventative solutions). When you've burnt out, it's time for rest.
These patterns of automatic thoughts ("how incompetent I am relative to everyone else") are a pain to overcome, especially, if there is no alternative avenue for self-worth (e.g. I am a good partner / friend / child / parent / citizen).
It's also quite surprising to note how easy these thought patterns emerge from seemingly nothing. The bar we evaluate ourselves against is often quite removed from rational thought — we can easily place this at an arbitrarily high point just out of reach ("OK, my start-up is growing; it doesn't matter, it needs to be grow faster!").
Good on you for reflecting and picking up these thought patterns!
When you are passionate about your work, it can easily bleed into every other area of your life — you read about work-related topics in your free time, you think about a particularly challenging problem in the shower, you journal about your work, etc. It also changes ones social circle: hanging out with an ambitious and curious start-up crowd easily leads to work as the default topic in a gathering of friends. Once you have work deeply embedded in your interests and social life, it does not take a huge mental leap to "work is what defines me as an individual".
That then leads to a precarious "all eggs in one basket" situation that leaves you vulnerable in cases of professional failure ("My start-up is not doing well; I am a failure") or burnout ("I'm cynical about my work; nothing matters").
It took quite a bit of time to disentangle my self-worth and my professional identity, but it makes life so much better.
I am somewhat skeptical of the claim that "one of the best things a mid/low performing company can do is to reduce toil". It feels that this principle is dependent on the context to the extent of not being useful guidance anymore.
For instance, if the company is pre-product-market fit reducing toil seems like the wrong investment; doing stuff manually can be the way to go until you find what works (unless the effort investment in toil reduction is trivial).
If the company has reached something approximating product-market fit, reducing toil still ought to be weighed against the other priorities. That (as all technical debt reduction) can do wonders to productivity, but alternatives (e.g. pushing for a new feature) may as well be the better call.
We are working on a B2B application right now and we're seeing 2 linked patterns we're looking to overcome:
-- one strong champion in the customer organisation that uses us actively, then changes jobs / goes on maternity leave / retires -> customer churns
-- a champion in the customer organisation does not find the time to onboard other users in their company, so the value of what we offer is smaller than it could be.
For us, getting more users onboarded and introduced to the value offering (we're calling it engagement) seems like a perfectly valid challenge to address — does not feel like a dark pattern at all, but is "useful and meaningful to the end users".
We're also tracking "engagement" with different features in the platform to help us decide on 1) onboarding gaps, 2) whether the features are any good (both, of course, then researched further with interviews). Here it also feels like our work qualifies under the author's core tenets.
I feel it adds a lovely bit of variety to the experiences. Tried a journaling RPG for the first time recently — spending 4 hours imagining experiences, describing them, and guiding my creativity with the game's ruleset / prompts. The game allowed room for introspection, for overcoming internal obstacles, for writing / thinking carefully about how I phrase things.
That was a profoundly different experience from my Tuesday afternoon RPG campaign where the social aspect, on-the-fly improvisation, "yes, and"-ing and the collective storytelling dominate, but would not discard the solo game as a bad idea — it's just built for something else.
Improvising three dimensional or at least memorable characters as a GM in tabletop role playing games.
Giving characters over-the-top traits is a good start, but so much to learn about making them stand out in the players’ memories / making them more than tools of acquiring things to do for the players.
This resonates with the published research on Burnout (mostly Maslach): she argues that the causes of burnout are best understood as mismatch between expectations and workplace reality. E.g. customer support firefighting can be tolerable if you don't expect yourself to be spending time on strategic thinkiing.
However, when burnout has happened, change of perspective / removing causes just won't do (those are preventative solutions). When you've burnt out, it's time for rest.