Burnout – Weekly Article Dump

Burnout

The trend in the articles this week is all about burnout. Burnout is a serious issue that can affect a wide variety of people. When an individual becomes so dedicated to something and starts devoting all of their time to accomplish a goal, burnout can set in. This is especially noticeable in startup companies where it’s typical to work longer-than normal hours. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with loving the work you do and wanting to put in more time! The problem ends up being when all of your waking time is geared toward one thing and everything else (including sleep!) starts to take the back seat. This is where burnout can set in.

Articles

• The Six Deadly Sins of Leadership: Leadership isn’t always easy, but there’s definitely a few things you should avoid doing as a leader. Jack Welch and his wife Suzy do an excellent job of describing six things you should not do. Ignoring values for the sake of results and forgetting to have fun along the way are two of my favourite points.
• 11 Simple Concepts to Become a Better Leader: Having lists makes for having good references, and Dave Kerpen certainly has a great list for leadership tips. Number one on his list is of course listening. It’s that thing that every good leader should be doing more of. Being a team player, being passionate, and being adaptive are also up there on the list.
• 3 Key Reasons to be Optimistic Like Steve Case: Julia Boorstin touches on an excellent point in her article: by remaining optimistic, you can view all of your challenges as opportunities to get better. Leaders need to learn from their mistakes (and we all make them) but those challenges are really just self-improvement opportunities.
• Avoiding Burnout: Take it from an entrepreneur, burnout is serious business. Andrew Dumont talks about his experiences as an entrepreneur and how burnout set in. The best part of Andrew’s post is that in the end he gives a great list of tips for how you can help avoid burnout in your own work/life. Highly recommended read!
• How to Prevent Employee Burnout: KISSmetrics has a huge list of tips for how you can help keep employees from running into burnout problems. They start off by defining what burnout is and how you can detect it among your employees. By knowing what causes burnout, it’s a lot easier to try and address solutions for it.
• It’s Time to Dream for a Living: Whitney Johnson talks about how being a dreamer lets you achieve a psychological pay-off similar to a well designed game. Be social, go above and beyond by tackling things that aren’t always necessary, and immerse yourself in epic scale.
• 6 Ways to Put the ‘Good’ in Goodbye: Read this article by Chester Elton that gives an awesome example of how you should treat departures of good employees from your company. When a good employee leaves your company, it’s probably for a good reason. Try to celebrate their work and encourage success for them when they’re leaving. There’s not much worse than trying to spin things around and make a potentially great opportunity for them a poisonous experience.
• Burnout: The Disease of Our Civilization: Arianna Huffington put’s it elegantly that most of us have  “the misguided belief that overwork is the route to high performance and great results”. It’s exactly why many people fall into the doom that is burnout. It’s a longer read than some of the articles I’ve shared, but I do recommend it!
• Find Leadership Inspiration in Your Everyday Encounters: You don’t need to look much further than ever-day life to be able to pick up on some great examples of inspiration for leadership. Simply work on rule #1: Listen. John Ryan (and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t stop thinking of Wedding Crashers when I read his name) details his experience on a plane and how he was able to draw inspiration from one of the passengers he was sitting with. Always try to learn something from the situations you find yourself in–It’s an excellent way to develop yourself.
• Want to Save Your Life?: “Rest is not a luxury. It’s part of survival” are some powerful words from Erica Fox. She discusses what the effects of overwork are on our mind and body and in the end offers up lots of great examples for how you can avoid burnout. Another solid read.

Hope you enjoyed! It’s great to be driven to accomplish your goals, but don’t become so narrow sighted that you lose track of the rest of the things that matter. Remember to follow on popular social media outlets to get these updates through the week!

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Nick Cosentino Principal Software Engineering Manager

Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft. Views are my own.

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