A Two-Minute Burnout Checkup

A Two-Minute Burnout Checkup

This level of awareness can help you create a more targeted plan going forward. Let’s say your workload is hovering at a 9. Try making a list of all the activities your job entails. Pick three that let you contribute most to your team. This is your core work. From here, consider meeting with your boss or team to clarify what’s truly important and see if there’s a way to delegate or eliminate some of the tasks, and as a result, reduce your overall stress.

Some of these stress factors are more systemic than others and more difficult to tackle over a short period of time or through one-off conversations. Depending on your workplace, fairness can be a particularly tough nut to crack. The effort that it takes to create a more fair and equitable environment may even generate more stress than making the decision to leave a workplace all together. Ultimately, there is no universal answer for how to reduce these sources of chronic stress, but identifying them is an important first step.

This activity also works in reverse, to track how well you’re doing across the six areas. Given that the opposite of burnout is engagement, this activity may prove equally valuable to assess the more positive gains coming from your work.

For example, maybe you notice a low stress score in the reward category of the checkup. Thinking back, you realize it’s because you raised your consulting rates and are finally feeling as though your level of compensation is on par with your experience. Or maybe your values stress score is low because you recently advocated to lead a project that lets you connect with a subject area you love. Reflecting on why you scored low for stress in these categories can help reveal the decisions you made to get there so you can potentially apply those same steps again in the future.

Use your best judgement when doing the activity. Having a few factors out of whack is often enough to come face-to-face with burnout, particularly when you’re also experiencing the three characteristics of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.

I do this two-minute burnout checkup every few months — when the projects that make up my work change enough to warrant a recalculation. Or, if I’m feeling some combination of cynical, exhausted, and ineffective, I’ll tally up my score even sooner.