The element about the book The Four Hour Work Week that turned my stomach the most was the extractive nature of Tim’s ideas.
If you haven’t read it, his basic premise is that all you need to do is outsource your boring administrative work to laborers in other parts of the global economy who will happily work for $0.17 an hour. If extraction also turns your stomach, keep reading, my idea is better. AND extractive practices are not his whole thing - the book does have useful reminders that perhaps your inbox deserves much less of your time, and that doing the most important thing first is savvy, but falls flat on general relatability AND practicality.
What I’ve been thinking about for years and decades is how easy it is to burnout if you work for other humans in a non-outsourcable way for 40 hours a week. I’ve done the full time hustle in health care, community care, fundraising, volunteer management, and recruitment. I have burned out in multiple ways (maybe you can relate?), and I have some ideas about solutions, which you’re welcome to pick over and repurpose as you see fit.
BURNOUT PROMOTING BEHAVIOR: Providing MORE care in a heart-centered, emotion-heavy way than your sweet adorable heart can manage
Medicine or medically-adjacent work is here, including any direct-patient care (in person or virtual), social work, massage therapy and maybe sometimes even yoga. In my work as a medical advocate, my tremendous supervisor would send us DIRECTLY to the employee assistance program if we attended a death or gave someone positive results on their HIV screening. This is absolutely the appropriate way of managing such a hugely transformational moment, and I think of my friends in medicine who may do this many times over the course of a ’shift’ with no reprieve or counsel. A hug does not reset someone after a thing like this.
When I first started attending births, I knew that I would not be able to manage attending six or eight births a month like so many other doulas would. I would take on six in a two month window, and then take a window of time off call, and then cycle back. I needed time to physically rest and also to emotionally recalibrate just as you might after running an ultramarathon.
BURNOUT MITIGATING IDEA: systemic change (and also…)
All we need to do is upend our entire system and we will be invincible! And also… until we have that sorted, we might benefit from consciously choosing to spend our out of work hours in a space of respite AND counting all of our boring administrative outsourceable tasks as welcome reprieve from the emotional grind.
Put plainly, if you are social worker, please do not also volunteer as a social worker. Volunteer trail building, or tree planting, or roofing.
As you rise to power, consider how you can care for your underlings with a healthy helping of non-caregiving work. Defend their breaks and their vacation. Do not perpetuate a culture that requires up and comers to pay their dues and suffer a fate of burnout.
BURNOUT PROMOTING BEHAVIOR: Working more than 40 hours a week
Hi, this is me. I live here. I love what I do, and I always have more than one job. For me, overworking is a coping mechanism driven by fear. It’s a sign that something is not quite right in my emotional landscape, and rather than dealing with it directly, I just keep sallying forth.
Oh, you too?
How cute are we?!
BURNOUT MITIGATING IDEA: adapt, evaluate, commit, repeat
Forty hours is a very weird number. A week is a very weird thing. You can absolutely find your groove in it, or focus on maximum productivity, or you can orient based on your adorable biology which will tell you when you need to sleep more or eat more or when you have a really great idea that needs all of your brain sugar and you should stay up through the night to finish reading or writing that book!
If your tendency is more because you would like approval, or have some cute perfectionistic tendencies, or are just greedy or full of fear that it will all dissolve maybe change something? Try that for a bit? Reflect on it? Change a new thing?
BURNOUT PROMOTING BEHAVIOR: Working with my thumbs
If you have work email or communication tools on your phone, or if your work includes social media, this is you. This is me. In the year 2007 I got a job that paid for my first smart phone, which allowed many things to be possible, including tethering me to a permanent leash. Shackles that only lifted while on an airplane in flight. These days the internet is everywhere at once, which is not a problem. It’s a great thing that you can reach into the grid and navigate or anticipate weather or look up who sang that song in 1987 that is stuck on a loop in your head and causing you to expend way too much effort trying to recall it.
HOWEVER. Much of the time, working with your thumbs is a big red flag problem which is participating in the acceleration of burnout. For me, the skillful use of this thumb business is while in the waiting room at the dentist, or when I’m producing a live event and the far, far, far more pervasive and problematic involves using my thumbs while making dinner. Or on the couch in my own house.
BURNOUT MITIGATING IDEA: delete that shit
Ok ok don’t. Fine. But maybe move a few apps onto your Home Screen that do not cause trouble: maps, weather, calculator, notepad. Put everything else into a folder that says “really?” like your email or socials or shopping, games, news, and distraction.
You can absolutely type with your thumbs. But replying to your work email with a tablet and chisel will only make it all worse. Ask me how I know….
BURNOUT PROMOTING BEHAVIOR: Working on my weaknesses
Not my original idea here either friends, but if you’re devoting much time to working on your weaknesses, you’re burning daylight. Yes, you must be competent at many things, even things you don’t like, and so getting yourself over the line from incompetent to competent may be a necessary evil. But if you are not good at public speaking, you’re not going to be. That shit takes talent, and while you might need to be competent at it, you will never be good. The same is true with anything and everything else.
BURNOUT MITIGATING IDEA: work on what you love, embrace the minutia per above, outsource the shit that makes you procrastinate and dive into the belly of avoidance
Be great at your good things, and do them 12 hours a week (and probably not more!). A full time anything is probably 12+/- hours a week of that wildly creative and compassionate or beautiful special thing you do.
Cultivate gratitude on the things that round out your compensation, or make that 12 hour dazzle possible. Spreadsheets. Social media. Travel (the slog portion, like getting the rental car shuttle).
Beg borrow trade advocate away from your life-sucking task-age that you absolutely abhor. In my world, this is absolutely anything related to the Yoga Alliance. Printing certificates. Justifying what I teach to an organization that offers credentials willy nilly to absofuckingloooootly anyone. Gah.
BURNOUT PROMOTING BEHAVIOR: Agreeing to terrible ways of doing things
There are better ways to do everything, and anything work procedure that irritates you is not a problem, it’s a lighthouse illuminating the shore of possibility. Yes I said it. In some lines of work, it is important that everyone is together in the same physical space for periods of time. Is that yours? I can’t say. If you work in a theatre company or a surgical theatre, I’ll bet the answer is yes. If you’re running a company that is not in production or construction…. I’ll bet you can be refined and intentional in such a way that you cover more bases, and require fewer commuting and curmudgeonly fellows. Do you need to drive to a place, gather around bagels, and wax poetically for five minutes about your goings on and your metrics? Only if you absolutely love it. Collaborations and hand offs are possible in novel ways, and I truly believe this. Slog begets burnout, and humans are not machines or mechanical. If you’re slogging, it’s on you to know it and say it and **key** think about where and how to do it differently.
BURNOUT MITIGATING IDEA: Using your giant brain to ruminate… like a human
For me, in my 42 year old human body, the 12 hour (human-centered) work week is what I’ve got. I still work 60+ hours a week, 52 weeks a year and will probably always, because what is a week anyway?! It is not a period of time that exists outside of our hilarious and adorable human construct. But this is where I’ve arrived after a few decades of bouncing around the edges of burnout (and a few deep dives). I can effectively hold space - facilitate, teach, doula - for 12 hours a week and then I become a liquid. The rest of the time is accounting, admin, quick bursts of email, research, planning, writing.
I’m noticing I’m not alone in this. My friends who are established therapists, facilitators, surgeons, and midwives have their own set points, none of which is 40 hours of direct space holding….
And back to sweet Tim, whose work illustrates an unyielding desire to hack and streamline… his four hour work week makes terrific sense when you consider that he is indeed a writer, and that 90% of the writing process is abstract busy-ness and putzing. My process involves vacuuming, prep cooking, walking, and staring into space with zero linguistic input. If his process is similar, that four hours of writing is a sweet 40 hour work week.
onward,
K