How to reenergize after a long year and still hit your goals.
"Just 5 more minutes!", We have all said uttered this phrase out as we snooze our alarm for 5 more minutes of dreading waking up, starting the morning routine, commuting to the office or your desk which is a few paces away (thank you 2020 haha). Fatigue and burnout are more common towards the year year-end as you wrap up your goals, the project that has been dragging on and well, during this time of writing, managing your response to a global pandemic. The year-end burnout does not have to be a norm in your life and here I share tips and tools I have used to manage the tail-end of busy engineering semesters:
1. Realize it is okay to feel this way.
Be kind to yourself.
Be kind to yourself. I am sure you have heard this phrase multiple times but for real, this time, be kind to your self. If you are a type-A personality and you always set goals and go after them, you obviously have been putting in the work and that requires a lot of energy, time, rest and recovery (more on that later). So if you are starting to feel the effects of you going at it, be kind to yourself and remember that it is part of the game but it does not have to be that way always as there are ways to improve.
2. Say No.
I thought hard about where to put this in the list but from my experience, this is one of the most important tools for taking back your time and energy. In his book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, author Greg McKeown emphasizes how most things are not important yet they take up so much time, mental, physical, emotional and financial resources. We should be picky about what we give ourselves to and having a well-defined filter for things that truly matter enables you to say no.
Now I know saying no is one of the hardest things to do especially if you are an agreeable person, but there are strategies that make it easier to say no and here are some you can use right after reading this post (or listening to the audio version here):
Have "No" scripts that you use. These are scripts that you will practice that will help you say no. They are suited to different situations and will help you become more comfortable with declining a request, seemingly good but not great opportunity and just plain time-wasters. The book Essentialism has a whole chapter about this and I think it is worth the read. One of my favorite helps you with declining a request when you have other priorities you are focusing on and you can't compromise. "Yes, I am currently helping with X, Y, Z, which one should I reprioritize?" This makes the person making the request think about the priority of the request compared to what you are busy with and makes for a much more intentional exchange.
Track your time. I know this sounds like another friction point that might add to your fatigue but when you know how long tasks take and you can see that visually you become more aware of how much time do you really have in a day and how adding on things might just be the one domino to make the most important things like exercise and sleep fall by the wayside. I used Toggl tracker to track tasks like studying for an exam, writing a report, blog/podcast script. The calendar view on the app (available on all platforms) enabled me to visually see the time things took and made me more aware of the tradeoff of saying yes indiscriminately.
3. Control Access
Be less accessible. In the age of constant communication through instant messengers like WhatsApp, you could always be managing a stream of conversation, requests and debates. Again, not everything is important and most of the time that constant stream of texts puts a load on your brain that continues in the background even after you have moved away from the glowing distraction box (smartphone). Here are some ways you might do this:
Set blocks of time where people know you are not accessible. I know this will annoy people at first but what I saw is that with time, people end up saying,"Hey I know you are not available between 3-4 pm, when can we do this?" The first time I saw this in my university experience I was shocked that people around me eventually started knowing my schedule and also implementing their own schedules with no access blocks of time. In my experience, it gave me more time to think, recover, relax and embrace stillness which is needed in this 'Always On' culture.
Get a robot bouncer. Set autoresponders on your email or messaging app for times where you are either engaged in focused work, relaxation with family and friends or some needed alone time. I found switching to WhatsApp business to be very helpful as it has an "Out-of-Office" response feature and you set available times on your profile.
Consider a media detox. The content we consume is given access to our intellectual or emotional reactions. It is no secret that most content outlets, traditional and new-age are optimized for addiction and emotional reaction. Everything is a headline and everything is deemed to be important while it is not. I saw tracking an election in real-time to be an absolute waste of time and draining and this could be applied to almost every, "viral" or "headline" threads on social media. Do yourself a favour step away from the news, twTwitteritter threads and latest tea, if it is important it will reach your ears and if it is actionable you will be able to do something about it.
4. Get back to basics.
If you have noticed, the first steps focus on clearing the way. Eliminating unimportant and draining things. Now that you have extra time, devote it to heading back to the basics of self care. Sleep, diet, play and exercise.
The book, The Now Habit, uses the phrase, 'The Unschedule'. This is when you block off time on your calendar for things that reenergize you first then blocking oofff time for studying, work and side-projects. What you want to be doing is making sure that you free up as much time you can so you can do these things and the previous two points help you eliminate inefficiencies that take up so much of your time, drain you and don't contribute to the main goals.
Now that you have all this free time you can:
Improve your quality of sleep. You can add 30-60 minutes of sleep because you have eliminated watching the anxiety-inducing headlines on the news, following twitter trends, replying to late-night texts which hurt your sleep quality because of the blue light coming from the phone.
Play more. Now you have the time to take up something that allows you to be a child again. Here you want to be careful, pick something that is fun to do and you enjoy doing for the sake of doing it. In this age of,"Hustle" we try to put a success turbocharger on to everything we do and try to monetize everything. Now you have to deal with shipping issues but you were initially just knitting sweaters because you just like doing it. It is okay to rest.
Exercise more. Movement is proven to boost mood and focus when you get back to work. In my experience, I feel much more confident when I am exercising and it had a knock-on effect on other aspects of life. Now you don't need to take up a gym membership and listen to another bodybuilder or former soldier yell at you, "No pain, no gain". At your lowest in energy and motivation, I have found that cliché hardcore motivation content won't do anything to motivate you to exercise. Instead, they will make you feel more guilty and start a spiral of you skipping exercise time. Instead, do something fun. I love lifting weights but this year, I had so much happening, with the pandemic, isolation, losing a loved one that all I wanted to do was have something that allows me to laugh, have fun and still move. My girlfriend introduced me to the app FitOn and I have been loving the Zumba classes. I skip everything else and do Zumba, it is fun, exciting and I get to laugh at myself when I botch a dance move (engineering ruined my dance skills lol). When I am not learning Latin-inspired dance moves, I am rocking a South African amapiano dance tutorial and having fun, I am definitely stiff but it is super fun and keeps me moving.
Conclusion
Year-end burnout is a real thing and most of the time it happens because we have been too hard on ourselves and forgot how to be human. You probably still have goals to hit but life is not just about hitting goals, you need a holistic experience that ensures you got enough rest, varied experiences and good relationships. When you have these well taken care of you bounce back with more energy and a renewed focus.