Marathon, not sprint
Hey everyone!
Sending this one a day late, because for some reason I didn’t schedule it correctly.
I hope you enjoyed your weekend. I'm on vacation after Thanksgiving! Finally found sometime to travel with my wife and the rest of my family.
We always need this moments to connect back, sit back and enjoy the ride. I’m generally so focused on work, that being able to enjoy time with my wife is such a great thing.
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With all (or most) of us going remote in technology companies, I’ve seen a raise in cases of burn out of people close to me.
I generally see on X (FKA twitter?) this recurring comment from people in tech about leaving tech after some point, and starting a farm, or something that requires time away from technology. While I don’t see myself in that type of context, I do agree with the sentiment of leaving screens behind, or even being able to find away from work.
The lines blurred a lot with all of us going home, it’s hard to know when you start and stop working!
Some people do make a hard 9-to-5 cut, but in some cases I’ve seen people succumb to indirect pressure of people sending emails, or slack messages at random hours.
Don’t crash and burn
Related to the whole burn out topic, I’ve seen people go through severe cases of burn out becase they’re attempting to change a process, or a company’s culture.
They go knocking on doors, and talking with people, promote or provide alternate paths. Either more efficient, or reduced steps, or helping work life balance, etc.
Earn capital
One of the reasons I see these attempts fail, is due to the lack of social/political capital from the people attempting to do the change.
While they might be known by peers, you need to make capital with leadership to be able to get the leeway to purse the change. With some large changes, you need the “mandate” to come from the top to be able to be picked up by your peers.
Make sure you earn capital first, and the way to earn it is via caring about the business. If you can deliver value, prove that you care about the success of the organization, then those wins will get you the capital you want with leadership.
Don’t force it
Beyond having the capital to invest in a change, you also need to capture the zeitgeist of the moment. Because in some cases, the time might not be ripe for change.
As much as you dislike the status quo, you might need to work with your team to move the Overton Window. And this implies breaking the problem down into milestones, as any other business project you want to deliver.
Sometimes things don’t have the legs you think they have!
Choose your battles
As part of improving your leadership skills, you might need to constantly assess your choices and be quick on your feet to decide if this is actually worth your energy and time. Part of avoiding being burn out, is learning to choose your battles.
While a lot of things might seem urgent, or important. If you’re past a certain level in the ladder, even with techniques as the Eisenhower Matrix, you might still have too much to chose from.
Learn to delegate, or drop as much as possible to keep yourself sane.
Conclusion
At the end, while simple on the surface, it takes deliberate effort to achieve change!
- Build trust
- deliver business goals
- earn capital
- work backwards from your goal
- work on moving the Overton Window
- Create milestones
Like the meme, improvise, adapt,
Your turn!
How you avoid burn out? How you chose what things are important for you, and would be worthwhile to work on and change? Have you been burned out? How you recover from it?
Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- Stop working on islands as engineers which talks about building more collaborative environments for engineering teams.
- Sam Altman, freed some thoughts from Ed Zitron around the whole OpenAI saga that we had past weekend.
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