It’s probably a well-known fact by now that burnout isn’t directly tied to workload and fatigue, but much more to how you personally perceive the results of your work. In other words, it’s not the one who overworks who burns out, but the one who subjectively doesn’t see the result of their work as meaningful. Procrastination only makes things worse, because it turns into pointless work, running in place with no visible result. But again, this isn’t about overload, it’s about dissatisfaction.
What if laziness is just a habit of focusing on effort instead of reward?
Scott Adams
There are plenty of burnout assessment models, but they are all far too formalized and tailored to the file on an HR desk. For corporations, the Six Areas of Worklife model (Leiter & Maslach) looks decent: according to it, burnout grows out of mismatches between a person and their job in six areas. Workload — Control — Reward — Community — Fairness — Values. A fit in these areas leads to engagement, a mismatch leads to exhaustion and lower effectiveness. But again, this is all about how work runs inside a company, and you can burn out even on pet projects.
Maybe it’s professional deformation, but what gives me personally the biggest surge of motivation is criticism, both positive and negative (or, as people like to say, constructive). I don’t know how much vanity is mixed in here, but which of us doesn’t like rewatching our own reel/meme/text “through someone else’s eyes”? And what if there are a million of those eyes. In a broad sense, that’s exactly the Community from the Maslach and Leiter model.
You can take this example outside the IT bubble and it still holds. An electrician with a sour face twists yet another pair of wires on site, but what if tens of thousands of anonymous people were watching the quality of his work? Most likely he’d do it by the book and skip the second pint, but don’t quote me on that.
With designers, it’s a textbook example. You feel like a seasoned design boss and the current project is a gem, but only until someone asks for a link to put it up for the whole world to judge. Not to mention the portfolio… that’s an instant 2-week redesign. But if you’ve managed to make something actually useful for people, you get an instant energy boost and overtime with a smile. You don’t even have to call it overtime: with today’s tools and resources, projects can get done many times faster.
But the IT world has a little problem here. A huge share of outsourced projects never reach the end user. That alone could be grounds for clinical depression in whoever did the work. And the ones that do get there… don’t always get there as designed. It might seem that things are better in so-called product companies, but they aren’t. First, a project stretched into eternity by managers and agile can feel endless. Second, that same satisfaction from a useful project can get diluted by how tiny your contribution is (work aka being a cog in the system). And at a startup the end goal may be nothing but cash and a rising share price. As they say, remember what you’re working for.
So my advice is to build a community and talk to fellow designers if you’re not a social phobe (like me), or work more with social media (if you are).