Michael Linenberger's Blog

I read an interesting article today about how the prevalence of Burnout at work is getting out of control.

Almost no one will disagree with that, but it also reminded me that while nearly all of us really are overloaded, there are some overloaded people who don’t burn out. In fact, many of them have the gift of enjoying work, and life, in spite of their overwhelmed work demands: they are able to stay positive about it and above the fray.

There are, of course, a ton of ways to attain that positive view. Stress reduction, balanced life style, positive thinking, etc., all are good examples. But you need to add to that the following: effective management of your workday.

An “Ah ha” Experience

I want to reflect on an experience that I had the other day that’s illustrative of the latter of those as a way to avoid burnout.

As background, I recently wrote an article on how to dig out of an overloaded task list. I wrote it because I had allowed my own MYN task list to exceed the MYN/1MTD size limits (see that link for details), and it was bugging me: I was starting to feel overloaded.

So I followed my own recommendations, and worked to get my list under my recommended size limits. I ended up with fewer than 25 items in my entire visible task list. Fewer than 5 were critical and the rest were optional for the week (in 1MTD/MYN language, they were Opportunity Now tasks).