35. Fighting Burnout At Work

Summary

At Work with The Ready

Episode 35: Fighting Burnout At Work

Hosts: Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin
Release date: October 20, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin dive deep into the current epidemic of burnout in the workplace. Drawing on their extensive experience helping organizations adopt modern work practices, they challenge the dominant narrative that positions burnout as an individual failure—and instead frame it as a systemic organizational issue. The discussion explores how burnout actually manifests in teams (not just individuals), why today’s organizations seem "perfectly designed" to burn people out, and practical, evidence-based ways teams can address burnout at the source.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Systemic Roots of Burnout

• Burnout is largely a product of organizational systems, not individual weakness.

  • Many companies operate in ways that systematically induce overwhelm, a lack of control, and continuous overwork. ([04:59])
  • Attempts to "solve" burnout usually target the individual (e.g., setting boundaries, personal wellness) and ignore the bigger picture.
  • Quote:
    • “You're telling individual people basically that it is their fault that they're burnt out…when actually they're acting perfectly rationally for the environment that they're in.” — Rodney ([05:16])

• Capitalist Incentives & The Prisoner's Dilemma of Overwork

  • Organizations reward those visibly grinding the hardest, pushing everyone into unhealthy work patterns. ([06:34]-[07:29])
  • Burnout “spreads like a virus” in cultures that valorize busyness and productivity at any cost.

2. How Burnout Shows Up in Teams

• Burnout isn’t always obvious at the team level—sometimes the symptoms in group behavior are misinterpreted, ignored, or even rewarded. ([08:21]-[09:56])
• Less Obvious Symptoms Include:
  • Over-helpfulness: Team members become everywhere-at-once “heroes,” losing focus and agency.
    • Quote: "They're just the people who are, like, in everybody's DMs…doing weird hero behaviors and they're not saying no to anything." — Rodney ([09:21])
  • Defeatism & Cynicism: Cynics may actually be exhausted, not merely negative.
    • Quote: "I often find the people who show up as cynics...are actually just really tired and they're imagining trying to take the hill and not wanting to." — Rodney ([12:22])
  • Procrastination: Repeated inability to ship work, misunderstood as laziness; often, it's simply cognitive overload.
    • Quote: “When you're super burnt out…it just feels sort of like being in a fog. Your memory is impacted, your cognition is impacted, your ability to focus…It’s like having a real cognitive impairment.” — Rodney ([15:18])
  • Busyness for its Own Sake: Filling calendars with low-value work to mask a lack of focus, validated by workplace norms.
    • “Organizations really hold up fullness and busyness and like a double-booked calendar as being signals that you're important…” — Rodney ([17:16])
  • Impatience and Hurry: Team members push to "just make a decision" and avoid process, not because it’s best, but because they can’t mentally handle work ambiguity. ([21:02])

3. Why Burnout Persists: Fear, Bureaucracy, and Broken Social Contracts

• Widespread existential fear: Economic uncertainty, job market pressures, AI disruption, and lack of a social safety net escalate stress. ([25:09]-[25:52])
  • “Most organizations are built on a level of fear. And especially right now…there is still this existential fear at work.” — Rodney ([25:52])
• Bureaucracy multiplies futility: Organizations squeeze every drop of energy from employees, but much of it is wasted on bureaucracy and senseless process.
  • “You're getting everything wrung out of you to go fill out the same form 10 different times…There’s this deep futility…” — Sam ([27:27])
• Cognitive dissonance and gaslighting: Companies preach "we're a family" while burning people out.
  • “The working world writ large is just gaslighting most of its workers all the time.” — Rodney ([28:11])

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the myth of individual blame:

  • “Bro, shut the fuck up. Like, you're telling individual people basically that it is their fault that they're burnt out because they don't have control over their behavior…when actually they're acting perfectly rationally for the environment that they're in.” — Rodney ([05:16])

• On busyness as a coping mechanism:

  • “All of the projects that come to mind to me are little micro reorganizing projects…I do them for the dopamine hit that I am missing in my day job.” — Sam ([02:28])
  • “The pencil arranging can keep the demon dogs at bay…it can keep things quieter in your brain, even if you quote, unquote, hate it.” — Sam ([18:07])

• On culture as a driver of burnout:

  • “Are any companies making whatever they sell as efficiently and productively as they are making burnt out employees?” — Rodney ([24:30])

• On physical symptoms signaling burnout:

  • “Now I often consider first, like, what is actually going on with me emotionally. When was the last time I had a break from work? How much am I thinking about work when I’m not there?” — Rodney ([41:19])

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Solutions: What Can We Do About Burnout?

(Segment begins ~[29:36])

1. Audit Workloads and Lower the Bar for Effort

• Review “Sunshine Zone” work: Ruthlessly audit what work actually needs to be done, and design for outcomes that require less effort, not more. ([31:48])
  • Even at smaller team levels, ask “What can we stop doing?”
  • Tip: Fully step back from tasks when delegating—don’t linger in channels or keep passive tabs.

2. Increase Structure and Clarify Rules

• Ask for clear guardrails:
  • Who has the final say?
  • What is the real deadline & budget?
  • Why is this work being done?
  • Clarity reduces the fatigue of "fog of war." ([32:47])
• Model strict but supportive policies: (For leaders)
  • Minimum vacation requirements
  • Enforced quiet hours and meeting-free periods
  • Post-launch recovery buffers
  • "Walk the talk": Leaders must model these behaviors for them to stick.

3. Recognize & Catch Burnout Early

• Know the stages: Reference Herbert Freudenberger’s “12 Stages of Burnout” ([36:20])
  • Notice telltale habits: excessive phone scrolling, sleeping too much, withdrawing, losing sense of humor, physical symptoms
  • Create recurring reminders to check in with yourself

4. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)

• Use Kanban boards or simple lists to cap the number of projects or tasks in flight
• Limiting WIP calms the psychological experience of work: “This is the work in progress and here’s all the stuff we’re not doing right now, and that is okay.” — Sam ([42:38])
• Four-day workweek experiments show that less "bullshit work" leads to less burnout

5. Run Low-Risk Experiments to Set Boundaries

• Try simple, non-permission experiments: e.g., not responding to early-morning emails for a week and monitor outcomes ([44:05])
  • “The experiment was: I’m just going to do it and see how it goes.” — Sam ([45:39])
• Focus less on policy, more on creating functional, adaptive personal boundaries

6. Culture Change Starts with Small Wins

• Change what you can, even if you’re not in charge
• Every team has control over at least some portion of its “sunshine zone” and norms

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to the topic & the individual vs. systemic causes of burnout: [04:33] - [06:22]
• Symptoms of burnout in team behaviors: [08:21] - [22:09]
• Why burnout is so prevalent (systemic drivers): [23:22] - [29:00]
• Practical solutions and experiments to fight burnout: [29:36] - [45:47]

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Tone & Language

Rodney and Sam maintain a conversational, frank, and sometimes irreverent tone. Their discussion is peppered with humor (“All right, y’all. Today…it's burnout. Did I forget to talk about the topic before? Doesn't matter. It’s burnout.” — Rodney, [03:13]), candor, and personal anecdotes, which make the advice feel grounded and actionable.

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For Listeners: Concrete Takeaways

• Recognize organizational burnout as a system problem, not a personal failing.
• Become aware of subtle burnout symptoms in teams—don’t mistake cynicism, over-helpfulness, or impatience for “bad attitude” or “leadership.”
• Experiment bravely with boundaries, workload audits, and work-in-progress limits.
• Leaders: Your behavior sets the bar. Model what you want to see.
• Remember: The problem isn’t usually working hard. It’s working hard on bullshit.

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[End of summary]

Transcript

[A]

I think we have seen the ethos of move fast and break things, break some pretty fundamental things when we talk about, like social media, where maybe we should be holding that ideal a little bit more lightly than we have in the past.

[B]

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Outwork with the ready, I'm Rodney Evans, and the man on the other microphone is Sam Sperlin.

[A]

Hello, Rodney Evans. Very happy to be here today.

[B]

Sam, they can't see you doing your Rocky dance. The.

[A]

The YouTube watchers can. They always get special little treats.

[B]

That is so true. Well, go check it out, y'. All. It feels like AI is rewriting the rules of work just every single day. The future of work is here. And the question now is not if you are going to adapt, but how you are going to design work for what's coming and how fast you're going to get up on it.

[A]

Work design is no longer optional, and the teams that treat it like a side project are in the process of being left behind. And ones that treat it as essential will keep up with the pace of change.

[B]

So while our show isn't changing, this intro is because I'm no longer talking about the future of work like something hasn't happened yet. With all of that being said, let's do a check in. Sam, what you got?

[A]

Rodney, have you ever given yourself a little silly or inconsequential project to complete just for fun?

[B]

Yes, but I have to think about it.

[A]

Would you like me to go first? Because I obviously have something in mind for having come up with such a very specific check in.

[B]

Yeah, that'd be great.

[A]

Okay. So I think I've mentioned before that there is an ice cream shop basically in the parking lot of my apartment complex. I can almost see it from my window. And I decided that this summer I was going to try every flavor that they offer. And I took a photo of their menu and every time I went, I would scratch off whatever flavor that I got and I have not quite finished. I have a couple of weeks left and I think maybe three of the flavors that I've been least looking forward to that I've saved for the end. But I have systematically worked through the menu and done the vast majority of them at this point, and I feel somewhat accomplished.

[B]

What's going to be the last flavor you try?

[A]

Cotton candy. Who wants cotton candy ice cream?

[B]

No one.

[A]

It's between that and toasted coconut, which I'm not.

[B]

Oh, that sounds good.

[A]

I'm not a coconut guy, so I'm.

[B]

A real coconut head. Yeah, it'll Come as a surprise to no one. I mean, all of the projects that come to mind to me are little micro reorganizing projects. And I don't do them just for fun. I do them for the dopamine hit that I am missing in my day job. So I'm like, I'm going to organize my pencils because it makes me feel calm and like I'm in control of something and that's why I do it somewhat compulsively.

[A]

Yeah, I can 100% relate to that. In a world of incredibly amorphous non physical work.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Giving yourself a nice little physical project that has a clear start point and a clear end point can be pretty great.

[B]

It's pretty great. What if I reorganize my sock drawer? Would the world feel more.

[A]

Your life would be better.

[B]

I know. Would the world feel more calm and less chaotic? To me, maybe. That's all right, y'. All. So today I didn't talk about the topic before. Am I supposed to? Yeah, I forgot. Doesn't matter. It's burnout. We have talked around burnout in a couple of other episodes, but what we haven't done is talked about how burnout really shows up in the Twilight Zone. Call back to depth finding. There will be a link in the show notes for those of you who missed it. But basically, I think a lot of times the behaviors that we see at work that we actually like observe in our colleagues are the behaviors related to burnout. And they show up in meetings in trying to make a decision, in trying to clarify some piece of strategy or policy. And obviously I think, Sam, you and I share the perspective that systems are largely designed to produce burnout. Like organizations are wonderful burnout factories as most of them are conceived right now. And. But we haven't talked a lot about what it actually looks like when it is happening in your team. And so today is going to be more about that.

[A]

Cool. There's something upfront to say about kind of the individual experience of burnout and the organizational experience or cause of burnout often. A lot of the advice we hear out there about how to get through burnout is like really focused on the individual, which I think has. It's not the highest leverage way, I guess, to get after like fixing burnout problems. So I hope we dig into like that nuance in this conversation.

[B]

We're gonna. Let's. Here's the pattern that I see. It's actually not that different than the pattern of like how social media is making us ill. It's basically like A monolithic system like your company, existing inside of, like, American late stage capitalism under a very chaotic political landscape. It is all conspiring right now to create a lot of overwhelm, a lot of feeling of lack of control, both of which are very related to burnout. And then the salves tend to be very individual. It's like, have better boundaries. And I'm like, bro, shut the fuck up. Like, you're telling individual people basically that it is their fault that they're burnt out because they don't have control over their behavior, when actually they're acting perfectly rationally for the environment that they're in. And by sacrificing their own Mental Health. 77% of professionals in 2018 reported experiencing burnout. That was before the pandemic. I'm certain it's worse now. By experiencing this and dealing with it as an individual problem, we allow these systems to continue to. To extract this toll from us. And that is the pattern that makes me grumpy.

[A]

Yeah, no, that totally tracks. And I think if I can add on like a secondary pattern.

[B]

Yeah, patterns on patterns.

[A]

I think it's like how I like.

[B]

To dress and decorate my house, go.

[A]

For it, and make podcasts. Yeah, there's like a classic, like, Prisoner's dilemma situation here in organizations where, like, if we would all kind of chill, then we wouldn't have to be in this state of burnout. But in a capitalist society, an organization kind of built for profit, and you have somebody or some groups of people going ham all the time and disregarding their physical health and mental health, it sets up this dynamic where, like, everybody feels like they have to do that. I know I'm speaking in generalities here, but. But any organization where, like, it's perceived that someone is getting ahead or getting rewarded for overwork and doing extra stuff, you are setting up the dynamic where everybody also feels like they now have to do that or should do that or don't have a choice and are now going to start acting in that way as well.

[B]

Well, it's very theory why. Right. Like, we've talked many times on this podcast about our belief that humans fundamentally want purpose and meaning and connection and contribution, which is a way of saying, basically, we are wired to want to do a good job. And so in group dynamics, nobody looks at the social loafer, at the slacker and goes, we should all be more like that. Everybody looks at the person who is grinding hardest and who's probably getting, if not the most accolades or validation from their management. It probably has the appearance of that and they go, okay, that's the standard to me. So I think you're exactly right. It's like a virus.

[A]

Yeah. We've got one of the most fleshed out mural boards we've had in a while for. For an episode. So where do you want to, like, where do we dive in here?

[B]

The reason I wanted to make this episode is because there is this individual focus, and a lot of the literature around burnout really focuses on, like, how the individual experiences it and how we feel. So, like, we feel exhausted, we feel distracted, we. We don't feel present, we aren't experiencing joy. But in team dynamics, I see a whole bunch of behaviors that are not that. So while that might be the individual experience, what happens in a group often looks different and it doesn't look exactly like burnout. And so I want to talk about that because I think a lot of the behaviors that pop off in groups are hard to decipher, and some of them are even rewarded, but many of them are signs of burnout. And so I'm going to sort of float these to you and you tell me, like, how they land and what you think. So one of the symptoms I see in teams is actually over helpfulness. I see people who have kind of lost their grip on their agency and are just stretched way too thin and lost the plot as just kind of being like, everywhere, everything, all at once. They're just the people who are, like, in everybody's DMs and they know everything that's going on and they're like, I'm here to help, like, what can I do? And they're like, doing weird hero behaviors and they're not saying no to anything. But it's not coming actually from a place of, like, thoughtful desire to contribute. It's coming from a place of burnout.

[A]

Yeah, that. It's coming from a place of needing control over what is happening and trying to achieve that control through massive, massive helpfulness. I've seen that quite a bit. I don't know that I've. I'm not a particularly helpful person. I don't feel like. So I have not necessarily succumbed to that in my own kind of moments of burnout or near burnout, but I can see that being a coping mechanism.

[B]

I will tell you, I have only really experienced this in myself once, but I've seen it in other people many times. The feeling I had when it happened to me, and I am going to say to me, because I didn't choose this it happened, was basically I felt Powerless to fix my own mental state. And so I was like, I'm going to fix everybody else's, like, you know, whose oxygen mask I can put on. A bunch of people who didn't ask for my help. Let me go to them. Because I don't know what to do to alleviate the pain or the discomfort that I'm feeling. So I'm just going to run around telling other people what's wrong with them and offering them support.

[A]

Yeah, I'm going to project it onto everyone else, basically.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Yeah, that makes sense. One that I feel like I see a lot in client organizations is the. Is number two, defeatism.

[B]

I knew you were going to pick that one.

[A]

Did.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I'm now. And now I'm curious about why, but. Yeah, yeah, this is one that I feel like I see quite a bit. And I think sometimes it comes from a place of burnout. I think sometimes there's like, personality kind of stuff here or like role like identity, things that show up for people and being defeatist. But I'm curious how that one tracks for you.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I see people who are in this sort of. We've tried this before, overly cynical, really defeated place. They just don't have enough gas in the tank to do the thing. And so they kind of shit on the thing, on the idea, and sort of like pre assume and narrate their failure because they're just like, I cannot imagine ginning up the energy to take this hill. And incidentally, part of the reason I wanted to do this episode right now is because of AI, because we are like, at the. I'm going to use so many metaphors today, it's going to drive everybody so nuts. We're at like, you know, base camp of a very tall mountain right now. And I think a lot of people, because of the last, we'll call it five years of pandemonium and, and. And are just like, bro, truly, I cannot, like, truly, I cannot be at, you know, 10,000ft right now and have however many tens of thousands of feet to climb. And so I see this sort of defeatism in groups when there's discussion of a new initiative of, you know, pursuing AI experimentation, when there's just like, conversation about innovation. I often find the people who show up as cynics in the conversation are actually just really tired and they're imagining trying to take the hill and not wanting to.

[A]

When I think about defeatism in an organization, my brain immediately goes to an org that is over indexing on the Sunshine Zone. So you Know that layer that is all about the physical artifacts and the things that we can see and kind of put our hands on in an organization and having a vacuum or just a really broken twilight zone. So the idea of, like, you know, we've made that deck before, so why make a new one? We've made this rule. We've done this thing before. And of course, if it's purely in the sunshine zone, it didn't go particularly well. And if you don't realize that there's this zone below where we actually operationalize these things in the twilight Zone, defeatism actually feels pretty rational at that point.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. Another one I want to talk about is procrastination. So do we have to right now?

[A]

Can we do it later?

[B]

We have. He has jokes. This is one that I did not understand until a few years ago because I did not appreciate the correlation between, like, anxiety and procrastination, Depression and procrastination, burnout and procrastination. Those three things are not necessarily the same, though. There's often overlap between them. But it's interesting how, again, sometimes I think in a team dynamic, somebody not meeting deadlines or seemingly kind of being stuck in a spin cycle on something and not able to just, like, ship it and be done will often be misinterpreted as, like, being disorganized or being lazy or not being able to prioritize. But sometimes it's burnout. I think sometimes people's brains are so tapped and they're so overwhelmed and they're so exhausted that they just cannot focus to finish. You know, a lot of what is in this list that I think is the stuff that has symptoms in teams but isn't. The root is when you're super burnt out. And I have been. It just feels sort of like being in a fog. It's like your memory is impacted, your cognition is impacted, your ability to focus. Mono task is impacted. It's like, we talk about it like, oh, I'm tired, but it's like having a real cognitive impairment.

[A]

Yeah. Well, what I'm sitting here realizing that we could take everything that we've talked about so far and everything that I think we'll talk about in a few minutes and actually think about it at the team level as well. So I think teams get burned out, and you see these behaviors from a team. You know, how many leadership teams have we worked with where they just won't make. Make a key decision? They're just procrastinating on that thing, or they know they need to spin up an effort around this thing, but we're not going to do it. We're going to wait for more information. And I think for a team to kind of be experiencing burnout, it's not that you need every single person on the team individually to be experiencing burnout, but there's probably some interesting kind of tipping point that there's research that I'm not familiar with that says like, how many people on a team need to be kind of in a burnout state for the team itself to be exhibiting symptoms of burnout.

[B]

Right, Absolutely. I mean, I can think of lots of teams that I've worked with in my career that I would say meet that description. And they fall into a lot of these categories. You know, one also that comes up a lot. And again, some of these things, some of these descriptions or these behaviors, the way that they show up in the meeting or in the conversation or in the group dynamic is actually quite rewarded. So a lot of times people will get into this sort of like heroic busyness mindset and they'll just fill up their calendar and they'll overwork. You know, they'll do work nobody's asking for. They'll just kind of drown themselves in work that is not necessarily important. And we know that a lot of organizations really hold up fullness and busyness and like a double booked calendar as being signals that you're important and that you're adding value and that what? Blah, blah, blah. And actually there are times where underneath that is somebody who can't prioritize and can't focus and has really lost the plot on what they're doing in their work and instead is just doing a pile of stuff and getting a little bit of dopamine hit from it. Like me organizing my pencils.

[A]

And I think it might be a little bit more than just a little bit of dopamine. When I think about my own personal relationship with burnout or states approaching burnout, I see the business as progress thing as very, very real in the sense that in my mind, when I was in that state, all of my brain wanted on the surface level was, I guess, like, there's too much going on. Like, just give me like a week of no meetings and I'll like recover from this. And the actual lived experience when I had a lighter week or had something like that was actually potentially worse than when I was in the throes of how busy I was. Because those, those little meetings, those status updates, that work that is annoying but knowable and doable. The pencil arranging it can keep the demon dogs at bay. You know it can. It can keep things quieter in your brain, even if you quote, unquote, hate it. And when that goes away and you are just left with the kind of tattered remains of your psychology after a long period of burnout. The it's not like a switch is flipped and suddenly you're all better now. Like, I think it actually feels worse for a little bit.

[B]

That makes a ton of sense. It's actually funny that you say that, Sam, because I usually try to take 12 week vacation every year because a week is not long enough for my brain to fully disengage from work. Even though I am very, very good about fully disengaging my hands from the slack machine on the Friday evening that I'm taking off. Point being, almost always, even if I'm not feeling particularly burnt out, this is just wiring. Because I work at a job that I care about and I'm very engaged. In the first week of a two week vacation, I always plan to do a lot of activities and projects because I know that my mind is not going to cope super well with just like a void. And it's sort of week two that I can get to enough peace that I can actually rest and see sort of refill the tank before I am coming back. But to your point, it's not like when you take away the clearing out the inbox or hitting submit on something or shipping a proposal. It's not like when you take that away, everything is groovy. It's like actually much, much worse. So yeah, I think the busyness thing is real.

[A]

Yeah, there's a real healing component that has to happen to come out of true burnout, which I think it's almost like a different class of burnout than just like I've been cranking really hard for a long time on a really hard thing. There's a whole other world of like you're being asked to like violate your values every single day and you just have to take it and do it. And what does that do to a human being over a long period of time?

[B]

Yeah, it messes you up. I have been there. Not for a long, long time, but I have been there. Yeah. I think the one other sort of symptom that I want to talk about, especially because this one is often viewed positively in teams, but it has a darker shadow side, is people who show up as impatient. And obviously nobody likes someone who just shows up in a meeting like an asshole. But sometimes, and you've seen these People, sometimes the person who's seen as being like, let's just make a decision. Let's just put a bow on it. We're being circular. We're like the people who, like, can't just sort of be in the mess for a minute because they can't actually, because they don't have the ability to be in the present and to stay focused and to live with the discomfort of some murkiness. Sometimes those people show up as being kind of impatient and being kind of drivers and being kind of like, we just need a do step. We just need a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that behavior I see as often being validated and rewarded. And actually it is the opposite of what needs to happen sometimes with teams. Not always, obviously. I know that there are people out there who just let swirly shenanigans persist forever. I'm not talking about that. But I do sometimes see people who just don't have the mental capacity to be in a mess. Sort of impose this impatience on the group for their own comfort, but not because it's what's best in the moment.

[A]

Totally. Well. And we get to kind of paint a coat of bias toward action over it or move fast and break things.

[B]

We love urgency.

[A]

Yeah. So it's very much rewarded in lots of. Especially kind of tech focused organizations where, yeah, you know, move fast and break things was like a thing that people were holding up as quite admirable 10 years ago. And not to, like, really put this down a rabbit hole, but I think we have seen the ethos of move fast and break things break some pretty fundamental things. When we talk about, like, social media and the impact of things like Facebook on the world, where maybe we should be holding that ideal a little bit more lightly than we have in the past.

[B]

I mean, if we're gonna talk about impact over intent, you know, I just saw a headline the other day that says the average American teen experiences as much anxiety and depression as a psychiatric patient in the 1950s. That's not good.

[A]

I immediately have questions about how that was quantified. But it doesn't sound good. That's for damn sure.

[B]

Doesn't sound good. Yeah, that's right. So we've talked about some of the behaviors that are less obvious but are showing up. Let's talk a little bit about what causes these behaviors. Because again, we are not here to blame individuals for this. And I am not going to tell you that, like, you need to put time blocks on your calendar for dip. Like, absolutely not. I'm not going to contribute to that narrative that I think is absolutely bogus. Why is this happening?

[A]

Well, and it's interesting too that it's, it's not like we're talking about like all executives and leaders are having a great time and not experiencing any burnout and everybody else underneath them is having the worst time. It's like everybody.

[B]

Right, everybody's having a bad time.

[A]

Exactly. So our organizations, I think you've said something, Elias, at the beginning, seem to be perfectly designed to burn out human beings. Like, if the purpose of a system is like the outcomes that it generates, like we apparently have created an entire economy of organizations that kind of just destroy human psychology, which is what our.

[B]

Organizations are doing best.

[A]

Best.

[B]

It, it actually might be what companies are doing most efficiently of anything they're doing is causing burnout in workers, which is kind of fascinating and not something I've ever thought about before. Like, are any companies making whatever they sell as efficiently and productively as they are making burnt out employees? I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, I'm sure there are a few organizations out there who are really trying to be progressive in this, but I mean, at least every organization that I've kind of interfaced with has seemed to be pretty well optimized for making people have a rough time.

[B]

Yeah, it's amazing.

[A]

I don't have a good explanation other than I think when you create an organization that is purely focused pretty myopically on short term financial returns, everything that has to be kind of like churned up in the short term to create that is seen as a worthwhile or an acceptable cost to make that happen. And to the extent that people are replaceable, you know, then they're just viewed like any other resource that is fungible in that way, which is pretty dark and a dire way to like conceptualize our fellow man and woman.

[B]

Yeah, I think at the root of a lot of this is fear. And I think most organizations are built on a level of fear. And especially right now, you know, someone just posted an article at the ready about the fact that like the job market right now is the actual hellscape. It's just horrible. And I think at this moment in time, I think AI is making it worse. You know, like people are applying to one gajillion jobs with AI and then HR is using AI to review all of those applications. And then just like nobody's getting jobs, it's a mess out there. And so you combine the fact that hiring processes at most places are incredibly inefficient. We're having really Terrible jobs reports, and people are really worried about the coming AI wave. You combine that fact with our lack of any, like, social programs in the US like the fact that it's very difficult in some places to have healthcare if you're not employed, to have childcare. All the things, you guys. Our American audience understands this. And no matter how irrational it is, because for many people who are great performers and very critical to their organizations, it is irrational. There is still this existential fear at work. And so when you combine some kind of feeling that your success at work is related to your survival as a person with a system that will extract every single drop of juice out of every lemon in the place, I think this is what you get.

[A]

Yeah, I think you're right. And I think if you add on the experience of bureaucracy or org debt into that. So it's one thing to feel like you're getting every little bit squeezed out of you and, like, shit's happening, like, even if it's just purely, like, making money. But I think a lot of people's experience at work is you're getting everything wrung out of you to go fill out the same form 10 different times. And if there's one error on it, it gets returned to you. So there's this, like, deep futility about my precious energy and life being sucked up by this faceless machine that doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever. And that is a dark place, I think, to spend time.

[B]

And then you add to that the layer of cognitive dissonance, because people at your company are telling you how we're a family and how we care so deeply and values, you know? And so to your point, Zam, like, how do you hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time and say, stay like a fully functioning person? I think that, like, the working world writ large is just gaslighting most of its workers all the time.

[A]

Totally. Yeah. If your actual family treated you like the way your organization may likely treat you like, we'd get the authorities involved. Like, it's problematic.

[B]

Divorce lawyers would be called.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Okay. So this has been just like a total walk in a park full of sunshine so far. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about, like, how prevalent this is. I think we should spend more time than usual on what to do because, yeah, we want to help people. We want to help people get out of this sludgy feeling that they have because we spend so much time at work. And the unfortunate reality is when you are burnt out at work, you are burnt out in life and it messes everything up, not just your job. So, Sam, give them a great idea to start with.

[A]

I don't know if it's great, but it's gotta be an idea.

[B]

No pressure.

[A]

Well, here's the interesting kind of challenge of this whole section that we're about to experience is we could spend so much time talking about how burnout it's experienced as an individual. But solving burnout, it can't just be like, hey, you person, just live your life differently and then your burnout will go away. Like it's so. It's so embedded in the larger system. So the way that we approach doing things differently, it'll be interesting to see this, this conversation. So where my mind went to was assuming that the burnout flavor that you are experiencing in your organization has something to do with kind of an over indexing on that sunshine Zone. You know, we're spending so much time making stuff that we think has dubious amounts of value. Perhaps one way that we can start to alleviate this burnout that we're creating is to do a real tough audit on the stuff that is going on in our Sunshine zone. And what would it look like for us to not just think about what is the absolute best version of the stuff that lives up here and what is the version that gets us most of what we need with the least amount of effort, Which I find most organizations don't spend any time thinking about in that way because a lot of people's jobs are purely kind of in the sunshine zone. So they are expected either because of their own internal motivation or because of external motivation put up upon them that I go 110% on every single thing that I do in the Sunshine zone, regardless of how much work that creates for me or others. And let's not think too much about what outcomes these are driving toward. So if you're at in a very senior position in the organization, the version of the Sunshine zone that you can influence is much larger. But even if you are not at the top or near the top of an organization, your individual team has a sunshine zone of just the stuff that lives in that area for your team that you have control over. And it's worth doing that sort of exercise, that sort of audit, even on that smaller kind of more fractal level. I think.

[B]

Yeah, I agree with you. And one like small hack here that's very related to what you just said. I was just in a conversation actually with someone who's doing some work with the ready right now, and there is Something that she needed to put down because of capacity. And she was like, but I'll like keep an eye on it. And I was like, don't, don't like stay in the slack channel and read the like either. Like, if you don't have time to do it, which you don't put it down and like save that space in your brain. I think too often people kind of do what you're saying, but they don't do it enough to actually reap the benefits.

[A]

Yeah, I agree. Those little things each on their own don't feel like a lot. But if you have 10 or 50 or 100 of those, that's an incredible amount of cognitive bandwidth being used on, like just keeping one eye on. I think you only have two eyes generally. So like maybe use that as, as your, your enabling constraint.

[B]

I love that. While we're still in sort of the depth finding conversation, it is okay to ask for clarity around ways of working around Twilight Zone things. Like, it is okay, look, this is a practice like anything else, and it takes reps like anything else. And leaders might bristle the first time these things get asked of them. But one of the sort of unseen and pernicious causes of burnout that you alluded to is like in a lot of bureaucracies, it is kind of fog of war and people don't know what is going on or how to get their work done. And they feel like every day is just sort of a futile drudge through sludge. And one of the ways out of that is like, if you can just in your team or with your manager be really like, who has the final say on this? How much money do I have to spend on this? What is the real outcome that is required by what day? Why are we doing this? Like, these things might sound small, but I think part of the systemic cause of burnout is that a lot of people are playing a game that they don't have the rules for and they are trying to echo locate what's allowed and what's good and what the norm is without anybody just handing them the explicit rules and saying play by these. And most people would really like to have those rules because it's way less tiring than all day, every day being like, am I doing it right?

[A]

Totally. And I'm going to break our structure here and actually do my second one because it's a build on that.

[B]

Hit it.

[A]

So the word that you were just using here, like, what are the rules? I think the word that comes to mind for me is like, what's the structure here. Like, structure is super helpful. It gives you a sense of like where to play and how to play. So I think early days of my time at the ready, I was anti rule for everything. Everything is emergent. We'll figure it out. I think in a burnout centric organization, there's the opportunity to put some really strict guardrails and defaults in place around minimums, around things like minimum vacation requirements. Not like, oh, here's the max that you can take. But actually you are expected to take at least this much. Get out of here and we're gonna have a conversation if you're not taking this time off.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Things like enforced quiet hours or you know, strict working hours. The expectation that we are all like aware of each other's time zones and we don't send each other messages after working hours, meeting free buffers after busy times. So if you're an organization that has product launches, what does the week or two after a product launch look like? Can we make it just a quieter time by expectation, by the structure, by the rules, so that you don't have to like use individual effort to make those things happen? And I think this is, you know, really speaking to the folks in like official leadership positions here because all of this really hinges on like, how well do you model this? None of this works if like, here's the minimum vacation requirements and I never take my vacation or here's my strict, or, you know, the expected strict working hours. And here's an email from me at 1:30 in the morning. Like, right. You really got to walk the talk as a leader if you're going to try to do some of these things.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[A]

All right, what do you got?

[B]

This is going to maybe be a little bit woo woo. But I love it.

[A]

I'm here for it.

[B]

Okay. I do think that some awareness is really helpful. So I have been burnt out more than once. There's a 12 stages of burnout document. So Herbert Freudenberger, who is a psychologist, I think, I don't think he was a psychiatrist, created this model and we'll link to it in the show notes. But basically there are 12 stages of burnout and I have never been at stage 12. I think I've been at stage 11 in my life. I've definitely the one through 11 feel very familiar. Those definitely feel like I have a, you know, a little punch card for those where I can get one free the next time I hit it. One of the things that is so difficult about Burnout is I experience it as hard to spot in myself. So I generally know that I'm burnt out because I'm starting to do habits that I have when I'm burnt out. Like looking at my phone too much, like sleeping too much, like canceling plans. But it's not like a feeling of like, I'm aware when I'm grieving, I'm aware when I'm worried. I don't always feel like I can really tune in to when I'm burnt out. And it's really helpful to just be able to know. So we're going to link to this. But I think that because of how a lot of the discourse around burnout is, it's like, if you feel this way, you got to do this thing and there is a $60 billion self help industry telling you that you mess this up, you created this situation for yourself and if you would just get a fucking habit journal, you would be fine. And you won't be like, that's just based on a lie and somebody making a bunch of money off of you. What I do think is really helpful is to start to learn to spot the signals before they get worse for yourself. And they might look different for you than they look for me. But my own work around this has been catch it early and don't try to just habit my way out of it. Instead to rest or name it or think about it or like, be with the feeling that I'm having rather than trying to tactically overcome the feeling that I'm having.

[A]

I have what I think is maybe both an easy and impossible question.

[B]

Perfect.

[A]

Which is how, how, how? How do you get good at noticing that you are getting into these stages of burnout? Is it just like a matter of, you know, read through this framework that will link to the 12 stages and being like, oh, like, yeah, this is where I am. Or is there other things that you've done to get more in touch with your emotional state around burnout?

[B]

Yeah, so I'm really bad at actually getting in touch with the emotional part. So I need to have other doors to walk through to get to it. So, like, I'll notice for myself basically. If I, like, stop making jokes at work, it's a sign. If I am spending time scrolling, it's a sign. If I'm having a hard time monotasking. Like, if I feel compelled to like be picking up my phone or refreshing a tab or checking slack too much, it's a sign. Like I have an inventory of signs. Because when I'm Burnt out. I'm not in touch with the feeling. I have sort of this behavioral inventory that tells me that there's something going on emotionally that I'm not in touch with but should be. And that's usually enough for me to be like, okay, I need to like, take a day off, take a step back, then try to notice actually what I'm feeling. But I'm sure there are people who are much, much more skilled than I am in just accessing the feeling and noticing what it is. I have to take a little detour to get there.

[A]

I mean, that, that makes a lot of sense. And you just gave me the very practical idea to basically take a Screenshot of these 12 stages of burnout and make a recurring monthly reminder to like, look at it and be like, like, where am I at if, if anywhere on this? And what do I want to do about that?

[B]

The one other thing which also relates to my other idea is you're listening to this and you, like me, are not always in touch with your less comfortable emotions. I almost always have a physical symptom when I am experiencing burnout and think that there's something wrong with me. And I know a lot of other people, especially women. I know a lot of women who are like, I am having a problem with my hip. And it's like, girl, are you or are you burnt to a crisp by your shitty job? It's that one. Spoiler. When I worked at an investment bank, there was a year where like clockwork, every six weeks I had like a non specific illness where I just like had a fever and couldn't get out of bed. And it lasted for like 36 hours. I went to the doctor like 20 times. It was just burnout. It was just like burnout that was like messing up my body. So again, if like me, you're not always great at recognizing your own signs when things start to go wrong physically that seem weird to you? I'm not saying don't see a doctor, but I am saying now I often consider first, like, what is actually going on with me emotionally. When was the last time I had a break from work? How much am I thinking about work when I'm not there, blah, blah, blah. And often, once I start to investigate that, the physical symptom miraculously disappears. Yeah, all right, what's your, what's your last idea saying?

[A]

My last one is I'm, I'm realizing it's actually, I think similar ish to my other ideas, but I'll share it anyway just in case this like slightly different angle on it hits people in a different way. I think work in progress limits like crazy start to introduce them into your organization, into your own personal way of working. Into your team's way of working can be in small ways. Like literally we have, you know, as a team a very simple Kanban board where the things that are active and the things that are in a backlog and we're only allowed to have a couple of things in active at a time. This is one of those like things kind of like a check in round. That sounds so stupid and simple when you explain it. Unlike check in round, actually very hard to do to do and like keep it true to the rules that we put in place for ourselves. But every time I have done it for myself or on a team that I have worked on, holy shit, do we like get so much more done and it feels easier and like getting more done is just like the bonus. I don't even really care about that part. It's the psychological experience of being like, no, this is the work in progress and here's all the stuff that we're not doing right now and that is okay. And I'm just focused on that. I think can have a really big impact on burnout and even up to the level of something like a four day workweek. You know, I think there's been pretty impressive research now at this point that organizations that embark on a four day work week, the human sort of outcomes are so much better. And quite often, and maybe almost every single time, the actual productivity goes up too. And that is just, I think an example of a larger kind of limiting work in progress, like making the amount of time that we can actually work shorter so that we can really focus on the stuff that matters. Because I really believe in most cases burnout is not a working too hard problem. It is a working too hard on bullshit problem. And if you can make less room for the bullshit and only leave the good stuff behind, I think burnout inevitably goes down in most cases.

[B]

I totally agree. And like a quick example of this, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who's had a bit of a tough go lately at work and she has a boss who is a real like early riser and just sort of starts furiously emailing and slacking like before the sun comes up. And she used to just like pick up her phone while she was still in bed and start engaging with this sort of like cascade of requests. Now could her boss not do that? Yes, yes she could. Is her boss Gonna stop doing that. No, she is not. And what my friend realized that part actually she did have a choice over. So basically she was like, well, for one week, I'm just not gonna respond to anything before. Like, I don't know, like 8:30 and just see if anyone notices or what happens. And like, no one did. Like, no one was upset or said things. My point is like, in terms of limitations, if it is in your working hours, if it is in your working week, if it is in you hold. Rather than trying to set a hard boundary and saying, I'm only available from nine to five, which, like, that's doom for failure, like a New Year's resolution. Try running an experiment like my friend did. That's like, I'm noticing this behavior in myself. I'm noticing that my cortisol spikes before I've even had a cup of coffee. And like, what if I tried for a few days to not do this to see if there's any blowback? Oh, there's not. I'm gonna keep doing it. Like, that's a more adaptive way to get at some of the individual work, I think.

[A]

Yeah. And importantly, the experiment there was not. I'm going to run this by my boss and see if she's okay with it. The experiment was. I'm just going to do it. I'm going to do it and see how it goes.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Did we do it, Sam?

[A]

Did we do it? Do we have another one?

[B]

No.

[A]

Okay, great. We did it. We have done the thing and now we do the thing where we close the episode and we simply say goodbye to everyone.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Hey, Rodney, did you know we're always looking for new topics for hey, Sam.

[B]

I did know that, yeah.

[A]

Okay, well, if you have an organizational pattern and I'm not talking to you, Rodney, I'm talking to the listener. If you have an organizational pattern that you're having trouble changing, shoot us a [e-mail] that'd be great because I do.

[B]

Come up with a lot of them and I would love for someone else to limit my work by giving us some patterns to unpack.

[A]

Help with our burnout, help us come.

[B]

Up with our topics, limit our work in progress. This show is engineered by Taylor Marvin and produced by our good buddy Jack Van Amberg. At Work with the READY is created by the Ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you so much for listening.