(#30) Burnout is a Choice
“...we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we’re doing is doing all these things at once.”
‘Busy’ is a choice. Yours.
You might busy yourself with work to feel productive, even if not much is being accomplished. You might keep the cogs of your mind turning to avoid thoughts becoming refocused on more difficult matters in your idleness.
To make yourself busy, to be the buzzing bee and bumble, will likely not be by the mechanism of doing just one thing, but rather all tempting things. You’ll put all your fingers in all the pies, tasting each but finishing none. Multitasking will sit upon your most salivary pedestal, blinding you to the unmounted value of doing one thing at a time.
Go on. Stay occupied. Spread yourself thin. Be such a thin spread of butter on bread as to be a transparent waste of a clean knife.
This busy being will most certainly take the payment of your time and energy it is owed. And yet, it won’t necessary provide any return on your exhausting investment. This treadmill stasis, this water treading, is where the short anticlimactic fizzling fuse of burnout lives.
Busy is a choice, and so too, under the circumstances where you have the control to do less, is burnout.
How can you encourage others to avoid the burnout they might otherwise create for themselves?
Check out my forthcoming book on managing the Imposter Phenomenon (a.k.a Imposter Syndrome).
