Zen-ish Thoughts About Burnout
- Even 5 minutes of quiet mindfulness can provide a break from pressure, stress, and anxiety.
- Even a 30-second quiet pause just before entering a meeting can help you be more calmly attentive, more prepared to handle questions and make contributions, and more ready to give a report or presentation.
- Regular meditation of 20 to 30 minutes at a time, daily or twice daily, will make the above benefits more likely as well as stronger.
- Peace of mind, even in the face of undesirable outcomes, leaves room and resources to more quickly come up with and present solid thinking about next steps. This shows that you are responsive, on top of things, resourceful, creative, smart, persevering, committed. Regular meditation sessions make this sort of peace of mind more accessible under duress. They also help to generate insights and solutions regarding a project's challenges, or one's personal challenges in managing a project. (Be sure to understand the difference between meditation and normal, discursive thinking.)
- Both regular meditation and discursive reflection on one's values and how well one's job is or is not aligning with them can lead to decisions and actions that change how you do the job, or the job that you do.
- Simplification and prioritization can ensure you are working toward objectives in the right order. Begin with what is most urgent and most important. Then move on to what is less urgent but still important. Do not work on things that someone considers urgent if no one can explain why it's important, or on anything more urgent but less important than what you already have lined up.
- Completing one thing is better than starting multiple things and completing none. Reevaluate priorities frequently, but do not let priority shuffling prevent completion of things that are urgent and more important.
- Even the most urgent and important thing is never the only thing. Don't feed one child at the expense of all the others.
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Breaking tasks up into very small chunks is a way to stay aware of what is so, and has many benefits:
- People can provide more reliable estimates for smaller pieces of work.
- If a problem occurs, it is easier to tell where the source of the problem is and correct it.
- If there is a mistake in execution, or if a mistake in direction is discovered, the cost of correcting it will be less than if it is embedded in something large and rarely put to the test.
- Regular meditation of 20 to 30 minutes at a time, once or twice daily, is a good tool for becoming more resilient and creative, and also for seeing and adjusting one's relationship with the prevailing "hustle" culture.
- You need to show your industrious dedication. You must not lose sight of the factors that sustain you so that you can be industriously dedicated. You should not set and do not need to continuously comply with unrealistic demands without recourse to respectful and intelligent discussion of priorities and capacity.
- Both regular meditation and discursive reflection on what one's work enables for the company's customers, employees, your boss, company shareholders, one's self and one's family, can and should lead to an experience of gratitude that is commensurate with the stress that the job provides. If it doesn't, you need to change the way you do the job, or change the job you do.
- Expect your life to provide stresses. Don't be stressed about being stressed. It's normal. Just keep it in bounds.
- Being in a meditative state of mind while taking a walk or engaging in more vigorous exercise combines the benefits of that state of mind (several of which are mentioned above) with a physical release of tension and balancing of the body. Take the breaks you need to do the job you do, and to do it well.
