**BEST OF**
World-renowned organisational psychologist Adam Grant opens up about his personal battle with burnout – and gives me advice on my recent experience with burning out. Listen in as Adam shares:
- 📚 The intense journey of writing his first book and the unexpected obstacles he faced
- 🔥 His personal experience with burnout symptoms and how they manifested
- 💡 The turning point that helped him push through his lowest moments
- 🛠️ Practical advice on overcoming self-doubt and procrastination
- 🤝 The critical importance of sharing your work early and often
This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to understand and combat burnout. Adam’s story shows that even experts can struggle, and his lessons learned provide a roadmap for turning setbacks into comebacks. Connect with Adam via his website, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials:
Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
Episode Producer: Rowena Murray
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How I Work is having a little break over the
festive season, so I've picked a handful of my absolute
favorite episodes from the last eighteen months to play for
you in this best of series. I hope you enjoy,
and I'll be back with new episodes twice weekly from
January twenty eight. Earlier this year, I hit burnout, and
(00:22):
to be honest, in my friendship circle, I don't know
too many people who haven't had that experience in the
last couple of years. So when I knew I was
having Adam Grant back on How I Work, I wanted
to ask him for advice. Adam is a world renowned
organizational psychologist and a professor at Wharton, as well as
(00:43):
being a New York Times bestselling author of six books
and the host of the incredibly popular work life podcast
by Ted. Perhaps surprisingly, Adam has had his own experience
with burnout, despite the fact that he has researched and
written about the topic for years. So what does Adam
recommend to prevent burnout? And what changes did he make
(01:06):
to his own life? And if you're feeling burnt out
right now, what strategies can you put in place to recover?
Welcome to how I work a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor
(01:27):
Amantha Imber. Adam is someone who I feel like operates
at two hundred percent productivity all the time. So I
wanted to know has Adam ever experienced burnout?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Definitely.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I feel pretty lucky that I get to design my
own job, and so if I burned out for a
day or two, Wow, my boss made some really bad
design choice. Oh wait, that was me. I need to
rethink how I spend my time to try to get reenergized.
But when I had a real job, I definitely experienced burnout.
And then I've had some acute moments of burnout. So
(02:01):
one of the times when I actually felt the most
burned out was when I was writing my first book.
I don't think I've ever been more fired up for
a project in my entire life. So to set the
scene a little bit, this is twenty eleven. I got
tenure and I realized I don't have to worry about
job security anymore, and I'm not going to let down
by my family by forcing them to move and pulling
(02:23):
our kids out of school.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
And it was this euphoric.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Sense that now I had freedom also to think about
long term what impact I wanted to have. And a
group of students talked me into writing a book. I
had a vision. I sat down and the ideas just
poured out of me. I was supposed to be writing
a book proposal, and I got so excited about the
vision that I accidentally wrote the entire book. Basically, I
(02:47):
started writing in May and by August I had over
one hundred thousand words. Then I sent them to my
literary agent and he came back to me and told
me that he didn't even think my academic.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Colleagues would make it through the whole book.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Wow, it was that boring, And I think my first
reaction was just deep dejection, like I wasted an entire summer,
And then it was a lot of self doubt, can
I ever do this? And then eventually my agent, Richard, said,
you can do this. Just write like you teach, not
like you do research. When I sat down to do it,
(03:21):
it just it was not measuring up to my image
of what it was going to be. And it was
like what Irad Glass talks about when there's a gap
between your skill and your taste. I knew what a
great book read like, and the words that were appearing
on my screen were not that. And I just felt like, Okay,
I'm not working hard enough, and so I started pushing
(03:42):
myself harder and I would go outside in the morning
and write until it was dark. It was just exhausting,
and eventually I felt like it was time to give up.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Wow, what made you push through?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I don't honestly remember what was I thinking.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I think it was a combination of things. One thing
that happened was I came across a new study that
I was really excited to tell people about, and then
as I listened to myself explaining it, I was like, Oh,
that's how I need to write it.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
And so.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
I think I produced a couple of paragraphs that sounded
to me pretty good, and that was a little bit
of a boost of confidence and energy. I guess it
was a small win. And then the other thing that
happened was I started giving my shitty drafts to a
group of undergrad students who told me to write the
book in the first place, and I had them do
ratings of each draft, and a lot of the ratings
(04:39):
were like three four and a half two but they
also weren't zero, and after I made sure that they
were being honest with me, that gave me hope that,
in fact, there was a gem worth polishing here, and
I think I didn't want to let them down, and
that gave me an extra kick to keep going.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
So on the topic of burnout, what were the symptoms
that you were experiencing that made you think this is
something close to maybe what I've read about or lectured about,
because I imagine being an organizational psychology lecturer, you've probably
read a lot about burnout and maybe even taught it well.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Amantha.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
What was really disappointing about this experience was I had
published multiple papers on burnout by this point, I had
measured burnout in dozens of jobs, I had analyzed all
the predictors of it. I'd even run experiments and organizations
that successfully reduced burnout, and I taught classes about how
to do that. And here I was experiencing the very
(05:41):
symptoms that I knew how to treat and cure. And
I felt like an idiot, like I'm supposed to be
a burnout expert. Why am I burning out? And what
it felt like first was just the sheer emotional exhaustion.
I felt like I was beating my head against a
brick wall over and over and over again, and the
harder I pushed the the more it hurt. And with
(06:01):
that came a sense of dread that instead of looking
forward to waking up and working on a chapter, I
was avoiding it. I was starting to procrastinate, which was
very out of character for me, as you know. And
I think the last thing was the persistent can I
do this? Do I want to do this? The questioning
(06:22):
of my capabilities and my motivation.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
That was not fun at all.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
If you could go back and coach yourself from ten
twelve years ago when that was what would you have
told yourself to do differently?
Speaker 3 (06:36):
I think the main advice I would have given that
version of myself was start sharing the drafts a lot earlier.
I think that I was worried about embarrassing myself and
I didn't want to waste other people's time. But the
reality is it's really hard to judge your own work,
and it's also very difficult to see the problems in
your own.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Work because you're too close to it.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And so I needed people who had a little bit
of distance who could sort of zoom out and tell
me here's what's broken, and then often when they diagnosed
the bug, I actually had an idea for how to
fix it. There are a lot of reasons why people
hesitate to share their drafts, and it's not just about
the fear of embarrassment. There's also this concern that somebody
(07:19):
else might steal your ideas, either on purpose or by accident.
I think, if you're that afraid that somebody's going to
steal your ideas, you don't have that many ideas.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Which is not a great a great place to be.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
But I was thinking about all the downsides of putting
my work out there, and what I failed to consider
was the fact that if I didn't put it out there,
it wasn't going to get better. And also I was
going to end up depriving people who could benefit from
it of ever engaging with it. And I would have
just said, look, get over all of that. You can
choose the audience you're comfortable sharing it with early, but
(07:55):
you've got to get somebody else's eyes in front of it.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
What else would you done, even just to maintain energy
and try to get back some of that enthusiasm on
a day to day level.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Well, you wrote the book on this quite literally, so
I'm inclined to ask you, Matt, that what should I
have done. I can tell you what my instincts are now,
but you've spent a lot more time thinking about this
than I have.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
So you tell me, well, here's the irony, Adam.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I mean, probably it would have been three weeks ago now,
because I've just spent two weeks on leave and over
in Vietnam, having the most amazing holiday. The week before
I left, I realized I hit burnout. I can relate
to you in terms of the energy and enthusiasm and
passion that you have for your work and sharing ideas.
And I know a bit about burnout. I haven't published
(08:44):
papers on burnout, but I'd like to think, as an
organizational psychologist that's fairly well read and also that has
just released a book about health habits, that surely I
can not be someone the guests burnout. But I did.
I found in that week where I'm like, I've hit it.
It's happened to me. I felt like crying all day
and in between meetings, that's pretty much what I was doing,
(09:06):
just sitting at my desk being just so so sad
and so stressed, and just feeling like an out of
failure because I just spent the last five months as
being acting CEO of Inventium, and there was certainly moments
where I felt like, yeah, I'm doing a great job,
but I think right at the end and I found
an amazing person to actually step in and be the permanency,
(09:28):
I just felt like I could just see everything I'd
done wrong. I was scoring myself in that week. I
feel like I'd give myself a one out of ten
if that, and I could see all the mistakes and
I couldn't say anything good. I'd invested so much time
in deepening relationships with people and building trust. I'd had
a couple of conversations in that last week where I
was just at rock bottom, where I didn't bring enough
(09:50):
empathy to the conversation, and I'm like, did I just
destroy all the trust and goodwill that I had built
over the last few months. And I remember that first
week on holidays in Vietnam, and I was having the
most amazing time. But whenever I thought about work and
the idea of returning to work in two weeks, I
just felt such anxiety and I thought Oh my gosh,
(10:11):
what has happened to me? And how do I get
out of it? And I just felt really lost. If
I were, say, writing a piece to help other people,
I just felt stuck in terms of what on earth
do I do other than take time off? What would
you advise me? Adam hearing where I was asked.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Well, you're not answering my question, You're trying to make
me answer it. I'm sorry to hear that you went
through that, and I do think that it's I don't
want to say that it's actually good for us, but
sometimes it's necessary to live what we study and write
about in order to remember what it's like and to
make sure we're not just approaching it from the point
(10:51):
of view of theory and data, but we're really getting
close to what people's lived experiences are like. And no
better way to get close to an experience than to
live it. So if you want to become a burner expert,
you should go and burn out as often as possible.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
No, at least once.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
In your case, it sounds to me like like some
boundaries were missing and you were just stretching yourself very thin.
One of the things that I've both found in my
research and learned through experience over time, is I've got
to start by asking what's the most important project to
me in a given week and prioritize that, and then
if they're not in a hierarchy, I end up just
(11:26):
trying to juggle too much at once. Whereas if I
know what the number one priority is for the week,
I'm willing to accept that some of the others might
fall on the back burner a little bit. That would
I guess that would be my first piece of advice,
and it really for me. It stems from the classic
research on the role try out of burnout. What causes
people to get extremely stressed out at work is when
(11:47):
they experience role overload and role conflict and role ambiguity.
To apply those to your situation, it sounds like you
had too much to do, you were being dragged in
too many different directions, and also you didn't have clarity
and what success looked like. That would start there and ask, well,
how do you solve those problems?
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, it's interesting hearing you talk about just thinking what
is your most important project or priority for the week,
and I should have done that, and I felt like
I wanted to do all this stuff. I know you're
a fan of the musical Hamilton, and there's a lyric
in Hamilton about how he's running out of time. He's
writing like he's running out of time.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Why do you write like you're running out of time? Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And I had that line going through my brain almost
every week. I felt like there was so much that
I wanted to do when I stepped back into my
company in this leadership role, and I could see all
these things that needed fixing and needed doing, and I
knew that I was only in this role for a
finite period of time, and I found it so hard
(12:51):
to prioritize because I just wanted to do everything and
I had so much passion and so much enthusiasm. And ironically,
I remember probably about two months months before I had
this week where I just felt like I hit burnout.
I went for a walk with a girlfriend who's a
clinical psychologist, and I was saying to her, I'm getting
really frustrated because people on my team are telling me
(13:12):
that I'm working two long hours and that I'm setting
a bad example. And I've said to my team, I
don't expect you to do what I do, and I'm
really energized by the hours that I'm working, and I
felt so good and like I was achieving so much.
And then I thought about that conversation when I hit
that week, and I thought, was I just delusional? Was
(13:32):
I Adam? Was I just living in some fantasy world
where I thought this was sustainable just because I felt
really energetic in that moment.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Entirely passable. I don't know, I wasn't in your head.
You tell me, I do.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Wonder, I do wonder, and that I wonder maybe if
I would have made some different choices between April and June,
perhaps I wouldn't have hit burnout and I would have
actually sustained that kind of high performance where I felt
like I.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Was ass Yeah, I wonder.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
It sounds like you're a frequent victim like me, of
the planning fallacy, where you just underestimate how long different
things are going to take, and when you're looking at
a blue sky calendar a few months down the road, yeah,
of course I can do all that, and then you
forget to do the three x or four x multiple
for the unexpected extra tasks that get added on or
(14:23):
that need to be redone or done differently. And then
you realize you've just overcommitted yourself.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, I feel like that was definitely happening. What I
also struggled with is back to your strategy of what's
the most important project for the week. I just couldn't
determine that. And so in your life, how do you
do that? Because that's easier said than done when you're
excited about lots of things, as I know you are,
So how do you pick that one project and stay
(14:49):
true to that vision at least for a week?
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I think for me that's evolved over time. So it
used to just be what other people needed from me,
and then gained enough freedom to also ask what am
I excited about? And over time I've learned that's not
enough either for me to really want to make a
project a top priority, It's got to matter to other people,
it's got to be interesting to me. But also I
(15:13):
have to feel like I'm making a unique contribution, that
what I'm doing is not easily substitutable or replaceable. And
I remember reading some of the early research on this.
It was in the social loafing literature, where the classic
finding that many hands often make light the work, and
if you add a sixth or seventh person to a team.
Then each person tends to contribute a little bit less
(15:35):
because they diffuse responsibility and assume that somebody else is
going to pick up the slack. Only then everybody just
ends up doing a little more slack. And one of
the antidotes to that problem was task uniqueness, the idea
that I have a distinctive role to play and that
nobody else can bring what I'm adding to the table.
And when you do that, people don't just assume that
(15:56):
everybody else is going to carry the weight. I found
that that for me is a really big factor. And
it's not just a motivator because it prevents me from
just relying on somebody else to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
It's a motivator.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Because I feel like I make a difference, that it's
not just the position I happen to be in. So
often people do jobs that have an impact on others,
but they don't feel like they're delivering that impact. They
feel like they're just a cog in a machine. And
if a leader or a manager goes that extra step
and helps people think about not just who would be
(16:30):
worse off if your job didn't exist, but who would
be worse off if you were not doing this role.
That becomes a major source of energy.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
I like that we have a thing at Inventium, which
I think a lot of companies have adopted now called
a one page operating manual, and one of the questions
that we ask is what would be missing if you
weren't here or if your job wasn't here. So it
just reminds me of that, aside from thinking about what's
just one project you can prioritize for the week, what
else do you do to make sure well to try
(17:01):
to prevent burnout in your own life.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
It's a good question. There's some healthy habits that I
think are just table stakes, right. So I'm pretty obsessive
about working out six days a week. There's an element
of joy and play that I try to build into
my schedule. I made the mistake for a long time
of treating fun as a reward for finishing my to
do list, and now it's actually on my to do list.
So I try to have one thing that I'm looking
(17:24):
forward to that's not work every day. A lot of
that is kid centric. In some cases, we might end
up playing soccer or playing Mario Kart and just knowing
that that's on the calendar fires me up to both
be focused and productive in my work and also to
not feel the dread of this day.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Is all work.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And then I think maybe the one of the more
novel things that I've picked up over time is so
Paul Graham came up with this distinction. I really like
that you're familiar with the maker days and manager days.
And the aha moment for me when I read that was, Oh,
we all have manager tasks that we have to do
that are administrative, that are exhausting, zoom meetings, and we
(18:06):
also have maker roles and activities where we're creating stuff,
we're solving problems, we're making choices. And the recommendation of
Hall was you should divide your days, get the manager
stuff out of the way one day, and then you
can experience the full joy of the maker tasks on
a different day. In some ways, that's still an ideal
for me, but I've also found that it's pretty exhausting
(18:28):
to have an entire manager day. I just don't like managing.
I like creating. So what I've learned is if I
actually put those manager tasks in a particular block of
the day, I don't mind them as much and they
don't deplete me as much.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And I think the.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Reason I like that so much is that I know
I'm not doing my best creative or analytical work then,
because there's a circadian rhythm, dip and energy that you're
familiar with. And also I have I've blocked out enough
time in the morning then that i can feel like
I accomplish something and I'm less annoyed by the fact
that the administrative work is interfering with my desire to
do something more magical. So that's probably my if I
(19:07):
had a hack, I hate I actually don't believe in
productivity hacks. I think most things that we do require
a real effort and work and there's not an easy shortcut.
But if I had a hack, it would be like
afternoons our manager time.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I love that and I can relate. I've got my
calendar up on a different screen in my setup here,
and my meetings are yeah, always in the afternoon. I
feel like it is the best way to get good
maker time in a day. We will be back with
Adam soon where he talks me through his approach to
(19:40):
scheduling and taking holidays and time off. If you're looking
for more tips to improve the way you work can live.
I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've
discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up
for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
(20:04):
I want to know about holidays and what is your
approach to taking time off because you never seem to
be off, certainly in terms of your prolific presence on
social media, but what is your approach to taking holidays
or even just mini breaks.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Well, this is definitely evolved over time. I used to
be against breaks and I thought, if I've optimized my day,
then every minute will be used effectively, and that one
that's just not sustainable for any immortal and two it
also fails to give you the downtime that you need.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
For energy and creativity. What does this look like for me? Now?
Speaker 3 (20:41):
What it looks like is I use exercise as a
built in break during the day. I'll run round noon
and that kind of splits up the morning and then
after the run is when I move into the manager time.
Let me just tell you what I do, which is
during the school year, I start working when our kids
leave for school, and I stop when they get home,
and that is really energetic focus time. And my goal
(21:03):
is to not work once they're home, but if I'm
behind on anything or there's a deadline, sometimes I'll pick
it up after they go to bed. Increasingly, my goal
is to not even do that, so I actually get
an evening break and I can read or watch TV
or whatever won't annoy my wife, who's even more introverted
than I am. What's useful about that for me is
(21:24):
it creates a rhythm, and I know that they are
going to be focused work times and then there are
going to be times to detach and enjoy the moment,
which is not something I've been historically that could at.
So that's I guess that's the micro side. How does
that track with what you do and what you advise.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
On a day to day level? And I would say
all my routines just went out the door for the
first half of this year, where I felt like I
was in a dual role. I felt like I was
obviously doing the CEO role. But then the health habit
launched in January, so there was a lot of publicity
on either side of that, and also feelings of resentment
(22:03):
that I was in this CEO role when I just
wanted to be fully invested in. As you can appreciate,
when you put all this work into researching and writing
and editing a book, you want to give it your
role when it's out in the world. And then I
was still doing my individual thought leadership work, which is
the keynote speaking and the podcasting and the writing and
all that. And so because nothing gave, I did sit
(22:26):
down and think what am I going to say no to?
But it wasn't enough because all the things that I
was saying yes to, I thought it'll be fine. I'll
just be hyper productive and I'm good at that. It
turns out not so much. I had a big think about, Okay,
what are the new rituals and rules that I'm going
to have for myself. And I'm getting back into just
(22:49):
not checking digital communication before I've at least done a
couple of hours of deep work. So I was just
getting into really bad habits of when I get out
of bed. I had Microsoft Teams and I had email
outlook on my phone, and they would get checked before
anything else happened workwise, which is something I advise against
because it just sets you up to be reactive, So
(23:11):
I've just deleted those apps from my phone. As I
know you believe will power is overrated, So let's just
set up the systems in the environment so that it's
easy to have those good habits. I'm also giving myself
just a hard stop at five PM as well, which
I find really hard, and I am also planning for
longer holidays. It occurred to me when I took these
two weeks off and I was completely off all digital communication.
(23:34):
It was the first two week period that I'd been
completely uncontactable from work in probably years, which is kind
of scary. What about you on that macro level.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Yeah, so this is interesting in two ways. The first
one is that we know better when it comes to technology.
No one in their right mind waits till their phone
battery is at one percent before they plug it in.
They're start charging it when it begins to look depleted,
and I think I'll be We need to do the
same thing with our bodies and our brains, but we
forget that that's necessary because we're not walking around with
(24:06):
a battery meter.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
We did a podcast episode last.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Year on work Life about the science of recharging on
weekends and vacations. And one of the things I learned
through reviewing the latest evidence and talking with a series
of experts is it's more restorative to have more frequent,
short vacations than it is to have longer ones that
are less frequent. So if you had a choice between
one week vacation every month or a two week holiday
(24:33):
every other month, the first option is better than the second.
So I've tried to adopt that and say, okay, you know,
why not take the advice to treat our weekends as
many vacations. This is something that our mutual colleague, reb
Rebelly first introduced me to. He said, look, you know,
very few people have the luxury of going on holiday
(24:55):
every week. Most people can't get the time off from work,
most people can't afford it. But you do have this
thing called a weekend. And if you treat your weekend
like a holiday. Instead of saying, Okay, I'm going to
spend Saturday catching up on all the work that I
didn't finish, and then Sunday I'm just going to sleep
because I was so tired, and then the whole thing
(25:16):
starts over again, that's not going to.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Work that well.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
So I love this idea of weekends as vacations, and
we've been doing more of that as a family.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It's so funny because I am very aware of this research,
and I was actually working on a project where I
was reacquainting myself with this research literally a few weeks ago.
And if I think about the last couple of years,
I'm really good at the mini break. My partner and
I are really good at going, Okay, every eight weeks,
we're going to do a mini weekend away somewhere, typically
(25:44):
in regional Victoria, and we'll take a couple of days
off work. So it's a four day time off period.
And so that's what I've been doing. And I hadn't
been taking those long breaks because I've read that research
and I listened to it. But sometimes you know, you
do read research and go that just pride it and
doesn't gell. But do you all say take longer breaks
at them?
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Well, first of all, Amantha, what I love about what
you just said is that, I mean, you just responded
exactly like a great organizational psychologist would and should. I
have encountered too many people who read the research that
conflicts with their experience and say, well, the evidence is wrong,
and what you said was not that you said. I
might be an outlier, and I do think that's a
(26:27):
healthy way to respond to data. So the first thing
I would wonder about is what are you doing during
your holidays and are you actually spending those in an
effective way? We could think about that through all sorts
of different lenses. One of my favorite findings that I
stumbled across recently is this growing body of evidence that
although most of us have said, well, being in nature
is really what recharges us, and you want to be
in a green space if you can around a forest
(26:49):
or grass or trees, blue spaces.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Are even better.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
That water is more relaxing, and especially wide bodies of water, oceans,
big lakes, rivers, they bring extra tranquility. And there's a
huge commount of speculation about why that is and whether
we've evolved to experience this sort of relief when we're
near water, because prehistorically we would have dehydrated if we
(27:15):
couldn't get to water. But I think there's something to
be said for Okay, are you doing enough beach vacation?
So are you spending enough time by the pool? As
just as one small example, right, So i'd want to
break down how are you spending those holidays. I'd also
want to look at what are you doing over the
course of your work weeks that is pushing you to
need that long to recover. Are you draining your battery
(27:36):
to the very bottom? Maybe that's another cause here. So
how much do you think this is your personality versus
how much do you think it's the habits you've adopted
for both your work and your holidays.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
What what happened this year is that typically I've got
good habits. I've got good habits around how I work,
around productivity, and around health, and I also feel incredibly
guilty when I don't stick to those habits because I
hate being someone that writes and talks about things the
classic plumber with the blocked pipes hate. I hate that
(28:11):
so much. And I've really felt that this year where
a lot of the things that I talk and write
about I've been doing the opposite and that's made me
feel terrible, which is probably contributed to the problem. And
so I feel like, normally my habits are good. And
what I've also felt is that this two week circuit
(28:31):
breaker almost, which I think is what you get when
you take more than a week of leave, I was
completely in nature. I was also spending really great time
with my daughter as well, and just really just hyper
present in a way that I hadn't been for months.
And I think now that I'm back, I've got habits
that I can now put in place, and I'm not
(28:54):
dragged back by these really unhealthy and unproductive habits that
I had in the first half of the year.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
That makes me think of Wendy Wood's research on habit
formation and change and the myth that it takes a
month to change a habit. And I got such a
kick out of Wendy's finding that depending on the person
and the habit and the approach they take, it could
take many months, or it could take a day, and
it could be anything in between, and there's huge variation there.
(29:23):
And I think what you're highlighting that builds on that
is that the first step toward changing a habit is
to become aware of it.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
It's hard to pack.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Into a week, which is something that one of our
star doctoral students, Marissa Schandell, highlighted for me. Marissa said,
everybody thinks about vacation as unplugging, but you also have
to think about it as plugging into sources of meaning
and joy. And that was such a powerful statement for
me because I'm not a detaching person like that sounds
(29:53):
like boredom to me. But the idea that I could
connect to different things that fire me up, that give
me purpose, or some level of joy that's exciting, and
that's something I could look forward to. And so it
sounds to me like you have too pronged approach, which
is the first part of the holiday is you're decompressing,
and then the second part is you're getting quality time
(30:15):
with people you care about.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
One percent. I would love to know what haven't we
talked about about burnout that you think that you've come
across in research or that you've experienced for yourself, that
you think, if people listening can relate to feelings of
burnout or just exhaustion at work, what should they be
doing well.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
I think we've we've talked a bunch about individual changes,
but we have to also recognize that a lot of
burnout is organizational. If you're in a team or in
a job where you're not the only one who's feeling burnout,
guess what, that is not a problem in your head
it's a problem in your circumstances, and that means that
there's an opportunity for rethinking roles and redesigning jobs to
(30:57):
try to reduce demands or over load or conflict or ambiguity.
It means there's a chance to think about we may
not be able to eliminate all the stressors in our jobs,
but we can try to gain more control over them.
We can get more choices about what we do when
and who we do it with. And it especially means
we can think about how to provide people with support.
(31:19):
And I keep coming back to something I learned about
during COVID, which was a manager who said to a team, look,
it's okay to call in sick. It's also okay to
call in sad. And I thought that was compelling way
to frame this that, yeah, of course you would take
time off if you got the flu or if you
sprained your ankle. Well, guess what, if you're feeling burned out,
(31:41):
we want you to prioritize mental health same way you
would physical health. And I think it's good for managers
to obviously to say it, but what ultimately matters is
whether they walk the talk. So one of the things
I've been encouraging leaders and managers do is to make
it clear to their teams, I'm going to be taking
a recharge week, I'm going to be taking a mental
(32:01):
health day and normalize that behavior. And what that does
is it gives people across the organization the support they need,
the permission they need to prioritize their own well being.
And I don't think we can underscore that enough.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
It's funny, I've heard that advice before, and I was
thinking about that a lot, like in the few weeks
leading up to my holiday, and I just felt like
I so desperately needed to take a sad day or
a recharge day, and I reckon, I've rebably spent hours
thinking about that in the back of my head. Could
I take it? How would I frame that? And I
ended up discroing, you just need to push through because
(32:38):
right now, like you're the leader and people need to
have confidence in you. Absolutely there's a place for vulnerability,
but I also don't want to compromise the confidence that
people have. Even though I've pushed through all this change,
I'm okay. I didn't want the team worrying about me,
and I was really worried about the signal that would
stand at that moment.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
I think that that's a really common challenge for leaders,
and I think it's a totally reasonable concern to have.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
For me.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
What matters here is how you delivered the message, not
when you deliver it. So the danger of waiting until
after you've recovered is that it might take longer to recover.
And also you might be perpetuating the burnout of your
team right because you haven't given them the leeway to
do what they need to do to maximize or maintain
their energy. So what I would wonder is, of course,
(33:31):
you don't want to go in and say, hey, I'm
really sorry to let you all know this, but I'm
completely burned out. I have no energy, I haven't had
an original thought in months on the verge of quitting,
and I hope you all can you just cover for
me while I disappear for an unlimited amount of time.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
You would not do that.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
What you might do is say, I don't know if
you've noticed, but I've been picking up on a little
bit of a dip in my energy. And as somebody
who writes and speaks and teaches on this topic, it's
really important to me to pay attention to those signals
and also to model the very things that I'm trying
to educate around. And so I'm gonna you know, I'm
(34:11):
gonna be taking a few days just to recharge. Nothing
to worry about, but I want you to have, you know,
the freshest, most enthusiastic version of me. And I also
want you all to know that when you're in that zone,
this is what I expect of you. Do I doubt
your confidence if you say that, No, I actually have
more faith that you're telling me the truth.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Adam. I'm going to transcribe this interview and I'm going
to just sniff out that little beat and I'm going
to put it in a note, and next time I'm
feeling exhausted, that is what I'm going to say to
my team. That's gold.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
I'm watching a growing number of leaders who I would
consider to be on the enlightened end of the emotional
intelligence spectrum say we're going to do just a pulse
check once a week. And as a leader, it's my
job ask my team how's my energy? Because I don't
always notice it, and even when I think I'm in
a good place, I don't always know the impact I
(35:09):
have on others, and so getting a little bit of
that quick feedback. If a bunch of people tell me
that I'm dragging or I seem exhausted, that's helpful information
for me. And then guess what, It's not coming from me,
It's coming from my team.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
How do they do that energy check out of interest?
Is that? Is that a survey? Is that a synchronous discussion?
Speaker 3 (35:29):
I think it depends on the psychological safety in the team.
I think when in teams that have strong norms of
candor and honesty, where a lot of trust has been developed.
I've seen it done as just a okay, let's go
around the room, quick energy check zero to ten, how
is my energy today or how is my energy this week?
And if the leader asks first, sometimes you know other
(35:51):
people will will pose the question. Sometimes it's just feedback
for the leader saying, look, my job is to energize
the room, not to enervate or exhaust room, and so
I just want that feedback, and then people may choose
to have that conversation with each other in pairs or
in smaller groups. I think when psychological safety is lower,
I've seen it done very much as a pul survey
(36:13):
where there's a daily or a weekly or a monthly,
kind of the same way that a lot of companies
do quarterly or annual engagement surveys.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
I wish we'd had this chat a few months ago
before I'd hit burnout. I personally found it so useful.
It has been brilliant just to hear your thoughts on
burnout in holidays, and I'm hoping that for the second
half of the year I can be back to being
energetic and enthusiastic and not get anywhere near burnt out.
So thank you so much for your time well.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
As always thank you for having me in for both
the thoughtful questions and also the generative stories which always
make me think. I do think your team is going
to hold you accountable now, like you've gone public with
the fact that you burned out. You've admitted that you
felt like you we're a hypocrite, so obviously no one
can let you do that.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Again, which I think is a good thing. I hope
you liked my chat with Adam about burnout, and if
you know someone who might be in need of hearing
these strategies to help cope with stress and burnout, please
share this episode with them by clicking on the share
icon wherever you listen to this podcast from To find
out more about Adam hop onto Adamgrant dot net and
(37:24):
his latest book, Hidden Potential, is out nowt wherever you
buy books. If you like Today's Joe, make sure you
hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when
new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the
traditional land of the Warrenery people, part of the kuol
And Nation. A big thank you to my editor Rowena
Murray and Martin Nimmer for doing the sound mix.
How I Work is having a little break over the
festive season, so I've picked a handful of my absolute
favorite episodes from the last eighteen months to play for
you in this best of series. I hope you enjoy,
and I'll be back with new episodes twice weekly from
January twenty eight. Earlier this year, I hit burnout, and
(00:22):
to be honest, in my friendship circle, I don't know
too many people who haven't had that experience in the
last couple of years. So when I knew I was
having Adam Grant back on How I Work, I wanted
to ask him for advice. Adam is a world renowned
organizational psychologist and a professor at Wharton, as well as
(00:43):
being a New York Times bestselling author of six books
and the host of the incredibly popular work life podcast
by Ted. Perhaps surprisingly, Adam has had his own experience
with burnout, despite the fact that he has researched and
written about the topic for years. So what does Adam
recommend to prevent burnout? And what changes did he make
(01:06):
to his own life? And if you're feeling burnt out
right now, what strategies can you put in place to recover?
Welcome to how I work a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, doctor
(01:27):
Amantha Imber. Adam is someone who I feel like operates
at two hundred percent productivity all the time. So I
wanted to know has Adam ever experienced burnout?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Definitely.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I feel pretty lucky that I get to design my
own job, and so if I burned out for a
day or two, Wow, my boss made some really bad
design choice. Oh wait, that was me. I need to
rethink how I spend my time to try to get reenergized.
But when I had a real job, I definitely experienced burnout.
And then I've had some acute moments of burnout. So
(02:01):
one of the times when I actually felt the most
burned out was when I was writing my first book.
I don't think I've ever been more fired up for
a project in my entire life. So to set the
scene a little bit, this is twenty eleven. I got
tenure and I realized I don't have to worry about
job security anymore, and I'm not going to let down
by my family by forcing them to move and pulling
(02:23):
our kids out of school.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
And it was this euphoric.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Sense that now I had freedom also to think about
long term what impact I wanted to have. And a
group of students talked me into writing a book. I
had a vision. I sat down and the ideas just
poured out of me. I was supposed to be writing
a book proposal, and I got so excited about the
vision that I accidentally wrote the entire book. Basically, I
(02:47):
started writing in May and by August I had over
one hundred thousand words. Then I sent them to my
literary agent and he came back to me and told
me that he didn't even think my academic.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Colleagues would make it through the whole book.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Wow, it was that boring, And I think my first
reaction was just deep dejection, like I wasted an entire summer,
And then it was a lot of self doubt, can
I ever do this? And then eventually my agent, Richard, said,
you can do this. Just write like you teach, not
like you do research. When I sat down to do it,
(03:21):
it just it was not measuring up to my image
of what it was going to be. And it was
like what Irad Glass talks about when there's a gap
between your skill and your taste. I knew what a
great book read like, and the words that were appearing
on my screen were not that. And I just felt like, Okay,
I'm not working hard enough, and so I started pushing
(03:42):
myself harder and I would go outside in the morning
and write until it was dark. It was just exhausting,
and eventually I felt like it was time to give up.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Wow, what made you push through?
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I don't honestly remember what was I thinking.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
I think it was a combination of things. One thing
that happened was I came across a new study that
I was really excited to tell people about, and then
as I listened to myself explaining it, I was like, Oh,
that's how I need to write it.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
And so.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
I think I produced a couple of paragraphs that sounded
to me pretty good, and that was a little bit
of a boost of confidence and energy. I guess it
was a small win. And then the other thing that
happened was I started giving my shitty drafts to a
group of undergrad students who told me to write the
book in the first place, and I had them do
ratings of each draft, and a lot of the ratings
(04:39):
were like three four and a half two but they
also weren't zero, and after I made sure that they
were being honest with me, that gave me hope that,
in fact, there was a gem worth polishing here, and
I think I didn't want to let them down, and
that gave me an extra kick to keep going.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
So on the topic of burnout, what were the symptoms
that you were experiencing that made you think this is
something close to maybe what I've read about or lectured about,
because I imagine being an organizational psychology lecturer, you've probably
read a lot about burnout and maybe even taught it well.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Amantha.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
What was really disappointing about this experience was I had
published multiple papers on burnout by this point, I had
measured burnout in dozens of jobs, I had analyzed all
the predictors of it. I'd even run experiments and organizations
that successfully reduced burnout, and I taught classes about how
to do that. And here I was experiencing the very
(05:41):
symptoms that I knew how to treat and cure. And
I felt like an idiot, like I'm supposed to be
a burnout expert. Why am I burning out? And what
it felt like first was just the sheer emotional exhaustion.
I felt like I was beating my head against a
brick wall over and over and over again, and the
harder I pushed the the more it hurt. And with
(06:01):
that came a sense of dread that instead of looking
forward to waking up and working on a chapter, I
was avoiding it. I was starting to procrastinate, which was
very out of character for me, as you know. And
I think the last thing was the persistent can I
do this? Do I want to do this? The questioning
(06:22):
of my capabilities and my motivation.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
That was not fun at all.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
If you could go back and coach yourself from ten
twelve years ago when that was what would you have
told yourself to do differently?
Speaker 3 (06:36):
I think the main advice I would have given that
version of myself was start sharing the drafts a lot earlier.
I think that I was worried about embarrassing myself and
I didn't want to waste other people's time. But the
reality is it's really hard to judge your own work,
and it's also very difficult to see the problems in
your own.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Work because you're too close to it.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And so I needed people who had a little bit
of distance who could sort of zoom out and tell
me here's what's broken, and then often when they diagnosed
the bug, I actually had an idea for how to
fix it. There are a lot of reasons why people
hesitate to share their drafts, and it's not just about
the fear of embarrassment. There's also this concern that somebody
(07:19):
else might steal your ideas, either on purpose or by accident.
I think, if you're that afraid that somebody's going to
steal your ideas, you don't have that many ideas.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Which is not a great a great place to be.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
But I was thinking about all the downsides of putting
my work out there, and what I failed to consider
was the fact that if I didn't put it out there,
it wasn't going to get better. And also I was
going to end up depriving people who could benefit from
it of ever engaging with it. And I would have
just said, look, get over all of that. You can
choose the audience you're comfortable sharing it with early, but
(07:55):
you've got to get somebody else's eyes in front of it.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
What else would you done, even just to maintain energy
and try to get back some of that enthusiasm on
a day to day level.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Well, you wrote the book on this quite literally, so
I'm inclined to ask you, Matt, that what should I
have done. I can tell you what my instincts are now,
but you've spent a lot more time thinking about this
than I have.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
So you tell me, well, here's the irony, Adam.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
I mean, probably it would have been three weeks ago now,
because I've just spent two weeks on leave and over
in Vietnam, having the most amazing holiday. The week before
I left, I realized I hit burnout. I can relate
to you in terms of the energy and enthusiasm and
passion that you have for your work and sharing ideas.
And I know a bit about burnout. I haven't published
(08:44):
papers on burnout, but I'd like to think, as an
organizational psychologist that's fairly well read and also that has
just released a book about health habits, that surely I
can not be someone the guests burnout. But I did.
I found in that week where I'm like, I've hit it.
It's happened to me. I felt like crying all day
and in between meetings, that's pretty much what I was doing,
(09:06):
just sitting at my desk being just so so sad
and so stressed, and just feeling like an out of
failure because I just spent the last five months as
being acting CEO of Inventium, and there was certainly moments
where I felt like, yeah, I'm doing a great job,
but I think right at the end and I found
an amazing person to actually step in and be the permanency,
(09:28):
I just felt like I could just see everything I'd
done wrong. I was scoring myself in that week. I
feel like I'd give myself a one out of ten
if that, and I could see all the mistakes and
I couldn't say anything good. I'd invested so much time
in deepening relationships with people and building trust. I'd had
a couple of conversations in that last week where I
was just at rock bottom, where I didn't bring enough
(09:50):
empathy to the conversation, and I'm like, did I just
destroy all the trust and goodwill that I had built
over the last few months. And I remember that first
week on holidays in Vietnam, and I was having the
most amazing time. But whenever I thought about work and
the idea of returning to work in two weeks, I
just felt such anxiety and I thought Oh my gosh,
(10:11):
what has happened to me? And how do I get
out of it? And I just felt really lost. If
I were, say, writing a piece to help other people,
I just felt stuck in terms of what on earth
do I do other than take time off? What would
you advise me? Adam hearing where I was asked.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Well, you're not answering my question, You're trying to make
me answer it. I'm sorry to hear that you went
through that, and I do think that it's I don't
want to say that it's actually good for us, but
sometimes it's necessary to live what we study and write
about in order to remember what it's like and to
make sure we're not just approaching it from the point
(10:51):
of view of theory and data, but we're really getting
close to what people's lived experiences are like. And no
better way to get close to an experience than to
live it. So if you want to become a burner expert,
you should go and burn out as often as possible.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
No, at least once.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
In your case, it sounds to me like like some
boundaries were missing and you were just stretching yourself very thin.
One of the things that I've both found in my
research and learned through experience over time, is I've got
to start by asking what's the most important project to
me in a given week and prioritize that, and then
if they're not in a hierarchy, I end up just
(11:26):
trying to juggle too much at once. Whereas if I
know what the number one priority is for the week,
I'm willing to accept that some of the others might
fall on the back burner a little bit. That would
I guess that would be my first piece of advice,
and it really for me. It stems from the classic
research on the role try out of burnout. What causes
people to get extremely stressed out at work is when
(11:47):
they experience role overload and role conflict and role ambiguity.
To apply those to your situation, it sounds like you
had too much to do, you were being dragged in
too many different directions, and also you didn't have clarity
and what success looked like. That would start there and ask, well,
how do you solve those problems?
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, it's interesting hearing you talk about just thinking what
is your most important project or priority for the week,
and I should have done that, and I felt like
I wanted to do all this stuff. I know you're
a fan of the musical Hamilton, and there's a lyric
in Hamilton about how he's running out of time. He's
writing like he's running out of time.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Why do you write like you're running out of time? Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And I had that line going through my brain almost
every week. I felt like there was so much that
I wanted to do when I stepped back into my
company in this leadership role, and I could see all
these things that needed fixing and needed doing, and I
knew that I was only in this role for a
finite period of time, and I found it so hard
(12:51):
to prioritize because I just wanted to do everything and
I had so much passion and so much enthusiasm. And ironically,
I remember probably about two months months before I had
this week where I just felt like I hit burnout.
I went for a walk with a girlfriend who's a
clinical psychologist, and I was saying to her, I'm getting
really frustrated because people on my team are telling me
(13:12):
that I'm working two long hours and that I'm setting
a bad example. And I've said to my team, I
don't expect you to do what I do, and I'm
really energized by the hours that I'm working, and I
felt so good and like I was achieving so much.
And then I thought about that conversation when I hit
that week, and I thought, was I just delusional? Was
(13:32):
I Adam? Was I just living in some fantasy world
where I thought this was sustainable just because I felt
really energetic in that moment.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Entirely passable. I don't know, I wasn't in your head.
You tell me, I do.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Wonder, I do wonder, and that I wonder maybe if
I would have made some different choices between April and June,
perhaps I wouldn't have hit burnout and I would have
actually sustained that kind of high performance where I felt
like I.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Was ass Yeah, I wonder.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
It sounds like you're a frequent victim like me, of
the planning fallacy, where you just underestimate how long different
things are going to take, and when you're looking at
a blue sky calendar a few months down the road, yeah,
of course I can do all that, and then you
forget to do the three x or four x multiple
for the unexpected extra tasks that get added on or
(14:23):
that need to be redone or done differently. And then
you realize you've just overcommitted yourself.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, I feel like that was definitely happening. What I
also struggled with is back to your strategy of what's
the most important project for the week. I just couldn't
determine that. And so in your life, how do you
do that? Because that's easier said than done when you're
excited about lots of things, as I know you are,
So how do you pick that one project and stay
(14:49):
true to that vision at least for a week?
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I think for me that's evolved over time. So it
used to just be what other people needed from me,
and then gained enough freedom to also ask what am
I excited about? And over time I've learned that's not
enough either for me to really want to make a
project a top priority, It's got to matter to other people,
it's got to be interesting to me. But also I
(15:13):
have to feel like I'm making a unique contribution, that
what I'm doing is not easily substitutable or replaceable. And
I remember reading some of the early research on this.
It was in the social loafing literature, where the classic
finding that many hands often make light the work, and
if you add a sixth or seventh person to a team.
Then each person tends to contribute a little bit less
(15:35):
because they diffuse responsibility and assume that somebody else is
going to pick up the slack. Only then everybody just
ends up doing a little more slack. And one of
the antidotes to that problem was task uniqueness, the idea
that I have a distinctive role to play and that
nobody else can bring what I'm adding to the table.
And when you do that, people don't just assume that
(15:56):
everybody else is going to carry the weight. I found
that that for me is a really big factor. And
it's not just a motivator because it prevents me from
just relying on somebody else to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
It's a motivator.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Because I feel like I make a difference, that it's
not just the position I happen to be in. So
often people do jobs that have an impact on others,
but they don't feel like they're delivering that impact. They
feel like they're just a cog in a machine. And
if a leader or a manager goes that extra step
and helps people think about not just who would be
(16:30):
worse off if your job didn't exist, but who would
be worse off if you were not doing this role.
That becomes a major source of energy.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
I like that we have a thing at Inventium, which
I think a lot of companies have adopted now called
a one page operating manual, and one of the questions
that we ask is what would be missing if you
weren't here or if your job wasn't here. So it
just reminds me of that, aside from thinking about what's
just one project you can prioritize for the week, what
else do you do to make sure well to try
(17:01):
to prevent burnout in your own life.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
It's a good question. There's some healthy habits that I
think are just table stakes, right. So I'm pretty obsessive
about working out six days a week. There's an element
of joy and play that I try to build into
my schedule. I made the mistake for a long time
of treating fun as a reward for finishing my to
do list, and now it's actually on my to do list.
So I try to have one thing that I'm looking
(17:24):
forward to that's not work every day. A lot of
that is kid centric. In some cases, we might end
up playing soccer or playing Mario Kart and just knowing
that that's on the calendar fires me up to both
be focused and productive in my work and also to
not feel the dread of this day.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Is all work.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
And then I think maybe the one of the more
novel things that I've picked up over time is so
Paul Graham came up with this distinction. I really like
that you're familiar with the maker days and manager days.
And the aha moment for me when I read that was, Oh,
we all have manager tasks that we have to do
that are administrative, that are exhausting, zoom meetings, and we
(18:06):
also have maker roles and activities where we're creating stuff,
we're solving problems, we're making choices. And the recommendation of
Hall was you should divide your days, get the manager
stuff out of the way one day, and then you
can experience the full joy of the maker tasks on
a different day. In some ways, that's still an ideal
for me, but I've also found that it's pretty exhausting
(18:28):
to have an entire manager day. I just don't like managing.
I like creating. So what I've learned is if I
actually put those manager tasks in a particular block of
the day, I don't mind them as much and they
don't deplete me as much.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And I think the.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Reason I like that so much is that I know
I'm not doing my best creative or analytical work then,
because there's a circadian rhythm, dip and energy that you're
familiar with. And also I have I've blocked out enough
time in the morning then that i can feel like
I accomplish something and I'm less annoyed by the fact
that the administrative work is interfering with my desire to
do something more magical. So that's probably my if I
(19:07):
had a hack, I hate I actually don't believe in
productivity hacks. I think most things that we do require
a real effort and work and there's not an easy shortcut.
But if I had a hack, it would be like
afternoons our manager time.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
I love that and I can relate. I've got my
calendar up on a different screen in my setup here,
and my meetings are yeah, always in the afternoon. I
feel like it is the best way to get good
maker time in a day. We will be back with
Adam soon where he talks me through his approach to
(19:40):
scheduling and taking holidays and time off. If you're looking
for more tips to improve the way you work can live.
I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've
discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up
for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
(20:04):
I want to know about holidays and what is your
approach to taking time off because you never seem to
be off, certainly in terms of your prolific presence on
social media, but what is your approach to taking holidays
or even just mini breaks.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Well, this is definitely evolved over time. I used to
be against breaks and I thought, if I've optimized my day,
then every minute will be used effectively, and that one
that's just not sustainable for any immortal and two it
also fails to give you the downtime that you need.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
For energy and creativity. What does this look like for me? Now?
Speaker 3 (20:41):
What it looks like is I use exercise as a
built in break during the day. I'll run round noon
and that kind of splits up the morning and then
after the run is when I move into the manager time.
Let me just tell you what I do, which is
during the school year, I start working when our kids
leave for school, and I stop when they get home,
and that is really energetic focus time. And my goal
(21:03):
is to not work once they're home, but if I'm
behind on anything or there's a deadline, sometimes I'll pick
it up after they go to bed. Increasingly, my goal
is to not even do that, so I actually get
an evening break and I can read or watch TV
or whatever won't annoy my wife, who's even more introverted
than I am. What's useful about that for me is
(21:24):
it creates a rhythm, and I know that they are
going to be focused work times and then there are
going to be times to detach and enjoy the moment,
which is not something I've been historically that could at.
So that's I guess that's the micro side. How does
that track with what you do and what you advise.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
On a day to day level? And I would say
all my routines just went out the door for the
first half of this year, where I felt like I
was in a dual role. I felt like I was
obviously doing the CEO role. But then the health habit
launched in January, so there was a lot of publicity
on either side of that, and also feelings of resentment
(22:03):
that I was in this CEO role when I just
wanted to be fully invested in. As you can appreciate,
when you put all this work into researching and writing
and editing a book, you want to give it your
role when it's out in the world. And then I
was still doing my individual thought leadership work, which is
the keynote speaking and the podcasting and the writing and
all that. And so because nothing gave, I did sit
(22:26):
down and think what am I going to say no to?
But it wasn't enough because all the things that I
was saying yes to, I thought it'll be fine. I'll
just be hyper productive and I'm good at that. It
turns out not so much. I had a big think about, Okay,
what are the new rituals and rules that I'm going
to have for myself. And I'm getting back into just
(22:49):
not checking digital communication before I've at least done a
couple of hours of deep work. So I was just
getting into really bad habits of when I get out
of bed. I had Microsoft Teams and I had email
outlook on my phone, and they would get checked before
anything else happened workwise, which is something I advise against
because it just sets you up to be reactive, So
(23:11):
I've just deleted those apps from my phone. As I
know you believe will power is overrated, So let's just
set up the systems in the environment so that it's
easy to have those good habits. I'm also giving myself
just a hard stop at five PM as well, which
I find really hard, and I am also planning for
longer holidays. It occurred to me when I took these
two weeks off and I was completely off all digital communication.
(23:34):
It was the first two week period that I'd been
completely uncontactable from work in probably years, which is kind
of scary. What about you on that macro level.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Yeah, so this is interesting in two ways. The first
one is that we know better when it comes to technology.
No one in their right mind waits till their phone
battery is at one percent before they plug it in.
They're start charging it when it begins to look depleted,
and I think I'll be We need to do the
same thing with our bodies and our brains, but we
forget that that's necessary because we're not walking around with
(24:06):
a battery meter.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
We did a podcast episode last.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Year on work Life about the science of recharging on
weekends and vacations. And one of the things I learned
through reviewing the latest evidence and talking with a series
of experts is it's more restorative to have more frequent,
short vacations than it is to have longer ones that
are less frequent. So if you had a choice between
one week vacation every month or a two week holiday
(24:33):
every other month, the first option is better than the second.
So I've tried to adopt that and say, okay, you know,
why not take the advice to treat our weekends as
many vacations. This is something that our mutual colleague, reb
Rebelly first introduced me to. He said, look, you know,
very few people have the luxury of going on holiday
(24:55):
every week. Most people can't get the time off from work,
most people can't afford it. But you do have this
thing called a weekend. And if you treat your weekend
like a holiday. Instead of saying, Okay, I'm going to
spend Saturday catching up on all the work that I
didn't finish, and then Sunday I'm just going to sleep
because I was so tired, and then the whole thing
(25:16):
starts over again, that's not going to.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Work that well.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
So I love this idea of weekends as vacations, and
we've been doing more of that as a family.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It's so funny because I am very aware of this research,
and I was actually working on a project where I
was reacquainting myself with this research literally a few weeks ago.
And if I think about the last couple of years,
I'm really good at the mini break. My partner and
I are really good at going, Okay, every eight weeks,
we're going to do a mini weekend away somewhere, typically
(25:44):
in regional Victoria, and we'll take a couple of days
off work. So it's a four day time off period.
And so that's what I've been doing. And I hadn't
been taking those long breaks because I've read that research
and I listened to it. But sometimes you know, you
do read research and go that just pride it and
doesn't gell. But do you all say take longer breaks
at them?
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Well, first of all, Amantha, what I love about what
you just said is that, I mean, you just responded
exactly like a great organizational psychologist would and should. I
have encountered too many people who read the research that
conflicts with their experience and say, well, the evidence is wrong,
and what you said was not that you said. I
might be an outlier, and I do think that's a
(26:27):
healthy way to respond to data. So the first thing
I would wonder about is what are you doing during
your holidays and are you actually spending those in an
effective way? We could think about that through all sorts
of different lenses. One of my favorite findings that I
stumbled across recently is this growing body of evidence that
although most of us have said, well, being in nature
is really what recharges us, and you want to be
in a green space if you can around a forest
(26:49):
or grass or trees, blue spaces.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Are even better.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
That water is more relaxing, and especially wide bodies of water, oceans,
big lakes, rivers, they bring extra tranquility. And there's a
huge commount of speculation about why that is and whether
we've evolved to experience this sort of relief when we're
near water, because prehistorically we would have dehydrated if we
(27:15):
couldn't get to water. But I think there's something to
be said for Okay, are you doing enough beach vacation?
So are you spending enough time by the pool? As
just as one small example, right, So i'd want to
break down how are you spending those holidays. I'd also
want to look at what are you doing over the
course of your work weeks that is pushing you to
need that long to recover. Are you draining your battery
(27:36):
to the very bottom? Maybe that's another cause here. So
how much do you think this is your personality versus
how much do you think it's the habits you've adopted
for both your work and your holidays.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
What what happened this year is that typically I've got
good habits. I've got good habits around how I work,
around productivity, and around health, and I also feel incredibly
guilty when I don't stick to those habits because I
hate being someone that writes and talks about things the
classic plumber with the blocked pipes hate. I hate that
(28:11):
so much. And I've really felt that this year where
a lot of the things that I talk and write
about I've been doing the opposite and that's made me
feel terrible, which is probably contributed to the problem. And
so I feel like, normally my habits are good. And
what I've also felt is that this two week circuit
(28:31):
breaker almost, which I think is what you get when
you take more than a week of leave, I was
completely in nature. I was also spending really great time
with my daughter as well, and just really just hyper
present in a way that I hadn't been for months.
And I think now that I'm back, I've got habits
that I can now put in place, and I'm not
(28:54):
dragged back by these really unhealthy and unproductive habits that
I had in the first half of the year.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
That's interesting.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
That makes me think of Wendy Wood's research on habit
formation and change and the myth that it takes a
month to change a habit. And I got such a
kick out of Wendy's finding that depending on the person
and the habit and the approach they take, it could
take many months, or it could take a day, and
it could be anything in between, and there's huge variation there.
(29:23):
And I think what you're highlighting that builds on that
is that the first step toward changing a habit is
to become aware of it.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
It's hard to pack.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
Into a week, which is something that one of our
star doctoral students, Marissa Schandell, highlighted for me. Marissa said,
everybody thinks about vacation as unplugging, but you also have
to think about it as plugging into sources of meaning
and joy. And that was such a powerful statement for
me because I'm not a detaching person like that sounds
(29:53):
like boredom to me. But the idea that I could
connect to different things that fire me up, that give
me purpose, or some level of joy that's exciting, and
that's something I could look forward to. And so it
sounds to me like you have too pronged approach, which
is the first part of the holiday is you're decompressing,
and then the second part is you're getting quality time
(30:15):
with people you care about.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
One percent. I would love to know what haven't we
talked about about burnout that you think that you've come
across in research or that you've experienced for yourself, that
you think, if people listening can relate to feelings of
burnout or just exhaustion at work, what should they be
doing well.
Speaker 3 (30:35):
I think we've we've talked a bunch about individual changes,
but we have to also recognize that a lot of
burnout is organizational. If you're in a team or in
a job where you're not the only one who's feeling burnout,
guess what, that is not a problem in your head
it's a problem in your circumstances, and that means that
there's an opportunity for rethinking roles and redesigning jobs to
(30:57):
try to reduce demands or over load or conflict or ambiguity.
It means there's a chance to think about we may
not be able to eliminate all the stressors in our jobs,
but we can try to gain more control over them.
We can get more choices about what we do when
and who we do it with. And it especially means
we can think about how to provide people with support.
(31:19):
And I keep coming back to something I learned about
during COVID, which was a manager who said to a team, look,
it's okay to call in sick. It's also okay to
call in sad. And I thought that was compelling way
to frame this that, yeah, of course you would take
time off if you got the flu or if you
sprained your ankle. Well, guess what, if you're feeling burned out,
(31:41):
we want you to prioritize mental health same way you
would physical health. And I think it's good for managers
to obviously to say it, but what ultimately matters is
whether they walk the talk. So one of the things
I've been encouraging leaders and managers do is to make
it clear to their teams, I'm going to be taking
a recharge week, I'm going to be taking a mental
(32:01):
health day and normalize that behavior. And what that does
is it gives people across the organization the support they need,
the permission they need to prioritize their own well being.
And I don't think we can underscore that enough.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
It's funny, I've heard that advice before, and I was
thinking about that a lot, like in the few weeks
leading up to my holiday, and I just felt like
I so desperately needed to take a sad day or
a recharge day, and I reckon, I've rebably spent hours
thinking about that in the back of my head. Could
I take it? How would I frame that? And I
ended up discroing, you just need to push through because
(32:38):
right now, like you're the leader and people need to
have confidence in you. Absolutely there's a place for vulnerability,
but I also don't want to compromise the confidence that
people have. Even though I've pushed through all this change,
I'm okay. I didn't want the team worrying about me,
and I was really worried about the signal that would
stand at that moment.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
I think that that's a really common challenge for leaders,
and I think it's a totally reasonable concern to have.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
For me.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
What matters here is how you delivered the message, not
when you deliver it. So the danger of waiting until
after you've recovered is that it might take longer to recover.
And also you might be perpetuating the burnout of your
team right because you haven't given them the leeway to
do what they need to do to maximize or maintain
their energy. So what I would wonder is, of course,
(33:31):
you don't want to go in and say, hey, I'm
really sorry to let you all know this, but I'm
completely burned out. I have no energy, I haven't had
an original thought in months on the verge of quitting,
and I hope you all can you just cover for
me while I disappear for an unlimited amount of time.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
You would not do that.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
What you might do is say, I don't know if
you've noticed, but I've been picking up on a little
bit of a dip in my energy. And as somebody
who writes and speaks and teaches on this topic, it's
really important to me to pay attention to those signals
and also to model the very things that I'm trying
to educate around. And so I'm gonna you know, I'm
(34:11):
gonna be taking a few days just to recharge. Nothing
to worry about, but I want you to have, you know,
the freshest, most enthusiastic version of me. And I also
want you all to know that when you're in that zone,
this is what I expect of you. Do I doubt
your confidence if you say that, No, I actually have
more faith that you're telling me the truth.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Adam. I'm going to transcribe this interview and I'm going
to just sniff out that little beat and I'm going
to put it in a note, and next time I'm
feeling exhausted, that is what I'm going to say to
my team. That's gold.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
I'm watching a growing number of leaders who I would
consider to be on the enlightened end of the emotional
intelligence spectrum say we're going to do just a pulse
check once a week. And as a leader, it's my
job ask my team how's my energy? Because I don't
always notice it, and even when I think I'm in
a good place, I don't always know the impact I
(35:09):
have on others, and so getting a little bit of
that quick feedback. If a bunch of people tell me
that I'm dragging or I seem exhausted, that's helpful information
for me. And then guess what, It's not coming from me,
It's coming from my team.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
How do they do that energy check out of interest?
Is that? Is that a survey? Is that a synchronous discussion?
Speaker 3 (35:29):
I think it depends on the psychological safety in the team.
I think when in teams that have strong norms of
candor and honesty, where a lot of trust has been developed.
I've seen it done as just a okay, let's go
around the room, quick energy check zero to ten, how
is my energy today or how is my energy this week?
And if the leader asks first, sometimes you know other
(35:51):
people will will pose the question. Sometimes it's just feedback
for the leader saying, look, my job is to energize
the room, not to enervate or exhaust room, and so
I just want that feedback, and then people may choose
to have that conversation with each other in pairs or
in smaller groups. I think when psychological safety is lower,
I've seen it done very much as a pul survey
(36:13):
where there's a daily or a weekly or a monthly,
kind of the same way that a lot of companies
do quarterly or annual engagement surveys.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
I wish we'd had this chat a few months ago
before I'd hit burnout. I personally found it so useful.
It has been brilliant just to hear your thoughts on
burnout in holidays, and I'm hoping that for the second
half of the year I can be back to being
energetic and enthusiastic and not get anywhere near burnt out.
So thank you so much for your time well.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
As always thank you for having me in for both
the thoughtful questions and also the generative stories which always
make me think. I do think your team is going
to hold you accountable now, like you've gone public with
the fact that you burned out. You've admitted that you
felt like you we're a hypocrite, so obviously no one
can let you do that.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Again, which I think is a good thing. I hope
you liked my chat with Adam about burnout, and if
you know someone who might be in need of hearing
these strategies to help cope with stress and burnout, please
share this episode with them by clicking on the share
icon wherever you listen to this podcast from To find
out more about Adam hop onto Adamgrant dot net and
(37:24):
his latest book, Hidden Potential, is out nowt wherever you
buy books. If you like Today's Joe, make sure you
hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when
new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the
traditional land of the Warrenery people, part of the kuol
And Nation. A big thank you to my editor Rowena
Murray and Martin Nimmer for doing the sound mix.
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