When I look back on my constantly busy life for so many years and think about how I tended to take on too much, it’s amazing to think that I have never reached the point of burnout. To be sure, there are plenty of reasons to think that was bound to happen, and there were probably occasions where I was not far from it.
Fortunately, I did a few things along the way that likely helped, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
For a long time, I not only had a day job in a demanding field (software engineering) and for leading companies, but I also ran a side business covering college basketball and everything connected to it. Naturally, a lot of my time was accounted for between those two for most of the year – about the only real down time I usually had came from late July through some of September. As you can imagine, from about late October through the end of March was particularly busy, but that wasn’t all.
That kind of time commitment doesn’t seem to leave room for much else, especially during the season. On many nights, if I wasn’t covering a college game, there was a good chance I was at a prep school or high school game. True nights off were rare, and that was usually the case even more so near the end of the regular season, as I would often not have a single night off for about two weeks prior to the start of conference tournaments.
I have long theorized that whereas others who go to a side job or work long hours at their one job might burn out, there was one big reason I did not. My side job was very different from my day job, which means I switched gears when I went from one to the other. It was also a labor of love even more than my day job ever was, and as such it played to the idea that one way to fight burnout is to do things that bring you joy.
It helps that in this side job, I used to have to do lots of movement. I often had significant walks from where I parked to where game action was, and would walk from one part of an arena or gymnasium to another multiple times. As one example, when I would cover Providence College home games, I would often park at Providence Place and have to walk a few blocks through the mall, a hotel and a garage to get to the arena. There were travel team events where I would have to walk from one gymnasium to another at times as well. I also connected with plenty of people – it was really part of the job – and that undoubtedly helped as well.
To be sure, this was not without its own concerns. I put in plenty of hours, including on the road, in this side job for many years. From about April through July in particular, I was on the go, often traveling and working well into the night. Back in 2009, I was on the road for nine days in a row covering recruiting events in the northeast, and when I got back home after that, let’s just say I was exhausted for a day or so.
When you put it all together, between my day job and side job I was probably logging upwards of 70 hours of work a week at times. But it was not more than 70 hours of the same thing. Michael Hyatt has often cited studies that show how working past 40 hours a week might yield more output for a time, but after about 50 or 55 hours productivity starts going down for each additional hour. Had I run a side business doing much the same thing as I did in my day job, I probably would have burned out a long time ago.
I no longer have that side job, but like the days where I did, I maintain a very active schedule of various commitments. I attend professional networking events, take technical training and otherwise engage my professional world. As such, I must be cognizant of my time and energy, and having gone through some challenge to that end – at times when I had the side job I would take a college course and/or play in a competitive baseball league, for example – I have more to draw on for how to manage my commitments now and going forward.
This is a little different than battling burnout – it is more being concerned with over-committing myself and leaving little time for things I enjoy or self-care – but there are similarities. Both revolve around managing time and energy and the requisite health concerns that can come from each. Both involve wanting to do more but at times having to pull back as a form of cooler heads prevailing. It’s why I stopped playing baseball over a decade and a half ago, much as I miss the game terribly.
As burnout continues to be something we have to be aware of so as to manage ourselves to prevent it, reflecting on how I have avoided it thus far is helpful and interesting. Continuing to do what I have done to this point is paramount, as well as learning how others have battled it and continue to do so. We all owe it to ourselves to make the best quality of life we can since we only have one chance at this, and fighting burnout is one way to do that.