Work Stress: How the 42% Rule Could Help You Recover from Burnout (2020)
stylist.co.uk
stylist.co.uk
What science? There's not even a way to claim that number in the article.
I would personally argue that there is an optimal stopping point that is true in other problems. That number is 1/e or 37%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping
37% of a 24 hour day is ~9 hours. Most people work ~8-9 hours a day before stopping. Most people sleep for ~8-9 hours a day. Most people have leisure for ~8-9 hours a day. This percentage is pretty consistent & has actual backing in other applications.
There are other major variables not accounted for such as circadian rhythm and your biological working clock, but that's besides the point.
When I sleep eight hours and work eight hours, given that i also have to do bio maintenace (eat, shower, etc.) for around three hours, and do chores for two hours, I'm left with about three.
Study for work 5-8
Gym 8-10
Chores 10-11
Free time 11-12
Burn out: imminent
> Study for work 5-8
That’s not normal. If you’re doing this, you’re actually working 8-8. This schedule can work for a short periods and special occasions, but it shouldn’t be your norm.
This can usually be fixed by improving your efficiency at work: Get down to business quickly and limit time spent browsing the internet and other non-work activities. Consolidate work to normal working hours, save the leisure for later.
> Gym 8-10
Also not normal or even necessary. A 30-minute gym trip is more than sufficient to stay in great shape. You can also go 2-3 times a week instead of 7 days a week.
Spending 10-14 hours at the gym every week is an extreme outlier of exercise.
I'm assuming the gym time includes thing such as travelling to the gym, showering, unpacking the gym bag, etc. I usually spend about 60-90 minutes in the gym a few times a week, but from the time I leave my front door and arrive back home, the clock has never advanced less than 2 hours.
I a 1000 times agree that I could be more efficient at work - I think it's a cycle of burning out and then being slow. I want to stress this - I am looking for ways to be more efficient at work. I know I could be more productive during, rather than doing a bunch of OT. And as Sun Tzu said - no one wins from a prolonged conflict - better to do things quickly than drawing them out and getting tired without result.
Like marginalia_nu and hpsquared said, 30 mins isn't anywhere near enough. On my off days, I walk or run at least 45 minutes. On gym days, optimally - 10 min dress and drive, 15 mins warm up, 30-45 mins main lifts, 15 mins stretch, 15 mins skill work, drive home, shower, notes. This is what's needed for me to stay in shape. Also, when I work out this much, 8 hours is barely enough in terms of sleep, and then my diet has to be on point or I start being tired all the time. Not working out has the additional (short term) benefit of needing less food and sleep.
If you're not, you're harming not just yourself but, in the long run, your employer (who won't understand what they're asking of people) and your other coworkers (who feel pressure to meet your standard).
I agree that most people don’t actually work with 100% efficiency, but I disagree that everyone is procrastinating for 4-5 hours every day.
That much procrastination is the norm at certain companies, but try it at a tightly-run company and you’ll quickly fall behind your peers.
Note that communications, e-mail, and meetings really are “work” even if programmers often don’t count them. However, straight up procrastination is definitely not work.
Having children is a good thing for the soul. We're supposed to have them, it's in our DNA. Something is out of whack with contemporaneity -- the time is out of joint -- when we can only see them as a cost center.
I'm part of the "childlress" class you describe, and no, it's overtly obvious how much work a child is, and is the precise reason I don't have any.
> Having children is a good thing for the soul.
I get the same fulfillment (without all the work) by being extremely close with cousins and siblings with children. It's really fun and fulfilling being the "cool uncle" - but having one of my own 24/7? No thanks, hard pass!
And if you hate your children, you're doing them a vast disservice.
There is no moral imperative to have children, and I wish people would stop pressuring the voluntarily childless into having children.
If I always rode my bike, but didn't have a car, I couldn't really say "riding a bike is as much fun as driving a car".
You really don’t though, the work is what deepens the relationship you have with people.
It really isn't. My sister lived with me on and off during her kid's first years and I saw a lot of it (also experienced the joys of being the cool uncle). But I still underestimated the amount of work you have to put in. Also: taking care of a 9-month old is possibly 81 times the work of taking care of a newborn. But evolution is funny like this: the payoff scales very close to the energy expenditure.
It's really hard to explain the benefits one gets from having kids because, well, with your mentality one doesn't get any benefits. I was almost militantly "child-free" until something I can't quite explain happened to me, and put the world in an entirely different perspective. This is when we decided to try for a baby. We were different people already when the baby came.
The differences in thinking between parents and the childless might well be larger than political, racial, ideological, religious etc. differences.
If you want to focus in particular on the notion of how “selfless” you learn to be after becoming a parent — this form of “selflessness” is actually just an expansion of selfishness to include your own children. It isn’t some enlightened ego free global selflessness.
There are certainly a lot of additional chores around child raising, but I agree. This article talks about kids in the way I would have thought about them in my early 20s, long before I had kids: as a sort of chore that you had to deal with before you could do the things you really want.
The reality is completely different; spending time with kids is the thing I want to do! I’m lucky enough to enjoy my work and people I work with, but I’d still rather hang out with the kids and go to the park.
So is being an omnivore. Yet we don't vilify vegetarians and vegans nearly as much as we do the voluntarily childless.
The omnivore equivalent would be an article that describes eating meat as an unfortunate side of life, like commuting and calling into call centers to cancel your cable. My modified reply would be "hey, it's normal to eat meat, it's part of our programming". That doesn't vilify the vegetarian, it calls out a puffy well-being article that says "eat vegetables so you can overcome the stress of eating meat".
... anyway, I was the cool uncle (and my sister lived with me on and off, so I really had a close experience with my first niece) for a long while, and near-militantly "child-free" until I was 40. One day, something rang in my head, and I was changed. Keep rocking the vegetarianism, but try not to be too proud to listen to that ringing. If it comes to you.
Still worth it though.
My small work experience has made me isolate a few ingredients:
- loosely defined tasks - improper team spirit / organizational communication
People feel bad when they feel they can't do their part and feel worthy / look ok / belong. Badly defined => badly trained => unfair blame (or the potential for it). They feel bad if they can't be open about issues and rely a bit on the group for support. They feel bad if they don't know how to get information (this links back to the first point).
A group is a strange soup and fears / doubts / tiny ego bursts can rapidly turn it into an acid bath.. but the opposite is true, most people want to be team players and care for a group and for a duty.
Also very fair point about the fact that it's larger than work.. it's social-general.
A lot of this is probably learned helplessness. When things are always randomly breaking and you're powerless to affect your solution in any other way than putting out the constant fires, that's a surefire way to burn out.
It's not just that it's a stressful situation, it's when they keep coming and there doesn't appear to be any obvious means of avoiding them or improving your situation. That's when you get fucked up.
Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson
Inspired / Empowered by Marty Cagan
Build What Matters by Ben Foster
High Output Management by Andy Grove
The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Much by Cal Newport (Deep Work / A World Without Email / etc)
Burnout actually overlaps partially or even entirely with depression. You can find a lot of good literature on the dynamics of stress resilience, depression induced by chronic unpredictable mild stress, and chronic social defeat stress that will illuminate the subject.
The term “burnout” is more palatable than “depression” to a lot of people due to stigmas against mental illness. Burnout also comes with a built-in explanation that you “just worked too hard” which some people see as a badge of honor, unfortunately. But it turn out that much of what people describe as burnout is more or less identical to classic depressive symptoms, and much of the same therapy helps address it.
There are two kinds of burnout and they can reinforce and overlap.
The first is physical burnout. This is when your body just gives out because you don’t sleep well enough, you stop eating or exercising. The causes of this can be a poor habits, stress or being busy. It may also be because you just don’t feel like exercising.
This brings us to the second form of burnout - cognitive burnout or depression. Cognitive burnout is a result of your self concept failing. You experience set backs and obstacles which convince you that who you are right now is a failure and someone who’s actions don’t make any difference in the world. What you can achieve doesn’t seem in line with what you want to be.
This can often be because you are physically burned out. You are less effective hence reinforcing that belief. If this is the case focus first on lowering your stress levels. Stop worrying about too much of work or being fired for now. You have far more serious problems. Get your sleep exercise and diet on track.
Once you’ve done that you need to work on your self limiting beliefs. You need to understand that your failures don’t define you you can choose a new path and a new set of values. If you find that too difficult you can take the help of therapists and counselors. Reach out to your friends and discuss things with them.
Maintain a healthy lifestyle and a healthy diversity of interests and sources of self validation and meaning.
Avoid too much stress and try to have more free time for exploration.
Have friends and a community to fall back on and be open with when you have issues.
These are the ways to reduce the probability of burnout.
If you believe you have the symptoms of a burnout then please, seek out help from a qualified specialist. Do not start gobbling up pseudoscience like this.
Take it from someone who hase had burnout multiple times and sought help. It really does help.
For me it was happening, and is happening because I care. Because I care what other people think things are. Because I care what other people think I am to them.
It is very obscure how one can learn the art of manliness. How one can be sure what things are and what you are to other people, and not be swayed all day this and that way.
Sitting there coding you get used to direct communication. I tell this to be that. I read what this does.
But then your boss comes in to boss you (as he should), and you don't switch. You listen to him talking as if you're having those thoughts, you try to understand his position and accommodate. You don't engage him like this other person that he is, rather you relate to him/her. You take them in like they're documentation, not like they're marketing material.
And now they just told you what you care about, and you take that on, and run with it. And you keep on caring about it when come home, going to bed, waking up in the morning.
You're built to prioritize dangers, and warnings, and worry above other things as a biological being. Maybe 10 to one above other things. And your boss will not be 10 parts praise to 1 part business, he can't do that. He'll be business first and niceties later.
That doesn't mean that all is hell and you should stress and punch it, but you do.
And because it happens every day by day 21 it is a habit of yours. You learn to stress and punch it, and take your anxiety home with you and never let it go. You never rest. You get exhausted. You burn out.
I'm learning to be my own man, know what is what, put up filters. Express my care as a consequence of work decisions and not as a precursor. Invoke care in context.
I see some people have this from young age. Many of them had a father, or fathers.
I'm learning this at 38, after having misplaced care all of my most statistically productive period of life, and having nothing to show for it, consequently.
Learning about the concepts of "agreeableness" and proclivity to "negative emotion" helped make sense of how this works in my life, with other people.
What I'm saying, I guess is that the article takes a systematic, top-down view to this. Looking for a solution at a societal level, telling people how much to work and when to stop. But in my experience it isn't about any of that at all.
Instead it is about knowing when you're tired and what to do about that. It is about knowing how to be when working and how to be when your boss is talking to you. It is about caring for the things you're doing and are about to do, not the things you left waiting for you at work tomorrow. It is about practicing completing things, being done with things, and not practicing worrying about things (that's your boss' job) or practicing being accommodating (again, not your job).