Achievement is not your problem, alignment is
One of my favourite things to tell people post-burnout is to stop succeeding at the wrong things. I see people extolling the virtues of the latest productivity hacks – Lord help me I used to be one of them – but the issue with being more productive is that you still don’t know if you’re doing the right things.
I used to wear busyness as a badge of honour. I would breathlessly tell people I was just soooo busy as I rushed past them in the corridor at work.
Burnout hovers over all of our busy professional heads like a spectre. We hear about it, we’ve experienced it, we know it’s coming, and yet we still push ourselves to be more productive.
I used to be in a frenzy and to tick off every to-do item on my list without even questioning why it was there in the first place.
Most of these list items get put there out of a sense of duty. You say yes to things so that people like you. You say yes to things because it feeds your ego that you’re important enough to be asked. People send you emails with requests and you become the victim of OPP (other people‘s priorities).
It’s hard to break the habit of a lifetime but the simple answer to burnout is to stop doing so much. And the simplest way to stop doing so much is to stop the wrong things getting on your to-do list in the first place.
In his book Anything You Want, Derek Sivers encourages us to ask if it’s a HELL YES or a no.
He argues that by saying yes to things, you are by default saying no to something else. So with our limited time resource, you better be saying yes to things that are in alignment with your bigger goals.
This means you have to make the hard decision that when someone sends you an opportunity that would rank a seven on your “sounds like a good idea scale”, you should still probably say no.
The first step towards achieving this Nirvana of a streamlined to-do list, is to work out what your bigger goals are. Then it becomes easier to say HELL YES or no to anything that isn’t in alignment with those bigger goals.
I love this alignment technique and it has been super refreshing to write back a polite refusal to a series of quite reasonable offers that have recently arrived in my inbox. At the time, my ego squealed in protest, but my more sensible brain realised that saying no to each of them gave me back at least three or four days of non-burnout time each.
If you are hurtling towards burnout, get in alignment with your goals. You will find it becomes easier to know when to say HELL YES to adding something to your to-do list, and when to say no.
