Avoid Burnout

I was going through Adam Grant's book recommendation for 2024, and I came across this book titled 'Slow Work' from Cal Newport. It's not published yet, but we can get a taste of the concept from this book from the following post that Newport wrote on The New Yorker.

Towards the end of 2023, I found myself overwhelmed with works and duties. I started to experiences syndromes that are similar to what the internet described as Burnout. I tried tidying up my apartment, and I tried spending time outside. Going for a run and experience nature definitely help, but I too, believes that the problem lies inherently with work itself. And the only way out is to navigate this complexity together with my manager (and corporate culture also plays a part).

According to this article, we can prevent burnout. Newport suggests the reasons for burnout is the large volume of pending and ongoing works on each workers at every moment. To prevent burnout, we would like to keep the number of work in progress task down, while minimizing the number of TODO task on each worker's plate. It would reduces the stress and overhead, to allow workers to manage their work in a more sequential manager and avoid context switching.

I may actually try this at an individual scale and let my manager know how this is going for me. Also, I plan to chat with other members in my team and see if they are coming up with a different way of dealing with this issue of burnout.