Millenial Burnout

Throwback to one of my favorite articles by Anne Helen Petersen: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation.

Five years after this viral post, here's what still feels true for me:

🚶‍♀️ errand paralysis - the endless cycle of rolling over mundane or inefficient tasks to next week

📬  inbox of shame - where your inbox becomes an alternative to-do list

💤  decision fatigue - avoiding basic decisions because there's too many options to sort through

🚦 optimize everything - the essential Millennial condition: "We didn’t try to break the system, since that’s not how we’d been raised. We tried to win it."

I'm no longer in a state of burnout, but I am acutely aware of the symptoms and systems that drive it. This post is always a good reminder for me to step back and evaluate areas of my life that need to change so I can show up as my best self– at work, and in life.

What still feels true for you?

Efficiency vs. Resilience

"When efficiency is all you're worried about, you pay the price in resilience." - Will Harris, White Oak Pastures

I learned this lesson while moving a mobile chicken coop to fresh pasture in 2018. Every morning I could see how the process was less efficient than cooping up the birds indoors with troughs of high calorie feed to get them to market size as quickly as possible.

I'm still learning this lesson today as I get design requests with 24 hour deadlines. 

Efficiency is important, and for many B2B SaaS projects, desirable. The ROI on a single Linkedin ad design or landing page icon is low. Designers need to work with the big picture in mind. 

But what about the projects that can really move the needle?

📗 ... the ebook that you're personally delivering to the 5 prospects that could pay your bills for the rest of the year?

🚀 ... the pitch deck that could either double your team's budget or cost you your job?

📦 ... the first delivery of assets with a new client that will set the tone for your whole contract together?

Efficiency is important, but not at the cost of resilience. Not in any industry.

Maker's vs. Manager's Schedule

Back in '09, Paul Graham wrote about the difference between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule.

Managers work in one hour chunks, measuring productivity by full days of switching tasks. If a meeting can fit in an open spot on their calendar, it's considered a productive use of time.

Makers work in half day chunks. You can't come up with a scroll-stopping design in thirty minutes, and it takes time to focus enough to put thoughts into a high-converting blog post. The work of making is cognitively demanding, time-consuming, and as Cal Newport might argue: deep.

"For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work."

Meetings cost us more.

That's not to say that we can't work together. Makers absolutely need managers, and managers need makers. Understanding how the other works is essential to creating schedules where we can collaborate effectively and create our best work.

Read the original essay here.

(this post was written on a day with no meetings)