How to Avoid Burnout At Work
One of the worst things that can happen to IT professionals, particularly if they’re working in a demanding position, is burnout. No matter how much you enjoy your current position, the technologies you work with, and your career as a whole burnout can still creep up if you don’t know how to recharge and avoid it. Follow these steps to do just that!
1. Focus on the Work You Care About: Sometimes you need to be a little selfish and spend more of your workdays focusing on the work you actually care about. This will help remind you why you love your job so much and most of those tedious, boring tasks will be fine to be pushed aside or not focused on directly for a few days.
2. Learn Something New and Implement it: Whether you want to try out a new method of doing something at work or you want to learn a new technology and implement it the learning process can really help revive your interest in your job. To avoid burnout you should try to learn new things regularly because this practice will help keep you on your toes and doing different things each day, which is essential when avoiding burnout.
3. Collaborate With or Shadow Someone New: Working on learning something new is one way to avoid burnout but another way is to work with someone you don’t normally interact with or collaborate with. Whether that means you spend your time shadowing someone with a position you think you may be interested in or you collaborate with someone on a project that you’ve never worked with before this will help you avoid burning out for several reasons. Initially working with someone else will change up your days just enough to make things interesting again but if you also happen to be working with someone who loves their job their passion may spill over and reinvigorate your own.
4. Journal Your Days: Writing down the best and worst parts of your day will only take a few minutes but it could have some very positive impacts on your burnout or potential burnout. On a positive note, you can make note of all the things you’re grateful for and love doing each day that will help you continue to enjoy your job. And when you write down the worst parts of your day you can see which areas you need to focus on improving or, in the worst case scenario, you can ultimately decide that your current position isn’t right for you and you can start your job search immediately.
Avoiding burnout at your job doesn’t have to be difficult. If you follow these four steps you’ll be able to avoid burnout or recognize that your burnout is a symptom of a larger problem that requires you to start the search for a new job. Either way it will have great, lasting effects on your career!