Earned sick leave. What an appalling concept. Imagine having to earn the right to be sick. It has all the oxymoronic charm of another industrial invention: the death benefit. Nonetheless, a good many people are earning that right at precisely this moment, working on the edge of exhaustion, operating on the fringe of health, pushing themselves beyond what they know is good for them.

When exhaustion is the simple product of occasional overwork, it has a simple solution: rest. For millions, however, exhaustion has become a chronic condition, a pall, a familiar weariness that envelops them like perpetual fog.

The term burnout describes a final condition, an end product. Slow burn more accurately describes the process. How humans behave when immersed in situations of prolonged stress is analogous to how frogs behave when immersed in water. Drop a frog into boiling water, and it will jump out. Drop a frog into cold water and turn the heat up slowly, and it will stay put while it boils to death. The delayed, incremental nature of burnout makes it so insidious; by the time we notice the water is no longer pleasant, it’s usually too late.

Persistent workplace fatigue worms through the entirety of human experience, crossing emotional and spiritual boundaries as well as physical and mental. This is especially true of high-pressure positions, such as IT management. Precisely how burnout is experienced is determined by our relationship to our job. Those who experience fatigue as primarily physical and mental have typically allowed their work to dominate their lives. They might like what they do but are doing way too much of it. Their daily store of energy is spent working, leaving little fuel for life’s other possibilities. Tiredness, in this case, reflects both a lack of balance and—as we are frequently reminded by our ailing bodies or neglected loved ones—confused priorities.

Although the setting of priorities is seldom thought of as an issue of integrity, an appraisal of clouded priorities, whether they manifest internally as illness, externally as strained relationships, or as general dissatisfaction, will often betray an inversion of personal and profound integrity.

Personal integrity, or what we bring to the workplace, encompasses commitment, keeping agreements, honesty, and giving full value. It’s what keeps people working until the job is done regardless of personal cost. Personal integrity is often so strongly tied to our sense of self that it overrides higher values.

Profound integrity is reserved for the agreements—spoken and implied—we make with family, partners, and ourselves. In the extreme, it is the reason we choose to leave work and go to the hospital if our child is injured. But it also embodies the agreements we make not to miss our children’s recitals or basketball games, the commitment to a relationship that requires time and attention, and the promises we make to ourselves (quite often the first vows we break). Without exception, the intensity of feeling “burned out” will increase to the degree that our personal integrity has displaced our profound integrity.

Eventually, those who persistently overwork will find themselves impaled on the point of diminishing returns both in terms of productivity and enjoyment. Job performance will begin to suffer. Deflection of tasks will become commonplace, and productive work will be replaced by idle email correspondence, daydreaming, surfing the Web, and electronic solitaire. There may be sadness at the loss of excitement once felt for the job, and irritability will increase.

While dwindling productivity results from burnout, diminished satisfaction often has ancillary causes. If the discontent is recent, perhaps you have merely outgrown your current set of job responsibilities. But if you habitually don’t enjoy your work and get no satisfaction from your achievements, ask yourself who chose your goals. The expectations of parents or partners frequently launch and sustain unsatisfying careers.

The usual response to workplace dissatisfaction is to persevere, cling to the paycheck, and believe that somehow, someday, things will get better. They won’t. The simple truth is you can never get enough of what you don’t really want. Ask anyone with an eating disorder.

The other form of burnout is fundamentally an emotional and a spiritual languor assailing those who either have little fondness for their work or have suppressed too much of themselves in the workplace. When working for prolonged periods of time without heart, passion, or authenticity, exhaustion is the body’s response to its life force draining away; to the carnage of unredeemable possibilities and irretrievable days that drag into months, then decades. An atrophy of the spirit manifests as fatigue if you must leave your soul in the car when you arrive at work.

The exhaustion that comes from not being fully oneself is the body’s rebuttal to a spirit in exile, to never being completely present or entirely visible. Come to work, but don’t bring your joy, affection, or anger. Don’t bring your sadness or grief. Don’t bring your creativity if it conflicts with traditional ways of doing things. Bring your mind, but don’t use it in dissension. There is a sense of not being in control of one’s own life, of being a cork in the flow of stubborn currents, lacking conscious purpose—the paralyzed cog in the ergonomic cubicle.

In that regard, only the cubicle (the working conditions) has changed dramatically since Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times. “What I want is facts,” Dickens prescribed. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out anything else.” Isn’t it striking that, more than 100 years later, this model has not been significantly expanded in our schools or our places of employment?

Although we as employees now have a slew of rights ordained and protected by federal fiat, one right is noticeably absent: the right to be fully ourselves. Somehow, with most of our parts unwelcome and with enormous amounts of energy being used to suppress who we are, we are expected to be creative and productive over the long term.

Ironically, proof abounds that the person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts. Bill Gates comes to mind. But dreaming is not encouraged, and if it somehow survives to fruition, we call it entrepreneurism, which then employs all those folks armed with facts.

When work that should inspire and energize actually disheartens and depresses, as so much modern industrial labor does, it is easy to see automation not simply as a natural result of technological evolution but as a necessary substitute for the extinguishing spirit of a despairing and expendable workforce.

Fortunately, more and more firms are discovering that to invite authenticity in the workplace pays big dividends (see “Out of the Blue: Welcome to Darex,” MC, January
1999)—one of them being a noticeable reduction in the incidence of burnout. While waiting for your firm to make this discovery, a simple preventative measure can be found in the creative application of time management.

The point was persuasively illustrated by a professor of business who concluded every course in time management with the following demonstration. At the end of his lecture, he would look out over the bright faces of the high-powered overachievers in his class. Bringing to mind what awaited them beyond the classroom, he’d announce: “It’s time for a quiz.”

Ignoring the groans, he would pull out a one-gallon, widemouthed mason jar and set it on the table in front of him. Then, he produced about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, into the jar. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he would ask, “Is this jar full?”

Everyone agreed that it was, to which the teacher replied, “Really?” Reaching under the table, he then pulled out a small bucket of gravel, dumped some into the jar, and shook it, causing the pieces to work themselves down into the spaces between the rocks. “Is the jar full?” he asked again.

The class was beginning to catch on and someone answered, “Probably not.” “Good,” said the professor, and produced a bag of sand. He slowly poured the sand into the jar, and the class watched as it found the spaces between the rocks and gravel. “Is this jar full?” he asked again.

“No!” the class shouted. “Good,” he replied, reaching under the table for a pitcher of water. He poured the water into the jar until it was filled to the rim. Then, he asked the class, “What’s the point of this demonstration?”

One eager student responded: “The point is that no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit some more things into it.”

“That’s one possible explanation,” said the professor, “but there is another.” When no one offered an alternate interpretation, the professor explained: “If you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never get them in at all. Your dilemma, your challenge will be to determine what the ‘big rocks’ are in your life.”

Those who are fortunate enough to love their work will include it among the big rocks. But it will not be the only rock. Time with the spouse and the children, time for creating dreams, time spent in nature, time for art, time for solitude—each will find its own proper space. In this context, time management really becomes life management, and choice determines quality.

It is the difference between a life that supports a job and a job that supports a life.

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