Is Exhaustion your KPI?
I was on my tenth Zoom meeting for the day. Ten hours? How did the work day transform into this kind of grind? It’s as if working from home means working all the time. I became nostalgic for a moment, thinking back on the days of the long commute to the office. I used to hate that commute. The drive to work used to feel like a nuisance, but now I realize it was an hour and half every day just doing what I wanted: listening to a podcast or an audiobook, talking to friends or family on the phone, playing music, making mental checklists or simply daydreaming.
Now there is no forced downtime, and I feel like I am always “on” and expected to be on-call for endless periods of time. I have become an email jockey, just riding my inbox all day. I am, maybe like you, comfortable working hard, having deadlines, being highly involved and engaged. But lately, if there was a dashboard measuring my personal performance, exhaustion would be the central graph. And the higher the exhaustion meter, the more I would likely think I am being successful.
When had exhaustion become my key performance indicator?
I know I cannot keep up this pace. This new way of working is not sustainable. What gets measured, gets done. I remember hearing this phrase back in grad school. With exhaustion as my primary KPI, I knew I had to take a critical look at dashboard and how I could change what I was measuring. Otherwise, I knew anything I would try to change would get crushed by the tool that is currently driving and measuring my success.
This dashboard must die.
There are a few ways to go about killing off this particular dashboard. I knew I could get coaching, find a therapist, or engage in a 12-step program for workaholics. I wanted to make changes now, not spend six months lying on a couch trying to understand how I got to this place to begin with. There is value in historical understanding; peeling back the layers if you will. But I needed help today. I wanted some insight to how I got to this place, but mostly I wanted to start making changes right away. But how?
I started with grounding myself in Purpose. PURPOSE at work goes beyond the need for a paycheck. Most of us need to work for money. We all need to feed ourselves and our family. Purpose includes why we choose to do the work we do. We all have choices on how we spend our time. Usually it’s based on interest and talent: will and skill. Along the way we can lose sight of Purpose, or maybe our Purpose changes. I knew I needed to connect again with my Purpose and what I love to do. I decided to start with concentrated time, writing, talking with a close confidant, walking, and other activities that allowed me to engage in meta-cognition or an awareness of my thinking.
I recommend spending time asking yourself “what am I meant to do?” Remind yourself about what excites you, provides meaning, and helps you feel connected to your work, other people, a mission, a cause, etc.? The tool here is mindfulness. Bringing awareness to what you want, what you are thinking, and what you need. Mindfulness practice helps you connect with purpose.
Mindfulness does not have to mean endless hours sitting on a meditation cushion. There is value in a formal practice, but there is also benefit to developing a regular practice of increasing awareness, bringing a heightened sense of what is going on with you, inside your head, and within your body. This is “tuning in and tuning out” because it’s a focus on what is going on with you while turning off other distractions.
Lecturer Leah Weiss, Ph.D. writes in her book How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind….
“It is not helpful to put together an optimal intervention that no one in the real world can use. What is helpful is to create the minimally viable version of an intervention that will have an impact.”
This was life changing advice for me especially when I thought about being more mindful. You may not be able to sit in quiet contemplation for minutes or hours on end, but you can create positive change through smaller actions that you can and will do every day.
Throwing away an Exhaustion KPI Dashboard means being willing to give up exhaustion as a badge of honor. In the U.S. culture, those who are busy are perceived as more important and having “bigger” lives. But that constant motion and busyness comes with a price: stress-filled lives, less time for rest, let alone enough time for play and fun. It means missing out on some of life’s important moments because you are too distracted by what is going on in your head, even if you are physically present.
One day, a friend told me he could not enjoy his son’s soccer games because he had calculated the lost billable time from the two hours on the sidelines of the field. His thoughts were wrapped up in what he was losing in revenue and the lost time in getting work done for an important client. He not only missed his son’s game by not being fully present and enjoying the moment, but he also did not meet his client’s needs. It was a lose-lose situation. If he could have engaged in the game, enjoyed himself and his son’s experience, and returned LATER to his client’s need, he would have decreased his anxiety, created some fun and connection with his son, and returned to the client work later feeling more engaged instead of having a heavy sense of guilt and regret.
This kind of decision- to not engage in the moment but live in a suspended state of guilt, regret, busyness, distraction, and scarcity raise the height of the needle on the exhaustion graph. None of us start our careers saying “one day I hope to be so busy all the time that I never have time to enjoy anything” and yet many of us find ourselves in this very spot at some point in our professional lives. It’s understandable how we find ourselves here, but it doesn’t mean we have to remain there. Start with what you measure, and what you think is important. And, oh yeah….
