Burnout!

You have been stressing over the big project you have to get done.

You get in early Monday morning, pour yourself a mug of coffee and stumble to your desk.

You start up your system, and get notice that it has 5,476 security patches to apply due to the recent breach at your insurance provider.

You can’t do anything so you grab your phone and check social media to see how your most recent blog post is going.

6,500 views, nice….wait, why isn’t it syndicating to the various sites and linking to your ID? It’s under someone else’s account? They are getting all the credit? What?

You grab your coffee and take a giant swig.

Your stomach turns violently, ready to release your drive-through breakfast for the est of the world to see.

You were the first in the office, the coffee was leftover from Friday….

and so starts your day of drudgery at the office.

  Sound familiar?

We all get to the point eventually when we completely dread going into work, even if it is only a short walk downstairs to the home office.

The work culture we seem to be involved with when working with data, or anything else really, is to work and work and work.

Personal time and relaxation are for the weak! You can only survive if you keep at it.

The problem is that attitude very quickly leads to burnout. The point you just collapse and can’t do anymore.

Burnout isn’t just physical. You can experience a mental burnout a lot sooner than a physical one.

  What to do?

So, enough about defining what burnout is. I’m sure we have all heard lots about it.

What do you do about it though?

Well, first thing to do is sit up and breathe. Give it a try. A nice deep breathe, hold for a moment, then let it out.

Don’t worry what others think, they are too focused on their own burnout.

Trust me.

Okay, so now that you have some oxygen in your system and are ready to continue, decide when, withing the next week you are going to take a mental health day. Don’t choose a weekend day, that doesn’t count. The goal is to get away from work and regular activities. This is you time.

  Schedule A Mental Health Day?

Yep. Seriously. Schedule time for yourself. You schedule time to go to the dentist or doctor for a day, but that’s not always relaxing is it?

You also schedule vacation for a week to go travel and try to relax. But travel messes that up and it isn’t as recharging as you’d like. In the end you still dread going back to work.

This is scheduling a day for yourself, to disconnect from your work completely and take personal time to recharge.

The goal is to not check work email, think about what your career is and where it is going, nor to think about what you work in all the time.

Can it be for a personal goal? Sure, why not? So long as it is not related at all to what you do everyday at work.

For example, don’t study, or try to take a certification exam. That won’t disconnect you from what you deal with a lot, unless it is a certification completely different than your work / everyday tasks.

Go to a fun movie, eat out, do yard work, visit a forge and hammer away at some hot metal and make something. Take a road trip to somewhere you’ve never been. Take the dog, if you have one, to the dog park and go nuts with him.

Whatever works for you.

You will be surprised at how just taking one day to break the monotony of the work week and the stresses piling up will make you feel so much better. You will go back to work feeling refreshed and recharged and ready to take on the tasks you had been dreading.

It isn’t like those tasks went anywhere while you were out for a day.

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Chris Bell, SQL Server MVP, MCSE & MCITP, is a 20 year veteran of using Microsoft products & SQL Server to create solutions for businesses, organizations and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles and makes media of all kinds regarding SQL Server at WaterOxConsulting.com. Chris is also the founder of WaterOx Consulting, Inc. which features SQL Server consulting services along with the destination location week-long training series: SQL Summer Camp.

Click here to contact Chris or to follow him on twitter. [/icon_box]