Burnout and Time Off

Question:

I’m feeling burned out, but I can’t take time off because I have too much to do. How can I take care of my burnout when I have so much to do?

Answer:

By Adrienne Pettinelli, Director of the Henrietta Public Library

One of my favorite parts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the armor section. When you see people in movies wearing armor, they’re all jaunty, but real armor is a horror show. It’s a solution born of no better alternative. It’s heavy, it restricts the senses, and it’s hard to move. In middle age, I think more about how hot it must have been in those suits and how there was no elastic waistband for a bloaty day. Obviously in the Middle Ages, middle aged ladies were not allowed to put on armor, and God knows I would have probably been burned at the stake for witchcraft long before I reached my middle years, but you take my point. Armor is not something you want to slip into on the weekend to relax.

If you have not been socialized your whole life to step into power (this applies to almost everyone who identifies as part of a historically marginalized group, which means a whole lot of library managers), then stepping into a powerful role can feel gross and heavy and restricting, much like I imagine it would feel like to put on a suit of armor, but this is armor you’ll be wearing all the time now. No one warns people about this, but I love you, so I’m here to tell you the truth. It’s a burden you will feel physically, and you are going to respond to that in one of two ways: either you will detach yourself from your feelings and slowly evolve into a monster, or you’re going to get stronger and better able to bear this weight.

 I’m here to advocate for getting stronger and better able to bear the weight.

This brings me to my answer to your question: take a vacation. While you’re at it, sketch out how you’re planning to use your PTO for the rest of the year. I don’t care what you do on these vacations, staycations, and long weekends you’re scheduling, other than during these times you’re doing something besides library work. (Unless there is a real emergency, along the lines of a large-scale fire that set off the sprinkler system. If this happens, you are actually required to suspend your vacation and go to work. You get paid more than other staff members to be on call for emergencies; that’s different from being on call all the time for nonsense other people can handle.)

 I hear you saying, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

 You can. It’s just hard.

 The trap of burnout is that it impairs the ability to assess priorities, delegate, and manage a busy workload. Once you get to this point, you’ve become much less productive, which adds to the horrible feeling of burnout. Returning to my initial metaphor, all of this is making your suit of armor harder to wear, and people—your employees, primarily—are counting on you to be able to lead with calm confidence, not buckle under the weight of responsibility.

If you are engaging in any kind of sport or workout regimen (and if you aren’t, this is probably contributing to your burnout—have you considered an active vacation?), then you know how important it is not to overwork muscles. You have to sleep and have rest days to allow your muscles to repair and strengthen themselves. This is what time off does for you and your ability to be an effective manager: if you do this right, you get a break from your armor, and that gives your body, mind, and soul a chance to repair and grow stronger. You’ll come back refreshed and able to do more.

Let’s talk about that more you’re going to be doing, because part of the reason you may feel like you can’t take time off is because you’re letting everyone besides yourself manage your workload. Another fun part of being in charge is that people are going to tell you what they think you should be doing all the time, and when those people are doing that, they aren’t thinking about whether you have time to brush your teeth and do your laundry—what they’re thinking about are their needs and priorities. Sometimes those ideas will align with your needs and priorities, and that’s advice you can take. Otherwise, no. Just no. As a manager, I can’t overstress the importance of mastering the interested-but-noncommittal murmur, accompanied by a faint nod. Most of the time people forget what they told you that you should be doing with your one wild and precious life 10 minutes after they walk away.

Even with the day-to-day, there can be a lot of tasks you’ve laid on your own desk, and because you’re a manager, they can all seem high priority, but they’re not. For this, I recommend regularly using a priority matrix. You can find a bunch of them via Google. This is a chart you can use to systematically analyze your tasks to determine if they’re something you should be doing now, something you should delegate, something you should schedule for later, or something you should forget about entirely. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, I whip one of these babies out, map all my tasks out, and get busy doing, delegating, scheduling, and forgetting. And I hate to brag about how good I am at getting things done. (Not that we need to be defining your worth as a human being in terms of your productivity, but also you’re a manager. You need to get things done.) 

One last bit of advice: create written policies and procedures that make sense, train your staff on them, and make them easy to find. Often people call or text a manager because they have no idea what to do, and if it’s a routine trouble—something like a toilet getting plugged—then the staff should be trained to deal with it. (Sometimes when something really bad happens, I think, “Couldn’t a toilet have gotten clogged instead?” I know how to unclog toilets, and every time I unclog one, I feel like a hero.) Sensible procedures and training are efficient and empowering and make for all-around better library service. I give this advice all the time (I gave it in my last column) because it’s one of the most overlooked but powerful tools we have as managers. Teach a person to fish and all that.

I’m sorry about how hard it is to be in charge. We all feel overwhelmed sometimes, I promise you. Even the people who look like they’re totally fine 100% of the time and only ever talk about how their library is made of sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. Most of us who have been managers for a period of years have experienced burnout; we just don’t always talk about it because it’s scary. Ask that person from the unicorn library and I bet they’ll tell you about a hard time they went through or even about how they thought at various times about leaving the field entirely. The key here is to take care of yourself, let yourself grow, and get stronger.