I stopped posting BlogJune posts for a couple of days because rather than say something incredibly boring, I decided to not post at all.
The world doesn’t need extra words that are not charming, engaging and make you think or laugh or feel …
Or maybe, just maybe… in year three of a pandemic on the tailend of a large spike in work and moving house, it would be OK to be honest here.
I’m pretty burnt out.
I tried to answer a friend’s email last night and spent 10 minutes staring at the screen trying to add usual social chit-chat pleasantry to the message along with the info bit we were discussing. I didn’t even have that in the tank. I even tried to write something about how I had just spent ten minutes staring at the email before pressing send.. BUT..I just ended up instead with a very short, to-the-point polite and utilitarian message, but without the usual character and friendliness.
After midnight I was trying to totally rewrite the scenario for one of my assessments, to make it clearer so that part of the Study Period would be easier for me, the markers and my students. After half an hour and less than one paragraph completed, I just copied and pasted back the text I used last delivery. It’s good enough, and I published that version for the Sunday deadline today.
A few weeks ago, when I felt under a lot of stress, partly because I felt just so sad and helpless in the face of so many of my students and their families getting sick, I asked my line manager for a meeting to let her know “I’m OK at the moment, but maybe at the risk of being not OK”. It was a conscientious due-diligence kind of thing, “gee, I’d better let my manager know about this in case I fall over”.
It was reassuring, with a little dose of “entering new territory slightly more disturbing”, when she shared that most people she sees seem to be not OK right now. I wasn’t doing something to my students accidentally because I was stressed. Her estimate was that usually about 30% of students are struggling academically because of life-stress, but right now it is around 70%. I genuinely had thought that not only were things really busy and involved in my life, but on top of that my teaching had become dreadful and I was somehow making students perform badly academically.
I am taking a week off to unpack my box room to turn it into an office. Of course in the first couple of days here I planted broad bean seeds in my balcony garden and the plants are already about 4cm high. Priorities! I will do another “eat my garden” blogjune series in the next week or so. I have four fruit trees, and eggplant with five big fruit on it, herbs and spinach and flowers and lots of little seedlings growing.
But – today was an on the couch afternoon reading about burnout and perfectionism and not flogging myself, but trying to work out strategies. (Probably something is wrong when you are working until 1 or 2am many nights to do a job you are paid to do in 37.5 hours a week. Even if it is a job with an acknowledged uneven and seasonal workload fluctuation…with a culture of precarious employment and reward for overwork).
If you are looking for something useful, with some nice ways of looking at burnout during a pandemic, I recommend this. [It is on a site that appears to be run by a venture capital company, has no author attribution or date, so not what I would encourage my Info Retrieval students to rely on, but still… the info in it is pretty useful and it has some nice anec-data]
- A manager’s guide to helping teams face down uncertainty, burnout and perfectionism. (2022). First Round Review. Retrieved June 19, 2022, from https://review.firstround.com/a-managers-guide-to-helping-teams-face-down-uncertainty,-burnout-and-perfectionism
I particularly felt for my poor line manager, being susceptible to what the article refers to as “burnout burnout”… what happens when you are in a position where you support a whole lot of people who are getting burnt out.
So, having fallen off the wagon with BlogJune, I am going to commit to writing a something each day, whether it is any good or not. Unless, of course, that is just one more way of striving for perfectionism when taking a break would be better for me…