How can I reduce stress and prevent burnout?

Stress, burnout and work-life balance (WLB) are often discussed together, but in my experience you can feel stress and experience burnout even if you’re not working 60+ hours every week. Here are a few resources I’ve found helpful in managing my own stress.

Also find a few tips and resources on guiding your team towards a sustainable pace at work further down.

• Work-Life Balance: The Yellow Peanut M&M Analogy: A simple but important message how family can’t and shouldn’t be “in balance” with work. In this metaphor, your work is like a yellow peanut M&M and your family is like the sun. They may seem similar at a glance, but they are so different, it’s almost laughable to try and “balance” them.
• Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs: In this context, eating frogs is a synonym for doing things you despise that are going to propel you farther and faster toward overall success. Adam Mastroianni brilliantly challenges this notion as he asks “Dude, why are you eating frogs?”. Read this if you’re always looking for the next productivity hack and fear you may have lost sight of what’s truly important to you in life.
• How to know when to stop: This is an open recount of Andy Johns’ mental health journey. There’s also an effective assessment form to check for physiological and behavioral patterns that may signal burnout. Don’t wait until you tick all the boxes to seek professional help!
• Burnout Recovery: If you’re already burnt out give this a read. David Panarelli shared this piece when he was in the middle of recovering from his burnout after being laid off.
• My heart says yes, but my schedule says no: Read this if you could get better at saying no politely and professionally.

❓ Okay, but what about my team?

• Listen actively during your 👥One-on-Ones about stress and workload. You may even have a recurring survey to track these or add it as a recurring agenda item.
• Review workload and assignments through your work management tools to get a sense of the load distribution. If you don’t track your team’s work like that, ask them in your 👥One-on-Ones.
• Based on what you find, consider giving individual 🔄Feedback, leaning more on ⤵️Delegation, or even adjusting your 🧱Organizational Design.
• Advice That I Can't Get Out of My Head: Covers 3 main cases of burnout (never having true time off, broken steering, mission doubt) which you can use to reflect on your own or with your team. It’s not just about how many hours you work after all.
• Supporting Sustainability: Benji Weber lays out how you can manage your team to support them to build sustainable software. Despite the technical context his points on encouraging healthy habits (e.g. through 🔄Feedback) and celebrating sustainability also apply to reducing stress and burnout in the team.