Key takeaways
- Burnout is prolonged physical or emotional exhaustion, and it can come from being undervalued as much as from being overloaded.
- PMs look after everyone else and often work in roles that are poorly understood, which makes them especially prone to it.
- Watch for exhaustion, isolation, negativity, coming in sick and forfeited vacation in yourself and your team.
- Managers should protect people from extra pressure, send them home, and set clear goals rather than just telling them to rest.
- Take responsibility for making a change, get sleep, exercise and diet in order, set boundaries, and block focus time so meetings cannot eat the day.
About this episode
How are you feeling today? If you’re a busy project manager, there’s a really good chance that you’re feeling stress--or you have recently. And as the end of the year approaches, the pressure to wrap things up, deliver on year-end goals, and make everyone happy are probably building up. But you can’t let that stress get to you, because that leads to burnout. That’s why we brought Lynn Winter on the show to talk about how you can deal with burnout--and how you can help others to do the same. No matter the time of year, you’ll want to check this episode, which covers:
- How to define burnout--figure out you are burn out and how you can look inside and fix it
- Are PMs more prone to stress?
- Valuing the project management role
- Signs of burnout at work
- Things that we can do in order to beat burnout
- Facts about how employees deal with stress and burnout
- How to set boundaries