7 Red Flags of Working from Home Burnout
Millions of workers around the world have made a sudden transition to remote work. As a result, many professionals across the board have had to quickly adapt to a working-from-home lifestyle. Although this has helped avoid many potential COVID-19 complications, it isn’t without its own difficulties. And possibly the biggest of these sudden and virtually unforeseen issues is working-from-home (WFH) burnout. Let’s take a look at what this particular type of burnout is and how to combat it.
What Is Working From Home Burnout?
As if the lines between work and life weren’t already a bit fuzzy, things have gotten even more blurred during the pandemic.
Many of us who are working from home for the very first time are struggling to establish and maintain healthy boundaries between our professional and personal lives. This leads to working from home burnout.
Working from home (WFH) burnout is actually quite common in remote workers. It’s defined not as a medical condition but rather a symptom of chronic and unaddressed work stress.
If you find yourself feeling uncharacteristically exhausted, inefficient, unproductive, unmotivated, or have developed negative connotations towards your work, you may be experiencing working from home burnout.
If this is you, don’t worry, you certainly aren’t alone. Although there is limited research on WFH burnout, as it is a relatively new phenomenon, early signs are suggesting that this may well be the next societal health crisis.
Never fear, though: a good crisis plan starts with recognizing the risks before they become actual crises. In this article, we’ll explore the red flags of WFH burnout, and how to mitigate them.
7 Red Flags of Working from Home Burnout
In order to gauge whether you need to take a little break from work or, at the very least, set some solid boundaries, here are a few precursors of WFH burnout that you should keep an eye out for.
1. You’re Working Around The Clock
Mornings disappear and afternoons quickly blend into evenings. You feel like you are never doing enough and work has become an around-the-clock obsession.
And it’s easy to do, working from home makes going to work easier than ever before.
As tempting as it is though, it’s vitally important to set some solid work hours. Otherwise, you’ll never put down your laptop, ever.
To avoid this, try these tips:
Set consistent work hours and stick to them as closely as you can.
Be okay with leaving certain tasks until tomorrow or later in the week.
Or, if it helps, set out work tasks in a planner or diary.
2. You’re Carrying A Heavy Mental Load
That feeling of constant overwhelm, even on slow work days? That might be the mental load.
The mental load is more than the sum of all of your to-dos. It includes the stress of keeping track of tasks that you anticipate need to be done, filling informal leadership roles that leave you little time for your “actual” job, and constantly battling unrealistic expectations of what is possible - both at home and at work.
When you WFH, it’s impossible to ignore all of the responsibilities of running your home. If you have kids at home, those responsibilities might literally interrupt you in the middle of a Zoom call. Our tip?
Take the mental load audit to get an overview of what’s causing stress at home. You can fill out the worksheet in 10 minutes - and it’s 100% free!
3. Your Social Life Is Basically Non-Existent
Your social life has suffered and it’s starting to affect your happiness. When times get a little tough, it’s always nice to lean on a sympathetic ear. Although, at the moment it never feels like you have the time. Work keeps beckoning and you keep saying no to your usual social engagements.
This is super easy to do and no doubt we are all familiar with prioritizing work over friends and family.
To help you find more time for social engagements, try these handy hints out:
Treat social engagements as important as work-related engagements.
View catching up with friends or family as important downtime that will improve your work post-social event.
Pencil socializing into your calendar or diary to make it easier to stick to physically or virtually leaving the house.
If you have a fellow remote working friend, set up a work date.
And if things are super busy, simply set up a quick video chat.
4. You Feel Like Nothing Is Ever Enough
Your anxiety and stress levels have gradually spiked yet you feel you can never be doing enough.
There is always somebody online plugging away, putting in the hours to reach another level of success. Knowing this makes you feel like you simply can’t stop.
Working from an office makes it easy to gauge how hard are working. Observing your fellow working peers gave you a good gauge of just how well you are doing. But with no coworkers in sight and nobody to compare yourself to, working all the time can feel like the only way to calm your nerves.
The thing is that working isn’t going to relieve your stress levels. Be okay with taking some much-needed downtime, it’s only going to help you be more productive when you return to your laptop. While self-care alone won’t cure burnout, it’s critical to set clear time aside to engage in non-work activities.
Here’s how to help you feel like what work you’ve put in is more than enough:
Make your morning hours count, they will be your most productive.
Limit how much you procrastinate.
Limit your work hours in increments that will ensure productivity and ensure you feel good about what you’ve achieved.
Be okay with taking the weekend off. Sometimes a couple of days is all you need to readjust how you view your professional life.
6. Notifications Have Become An Obsession
Checking emails or Slack notifications has become an obsession. Before, work was limited to being in the office or perhaps receiving a phone call when something really important came up. But now more than ever work is just a click away.
Emails constantly find their way into your push notifications and receiving and responding to Slack messages at all hours of the day or night has become a normal occurrence.
Follow these tips to help you tune out:
Once the working hours are over with, turn off you push notifications on your laptop and phone.
Set aside a part of your day where emails are the priority. Once you’re done with them resist the urge to look at them until the following day.
Don’t feel guilty about not replying straight away. We all have lives outside of work, your boss and coworkers will understand.
7. Work Meetings Have Become Your Life
Work meetings have somehow pushed their way into out of regular work hours and they are more frequent and longer than they ever were before.
When work was limited to the office, work meetings were generally a once a week kinda deal. But now your boss or coworkers are constantly scheduling meetings and to accommodate you’ve extended your work hours.
To help reduce the number of hours you are spending in meetings, try these helpful hints:
Schedule routine meetings within work hours.
Set aside a single day just for meetings. Meetings throughout multiple days can break workflow and disrupt how productive you are.
Be okay with saying no to meetings and reschedule when it suits you.
Final Thoughts
No one is perfect.
We can’t work all the time, it’s just not natural. But, despite our best efforts, we can all sometimes overwork ourselves.
And, now more than ever, it’s so easy to do when so many of us are working from home.
To prevent working from home burnout from becoming a chronic cycle of burnout stress, start with accepting that you are only human. Never feel guilty for taking a little time out to get some much needed TLC.
Time off is just as essential to your life as fulfilling your career goals is.