Managing Burnout & Boreout

Written by Nurul Nabilah, YouthTech Trainee

Overwork has long been a common complaint, but the Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the situation, with 45% of employees putting in more than 8 hours of work a day since the transition to remote work, and a whopping 68% who report having to work on weekends as well.

Add to that the phenomenon of “boreout”, chronic boredom resulting from doing seemingly meaningless tasks at work. According to McKinsey’s survey of more than 6,000 professionals across five countries, the phenomenon of boreout is so real that more than 3 in 10 are prepared to leave their jobs without securing a new job first.

Both burnout and boreout are phenomena that are very familiar to me from my last job experience. I recall having to log in to work while on medical leave. My workload included auditing and generating reports and I remember this feeling of resignation, thinking that come the next working day, there would be even more reports to churn out. I found myself constantly thinking about how to draft certain reports even though my work laptop had long been turned off. My productivity started going down. I started pondering if the salary I was earning was worth the sacrifices in mental health. When the time came to choose, I decided to turn down a contract extension.

Recently, I attended Flow at Work, a session on career design at work conducted by Bold at Work. It helped me look back on my decision back then, with new eyes.

At the time, I had the belief that having a job, even if it was a short-term contract in an industry that I did not enjoy, was the most important thing. That belief literally held me in place. I stayed on in the job, for fear of not being able to find another job in a short time, or that the new job would not be comparable in salary to the one I had.

However, as I got older, I started to question my thinking. I started to ask myself why I was not yet building up a career in a field that I desired. I started to wonder if it was worth trading in my time and energy for a short-term contract. At the same time, I saw how my friend who’d been a trainee, had gotten hired as a full-time staff.

I started to see that my belief was very much dysfunctional, and that it was not working for me. After all, what was the point in having a job that I did not enjoy? Instead of seeing it as something to hold on to at all costs, I started to see how it was hindering my journey of getting to where I wanted, as I was not getting the experience or skills needed for my desired career. I decided that I needed to get the relevant experience, even if I had to start from the bottom. In a way, that was how my mindset was reframed, and my mind became opened to new possibilities that I had not considered before.

I went back to basics, asking myself what my objectives were. For me, my objectives were to earn an income, have a stress-free life, and gain experience.

From there, I asked myself, what my current options were. I could either stay at the job, look for a new one, or go back to basics and undergo an internship or traineeship in order to enter a field of my choice. It was clear staying at my current job would bring little benefit to me, and while the second option seemed rather plausible, I knew that I would still be willing to do just about anything in a field that I was not interested in, and that would have kept me stuck in the same cycle.

This left me with the third option of going back to basics. At first, I found that going for an internship or traineeship was rather laughable because I had another dysfunctional belief that at the age of 25, I was way too old to be undergoing either of them. However, I have since come to regard it as a stepping stone for my career. Witnessing how it had paid off for my friend was certainly encouraging!

I came to the conclusion that going back to basics was the way forward.

Only in hindsight, did I realise that what I was practising was the use of a decision matrix. The decision matrix tool is a reframing tool that allows an individual to come up with their personal decision framework where they generate at least 3 objectives and 3 options, after which they can decide which option would best fulfil most, if not all, of their objectives.

Reframing my mindset and overcoming my dysfunctional beliefs had opened up new possibilities and options for me. I came to recognize that while I needed a job to secure my financial future, I also needed to prioritise my health. Additionally, staying at my old job would not help me to achieve my goal of gaining the experience needed for my prospective career. I went on another job-seeking hunt and stumbled upon National Youth Council’s YouthTech traineeship programme.

And look where that got me! Writing my first article for Bold at Work and slowly but surely learning new skills that will hopefully bring me closer to the career that I want for my future.

#BeBoldAtWork is a Design Your Workplace series that seeks to covers practical tips, stories and tools that would serve employees and employers to better design how you choose to think, feel and show up in workplaces so as to improve the performances of not only your organisations but also the lives of the people you work with.

If you like for us to enter your workplaces to provide talks and engagements on workplace wellbeing & career resilience ,drop us a note at hello@boldatwork.sg !