Burnout Nation: The Truth About Workaholics
Burning the midnight oil. Working 10 or even 12-hour days. Yet still anxious you’re not getting enough done.
Classic workaholic.
Is this you?
While you’re burned out, exhausted, and likely a little miserable, be honest, does a small part of you feel like a little bit of a hero? A reliable employee that will get the job done no matter what. Clearly on a path straight up the ladder.
I get it. I was there too.
Throwing in more and more hours seemed like the only way to maintain this vision of success I had for myself and who I thought I needed to be to get there. It was the only way to get it all done to prove my worth.
And while I wished and dreamed of an alternative, at least I could fall back on being a “good employee” and a “dependable coworker”.
Then a coach gave me advice that hit hard…
What if all the overtime I was working wasn’t actually of service to my colleagues?
What if those extra hours were hiding the need for more help on the team? Or what if it was setting unrealistic expectations that others couldn’t match without letting some portion of their life fall apart? What if I was actually doing more harm than good?
I’ve written about workaholism before, offering advice on how to free yourself from your workaholic tendencies. But now I’m ready to double down to examine how workaholism is damaging not only your own personal life but also the corporate culture that surrounds you.
I have a more significant objective now. A dream of knocking workaholism off its pedestal for good!
The Hidden Consequences of Workaholism
Workaholics run rampant in the corporate world.
The idea of a workaholic is often celebrated.
They’re the “hard worker” who is always first online in the early hours of the morning or last to log off in order to wrap up just one more thing.
Emails fly in from them at all hours of the night and weekend. The talk at the “water cooler” is they must be truly dedicated, a valuable employee, reliable. Give them any task they’ll get it done, no questions asked.
But should we really continue to allow this behavior to be rewarded and glorified?
Let’s try on a different lens.
Workaholics likely aren’t the most valuable minds in an organization. There’s little problem-solving and innovative thinking. Look at the evidence. Instead of focusing on efficiency and providing value, they just focus on throwing more hours at a problem. This creates a diminishing return on the increased effort.
Think about it, a client presentation that took 20 hours to create isn’t going to win more deals than the one that took 5 hours.
How were those 20 hours spent? Recreating content from scratch? Writing and rewriting the same paragraphs over and over seeking perfection? Jumping from task to task because there were too many yeses handed out with competing priorities. Hours taken up just trying to get back on task.
Long hours do not guarantee high-quality output.
I would argue, workaholics are actually quite sloppy. Focused on the wrong things and unwilling, consciously or not, to look for and find alternatives.
A huge piece of this likely stems from that “glory” of being the 60+ hour workweek warrior. What’s the incentive to drop that identity? That identity has likely been attributed to whatever success they have today. It’s a common trap to be more comfortable in the hell we know than in the heaven we don’t know.
Just keep overworking to maybe, finally, find that success.
The workaholic model becomes unsustainable when the only option to solve a problem is to throw more and more hours at it. This model just chips away at mental health leading to that constant lull of stress, anxiety, and burnout you can’t seem to shake.
The workaholic model rarely leads to more value for you or the company.
The detrimental part of glorified workaholism is how it can affect a company's culture.
The more workaholics are put on a pedestal, the more anyone else working “normal” hours may feel inadequate. The constant responsiveness of workaholics can create unrealistic expectations, causing colleagues to feel pressure to maintain the same level of “devotion”.
The workaholism may even become contagious and cause others to create bad habits leading to working longer hours out of sheer obligation, not because it’s actually driving any value.
“Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is home because she figured out a faster way.”
- Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework
If you’ve found yourself stuck in this workaholic loop, step away from the false hero complex. I promise you, there is more heroism on the other side.
Let’s make a promise to each other to unite and quit this nonsense. If not for you, maybe just to inspire your colleague next to you who is afraid to set the boundary for herself.
You want to go above and beyond and overdeliver and that’s a great thing! That’s what makes you as amazing as you are.
But what if your new identity, the new hero in your story is a version of you that provides so much value without ever working late into the evening or over the weekends?
Be the hero that causes everyone around you to stare in awe wondering “How does she do it?!”
