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“Burnout” is a term of the moment. What’s really happening?
The “Big Issues” Series
First of all: Don’t work as much. Honestly.
Here’s a new piece on NPR about overwork, with the headline claiming that overwork kills 745,000+ people per year. I’d believe that, and I know there are some longitudinal studies about the health impacts of command and control management, and none of them are very pleasant. Over at Numlock News, where I found the NPR piece originally, they pull-quoted this portion:
A new study from the World Health Organization found that people working more than 55 hours each week face significant health risks, facing a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of death from heart disease compared to people working only 35 to 40 hours per week. This is a lot of people: in 2016, the WHO estimated, 488 million people worked such long hours.
Again, not good numbers.
Years ago — April 2015 — I wrote an article about 55 hours/week being a hard ceiling on work, including this paper on “The Productivity of Working Hours.” It does seem to me that overwork — and its cousin, burnout — are…
