Lessons from burning out
Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.
Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)
I did a Q&A last week and got asked a couple questions that made me want to share my answers more broadly.
I got asked one that I didn’t have time to answer, and I promised to write it up, so we’ll start there:
The question was: tell me about the time you burned out and what you learned.
I left Facebook because I burned out. It was EPIC burn out to the point where I had physical symptoms: I couldn’t lift my head out of my hands in meetings, sending emails or doing work took 2-3 times as long as normal, I had a regular eye twitch, I was exhausted even if I slept well, etc.
Burn out looks different for everyone — what the symptoms are and how they manifest — but my experience says that once you’ve started to feel true symptoms of burn out, you are probably past the point of being able to solve them inside your current circumstance. I took a month off and it made zero difference. I physically and mentally could not summon the energy to keep going inside of Facebook. I had to leave in order to reset. I actually strongly believe that allowing myself to get burnt out shortened my work-life span at Facebook by a couple years.
And yes, I did write “allowing myself”. No one else made the choices I made that led to me getting burnt out. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook was an intense place to work at the time, but I’ve come to believe that even in intense working environments, you can choose to set boundaries that let you manage your energy for the long term. More on that below…
So what would I do differently looking back?
2.5 years before I burnt out, I was asked to be one of the first people on a project that felt like the opportunity of a lifetime. And I remember making a very conscious decision that I was going to work all the time in order to take advantage of that opportunity. For 2 years, I worked 18-20 hour days, traveled non-stop, and learned more than I could have imagined.
Eventually, I had an amazing manager (Dan Rose) who said to me: “you are working as if the product launch is the end of this journey when actually it’s the beginning.” It completely blew my mind at the time and has since shaped how I think about managing your energy at work. If I could go back in time, I would follow that advice from Dan from the beginning of the project. Fwiw, I burnt out and left FB before the project shipped.
So, 5 main lessons:
1) You think this is a marathon, but actually, it’s a marathon followed by an Ironman, followed by a swim across the English channel, followed by a half marathon, and so on. You HAVE to manage your energy assuming that the journey is 4 times (or 10 times) as long as you think it is.
