Wyld.Media

Digital Product Design & Innovation Consulting

The Burnout Industry

 

Hi everyone. I’ve been working on writing up work practices that have improved my productivity, energy, happiness, and creativity.  I tend to struggle with structuring my writing 🙈, but I’m hoping that sharing my intro will nudge me to keep accountable by releasing the rest incrementally.  Hoping it resonates with some of you! 

xxx Moodthy
Update: this is now available as a podcast episode. Got questions or comments? Send me a voice note inside anchor :)

I first burned out at 17.

I was trying hard – as an undiagnosed person with Dyslexia and ADHD – to win a scholarship for university.

I needed a 97% grade average in that systems equivalent of high school, which, as it happens, I was learning in a secondary language.

I can’t tell you how long it was before the finals, exactly. Burnout is a blur. At this point I’d never heard the term, and wouldn’t for many, many years. I used to sit in front of my books in tears and incomprehension as I realised I literally could not absorb a single word anymore.

I would burn out several more times over the course my career:

  • During University (our biochemistry course was alleged to have more modules and hours of classes and assignments that a popular pre-med course). There were a lot of all nighters. 
  • During my first round of freelancing, while simultaneously doing a masters degree and job hunting. 
  • After the year I got settled immigration status (about a years work in itself), and after spending a year job hunting and hopping between temp jobs. Somewhere in the middle of this was a family crisis that lasted maybe also a year and culminated in a medical emergency. 
Three things I’ve learned about burnout since then: 
  1. You don’t get more than maybe two, three burnouts before it affects your health irreversibly.  There is no “rollback” function for the human body. You’ll waste several years trying yoga, fasting, veganism, raw, paleo, keto and every kooky therapy and miracle supplement before realising “this is how it is for me now”.
  2. Many young people are entering the workplace with a few burnouts already under their belt. And the bar today is even higher for getting a job today than it was for me.
  3. What I, and many other people in the tech industry call “burnout” is actually point  of crisis way beyond the actual definition of burnout. 
Why don’t we recognise burnout for what it is before it reaches the crisis point?

Because this story of suffering as a path to the  a very slim chance of glory is so persistent in our psyche.

In the 1939 book, The Grapes of Wrath, it’s what compelled people to move to California and work on farms.

Today, the tech industry have rebranded (pre-crisis point) burnout as “the hustle” or “the grind” and sold it as a lifestyle, a badge of honour, a necessary pain that will lead us to glory. “Like Facebook.” “Like Twitter”, “like Uber”.

Like all San Francisco startups.

And so millions of people in the tech industry still look to California as the model of how work today.

No longer moving to California farms, but emulating the same “disposable worker” mindset from their desks around the world. The only difference is that today, the bosses also work on the farm alongside us. Sometimes.

And the result is that in a Gallup study of 7,500 full time employees, 22% of full time employees report feeling burned out often or all of the time, while another 44% report feeling burned out some of the time.

I wonder, looking at those numbers, if they’re using my (and the people with whom I’ve spoken)- “crisis point” definition of burnout, rather than the actual definition.

Another survey by Blind had a simple yes/no answer: “Are you currently suffering from job burnout?” (burnout was not defined to the survey takers) And over half of respondents (57.16%, to be exact) answered yes.

If an industry like manufacturing resulted in short and medium term disability for roughly half its employees (44% – 57%), there would be a government enquiry, fines and regulations.

But because the disability of burnout – and that’s what not being able to work for months or a few years is– is invisible, the industry is still flying under the radar of scrutiny. For now.

This is beginning to change.

On the 28th of May 2019, the world health organisation categorised burnout from a psychological disease, to an occupational one.

This change may seem slight to many.

In the same year, a Spanish royal decree legally requires Spanish companies to track the work hours of all staff, be they remote contractors, or in-house.

The stage is being set to change the culture of burnout and worker exploitation through regulation. At least in Europe.

The way of working I’m proposing in this ebook is how I’ve been working the last 4 years, after a lifetime of buying into “the grind” and the virtues of “the hustle”.

It will help you change how you’re working and get better results– not worse. It will help your team get a head start against those too set in their ways and beliefs to adapt.

Most importantly, it will help prevent your health suffering in the long term and enable you to continue working passionately in a field I hope you love as much as I do.

“The World Health Organization is about to embark on the development of evidence-based guidelines on mental well-being in the workplace.”

I write about work methods and work culture and especially burnout because it’s an entirely preventable health epidemic based on the most ridiculous thing imaginable: identity politics. 

It’s 2019. We don’t need to work like we’re on that 1939 farm anymore.

If an industry like manufacturing resulted in short and medium term disability for roughly half its employees (44% - 57%), there would be a government enquiry, fines and regulations. Click To Tweet

Better Design Decisions : Why Few Products Pivot Successfully

 

Note: This article first appeared in my Newsletter: Double your SaaS Subscribers.

 

As a behavioural product designer, I read a lot about cognition, decision making and neuroscience. Alongside more traditional startup and business news.

I’m watching the most crucial skill in running a business being destroyed by popular startup culture.

Decision making is overwhelmingly the thing I hear people complaining about when deciding to leave a company or startup, or simply not wanting to join an otherwise promising company.

Decisions on:

  • How you select candidates
  • How you differentiate your product
  • Collaboration or management style (or lack thereof)
  • What features to prioritise
  • Who you promote or let go

And how is our industry ruining this?

By enshrining “The Grind.”

⚙⚙⚙

I’m at the very end of “How Emotions are Made: the Secret Life of the Brain“. 

It’s been 14 hours of listening and note taking and re-listening again.

So consider me your personal, free version of Blink list:

Underneath your “conscious” brain, is a huge circuitry designed to

  • Asses your energy levels
  • Asses other biological needs (repair, rest, thirst)
  • Analyse those needs
  • Come up with something like a ‘body budget’ of how much energy you have.

Everything you feel, every view of the world, and every decision you make is governed by this budget.

Embed from Getty Images

And consistently working long hours, pushing yourself, late nights (whether for work, or for fun, or both!)

It will run your body budget into the double negatives.

So that every decision that comes out of that pool of thought is affected.

As those decisions result in sub-optimal outcomes, conscious emotions like stress set in.

Chronic stress affects the pre-frontal cortex, making us more volatile and impulsive.

“Chaos Addiction”

This is when you’re most likely to double down on what we know (familiarity bias),

Get defensive, emotional and reject new ideas,

and keep doing what you’ve always done before. (Grind harder!)

We start investing based on feelings (like what other people are doing)

and not based on strategic planning.

This is why few teams successfully pivot their product.

And although have ample evidence that a 4 day working week is more productive than 80 hour work weeks, because of how long term stress affects the brain, they can’t hear it or accept it.

At this point, you are addicted to adrenaline.

And to feed that addiction, you will start to subconsciously create chaos.

 

Movies love to show that decisive moment where the protagonist must make a choice that will change the fate of his or her band/fate of humanity forever.

In real life we make sequences of decisions every single day

We have ample opportunities to rectify our decision making process and start making good ones as soon as we fix the source of the problem. 

Next week I’ll give some actions to reverse this process. 

? ?? Get some outside prespective

I’m a T-shaped, product designer with experience in leading projects, helping companies work better together, and data driven analytics.  If that sounds like it might be helpful for your project get in touch.

Bunny Economics Theory

 

Who you optimise your platform for is probably what’s ruining it. So do the reverse.

A wild rabbit in a forest setting
Anya was right, it’s always the bunnies.

You may have noticed a flourish of “premium” or specialist freelancer platforms lately.

It’s an obvious problem to solve; everyone who’s looking to outsource creative or development work complains about how hard it is to find talent.

The video call was about developing a niche specialist platform within a particular medium.

As the wireframes came through and we discussed the business model and features, it became obvious that this platform was falling prey to a typical thought-trap that affects a lot of startups when it comes to product design: what to optimise the platform for in order to be profitable.

The platform was falling prey to a typical thought-trap many startups suffer from.

 

The typical thinking of people with investor money follows a sort of obvious logic, e.g.

  • Your high tech startup should invest highly on recruiting the most talented engineers (necessary for building stuff), and not so much on HR, right?
  • If you have a paid platform for recruitment, or freelance platform aimed at big companies wishing to outsource work, you optimise for the paying customer, right?
  • If you have a national park around seeing the Iberian lynx, you make sure the environment optimised for the lynx. Not the dime-a-dozen wild bunnies, right?

It’s obvious and logical, right?

Except

  • Bunnies are the basis of the the entire lynx ecosystem. No bunnies? No foxes who eat the bunnies, no lynxes (who eat foxes).
  • Those highly motivated, super-talented employees need even more care and maybe even personal development than average employees. You absolutely need skilled HR or risk becoming the next Uber.
  • without optimising to attract high quality talent, your customers have nothing worth paying for on your platform. You’ve created an expensive HR/Freelance equivalent of those dollar book clubs. People will try it out, and then they’ll move on. And the next platform will try and fix the problem.

It’s the opposite of trickle-down economics. Especially since this model actually works.

 

Optimise your platform around the bunnies, the building blocks upon which the whole ecosystem depends.

Make it attractive and easy to those niche case designers, graphic artists and developers who bring that ‘magic extra’ perspective to a team, not just your mental image of what a ‘typical’ developer or ‘creative’ looks like.

Make it attractive to people with ten+ years in industry who aren’t desperate for any job but are interested in sharing skills and belonging to a community or seeking a better quality of work/life balance.

Make it inclusive to women and non binary people (that means at least having a documented process for behaviour policy and how complaints are dealt with, and well as a diversity plan), not because it’s ‘PC,  but because it results in stronger products and more sustainable businesses.

Think of it this way: everyone else is optimising in other direction and there’s still no clear best in breed.  So, this is how you can differentiate and stand out.

Need a hand finding that building block?

Book a 60 minute call with me.

or follow and DM me on twitter

If you want to maximise the number of lynxes, you need to optimise for bunnies.

 

You don’t have to have the sexiest tech to build the best app

 

Happy Friday! Are you feeling like a runner at the end of a marathon? I’m on the last leg of two concurrent projects and that’s how I’m feeling. A mix of exhilarated but also anxious to get the best out of the last stretch.

In my last post, I talked about how the very feature that sold me a product ultimately became the very reason it failed me.

New technology is sexy. But a well-made product doesn’t have to be sexy.

Sometimes what works best is just what pays attention to how people are fallible and is designed to fix that.

Like Dave Ramsey’s envelope system, it doesn’t have to be high tech in order for people to become evangelical about how much it works. It just needs to fix the root of the problem in human behaviour (in this case, the undeniable tangibility of either having a pile of cash or not having one), and nip the knock-on problems (overspending) in the bud before they develop.

To continue my very different experiences running two time trackers in parallel, I present..

The ‘side-girl’ timetracker who became ‘wifie’

Human beings are masters at self-deception.

At some point after I shaved off time from invoices, I started “flirting” with another paid time tracker.  Ya know, “Just looking.” No billing yet.

Almost immediately, I was sure I would let the free trial expire.

1. It didn’t show time entries as breakdowns of a nine to five day.

At first, this was clearly a sign that our relationship could go no further.

2. It required me to manually start and stop tasks.

HA! I don’t have to do that with the other one. What a drag.

3. It gave subtle, unobtrusive feedback at regular time intervals to bring awareness to the passage of time 

And just like that, I noticed how it changed the quality of my focus.

I started questioning if what was I doing right at this point was the most important thing for this task, or if it was “a nice to explore if there’s time” task?

  1. The design encouraged free note taking of the task process while the timer was running, without obstructing or influencing the dashboard layout of timesheets.

In my previous tool, this made my time logs in the day look “fatter” and it really wasn’t designed for more than a short description. Longer sentences ran together.

When I ran invoicing in my side-app, it was immediately clear what took so long in each project, but also, because of the time-feedback at intervals, my attention was called back repeatedly to question what I was working on in that moment, making the notes I took something I could stand behind.

In addition, I noticed that the act of manually starting that timer during that free trial became how I got focused.

More so than running app blockers or moving my phone to the corridor. That initial behaviour became the start of a habit loop.

A habit that made me feel better and more satisfied with my work at the end of the day.

The act of stopping the timer became a signal to rest and walk around a bit. Or water the plants. Or answer my poor husband’s messages. You know, have a life.

Furthermore, the default time interval was set to 15 minutes and the app walkthrough explained that actually, this is more reflective of true time worked than logging by the minute.

That nagging feeling I had of “but these gaps shouldn’t be here” and “but this took longer, I know it” was vindicated.

Even the absence of an hourly timeline, whole irksome at first, removed my guilt about “gaps” and I started working in a healthier, more flexible, and more productive way.

I focused on what got done over the day, not holding myself to some imaginary, perfect version of me who should have done half my weeks tasks before lunchtime.

It used hashtags that you could write in on the fly, rather than forcing me to use dropdowns. So it was much faster to use than any other start-stop timer I’d used before.

It also allowed me to write in time in a number of formats (1h, 60m, 60 m, 1:00, 1) because as humans, we do think of time differently in different contexts and subconsciously enter them the way we think we think about them in that context.

We’re not always aware of how we are inconsistent until we get an error message. And by that time, we’ve wasted time and need to repeat ourselves.

TL;DR; You don’t have to have the sexiest technology to build the best app. 

a. Just observe how people behave

e.g resisting using a time tracker, or hating that tracking time takes time that isn’t being tracked. Both apps were designed to fix these.

b. Get to the behavioural root of the problem

  1. “oh my god, I have to scroll through so many projects in this dropdown. Wait. I have to create a project for this first, THEN scroll again? Nevermind, I’ll estimate it later.”  <– both first and second-time trackers solved this.
  2. Time tracking takes time <- both timers solve this
  3. getting absorbed in the work and forgetting the passage of time <– first time tracker didn’t solve this or knock-on effects

c. Identify the knock on problems these cause

Overworking, circling the drain of burnout, feeling like I never got enough done, not knowing why particular time entries took so long.

4. Make opinionated design decisions to prevent them

The lack of per hour day view is  (I’m pretty sure) to prevent people like chasing an idea of a perfect, mythological work day with zero gaps between time logs.

And finally, if there’s ever a choice between being better for a business (AI timesheets are never guestimated) or being best for its workers…

always design for people. 

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