Can productivity burn you out?

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. There are many causes to burnout. It ranges from long work hours, high work load, lack of support, toxic human relationships, high demands, interpersonal communications to poor self care. That long list of stressors is relatable. The question is, can productivity be one of them?

Commonly productivity is treated as an antidote for burnout from all other stressors but have your ever wondered what would burnout from producivity itself will look like?

Here are a few tell-tale productivity burnout symptoms to look out for .

1. Beating yourself up by jam-packing your calendar with no space for rest in a day.
2. Having a long to-do list and getting stressed by the length of the list increasing day by day and not reducing.
3. Constantly feeling you have more projects to do and less time to get it done.
4. You struggle with habit formation. When you miss one day, all hell breaks loose and everything goes haywire because of that one miss.
5. You have amazing systems and routines in paper but doing it consistently is a herculean task for you everyday.
6. You spend more than 4 hours on your routines and you struggle to complete other activities. It feels like the day is spent just on your routines.
7. You constantly feel like a failure despite trying your best and following every tip and trick out there.

Relax. Productivty can also burn you out. A burnout from a good thing is still a burn out my friend.

You need to make your productivity a little more spacious than what it is now. It all boils down to choice making. It is not that your productivity sucks, it might be your choices. Do less. You will do well. May be that is what you should focus on!

🥂 to choices!