Everyone wants to tell you you’re burned out because you’re doing too much. Slow down, do less, clear your plate.  Take a vacation. Sometimes that’s true.

But after twenty years inside organizations, here’s the fact I rarely hear talked about: you can burn out doing a small amount of the wrong things faster than you’ll ever burn out doing a lot of the right ones.

Meaningless effort is a particular kind of exhausting. The tasks that don’t matter to you, the work that doesn’t connect to anything you care about, the things you only do because you think you should. That drains you in a way hard, meaningful work simply doesn’t.

About half of my work is in healthcare, and I see this constantly. Recently I was with a group of surgeons, and the sheer volume of admin they have to carry out is staggering. The charting, the boxes, the documentation. And it grinds them down, not because they don’t love the work. They love the work. It’s everything piled around it that’s wearing them out.

You’ve felt your own version of this. You can work a twelve-hour day on something you love and feel lit up. Then spend two hours on busywork and want to lie on the floor.

So before you assume the answer is to do less, ask the harder question: how much of what’s draining me actually matters to me?  What do I need to hand off to my team that would actually develop them?

Burnout isn’t always a volume problem. Sometimes it’s a meaning problem. And those two require completely different solutions, which is exactly why so many wellness fixes don’t work.

Let me know your thoughts on this.  Speaking of vacation, I’m currently on the beach somewhere!

Cristina “Getting Re-Energized” Filippo