I was recently told I was too efficient and that was why I felt burnt out.
I was the person who would reply to emails around the clock, volunteer for projects and new roles, cover staff absences, and kept adding to my own workload to help support others.
I always offered to do more than my role required because I genuinely enjoyed my work, I wanted to make sure students left higher education having had a positive experience even if they faced challenges during their academic journey, and because alongside this I had also been trying to carve out a pathway to leadership.
This approach had always worked well for me in the past, as I could gain a lot of experience in a short amount of time and build up my expertise in a range of areas, including management and leadership. And so it’s what I would recommend to anyone who asked how to make those career moves into more senior positions.
It worked because I am a quick learner, intuitive and efficient. Even when I am not working, my brain is still ticking along in the background planning, problem solving and building ideas.
So when I was told my efficiency was an issue, I initially laughed it off.
But being signed off for 4 weeks last summer had me reevaluating my work-family-life balance, and I kept going back to this comment and decided to reassess the working patterns and habits I had created over the last 17 years working in Higher Education.
It wasn’t the efficiency that was resulting in burn out, it was the fact that despite knowing I was at capacity on paper, I still kept offering myself as an unlimited resource to the workplace as I didn’t feel I was at capacity.
As workload in higher education has peaks and troughs throughout the year, I would say yes when I felt I could manage the additional work, and then end up being over-extended when a peak would hit. This cycle resulted in constant peaks throughout the year and eventually meant I needed time out to decompress.
Having had time to reflect on this I decided to take a step back and sit with inefficiency for a while, and here’s what happened.
I blocked out hours in my calendar as recommended in our workload allocation document for everything I was responsible for. I scheduled in my hours for planning, for marking, for scholarly activity and for research. I started saying no more. I made sure to only offer times that were unassigned in my calendar for impromptu meeting invites, rather than moving tasks around to accommodate others calendars. I stopped rushing to complete tasks in shorter timeframes. I took my lunch breaks. I turned off notifications for emails and Teams on my phone and shut-down my computer at 5pm too.
And I finally felt like I had time to breathe again.
Taking back control of how I used my hours, slowing down my pace and taking a step back from saying yes to every request and opportunity that came my way, resulted in my inbox becoming quieter, my Teams messages becoming fewer, and invites to meetings reducing significantly too. There was the occasional “could you do…” but gently reminding those around me that I was in fact at capacity meant those requests soon disappeared too.
As I sit here I know that my mind is grateful for the peace this has brought to my life, and surprisingly it’s no longer ticking away around the clock thinking about and troubleshooting work issues either.
So maybe it’s about time that we all become a bit more inefficient, and took a side step from constantly offering ourselves as an unlimited resource to the workplace, and instead allocated time for extra responsibilities, projects and recognised career development and training within our existing workload models.
Aniqa T Khaliq 