The internet is awash with famous people telling us to take a break, look after ourselves, smell the roses. The personal stories tend to be thrilling tales with happy endings. Compounding sacrifices for some grand purpose eventually cause exhaustion, which enforces rest, which in turn delivers a blinding flash of self-care inspiration.

I don’t doubt the sincerity in these efforts, but I do wonder if the unintentional message might be: the right way to do this is to smash yourself to get where I am, and then you can have the luxury of a self-care epiphany. First, hard-won ‘success’; then, a breather and possibly a best-seller.

Maybe hitting bottom and then finding a path to recovery just makes a better story than ‘slow-and-steady’. We seem to be missing a whole genre of not-very-nail-biting stories about people who’ve developed the knack of managing their energy reserves over the long run. People who didn’t wait for the crash to start the re-build.

‘When I need it the most is when it’s hardest to make time for’

Time to rebuild energy reserves seems to become optional for a lot of us the instant the pressure is on. If you lean towards perfectionism, that’s especially likely to be true. For short periods, that’s not a big problem. The issue is when the pressure becomes constant and we’re waiting for it to let up before we shift the balance back to topping up the reserves. That’s a rapid path to “empty”.

And that brings us to the survey we ran this past fortnight for TANK. The idea was to understand what categories of ‘rebuild’ activities people are having the most trouble getting to, what the biggest issues are in getting to them, and the specific benefits they’d be most keen to see in an anti-burnout system like TANK.

The top three things people said they had trouble finding the time and energy for, all coming in at around the 80% mark:

1. Myself, e.g., for exercise or meditation
2. Community
3. Friends

That’s very consistent with what we’ve heard in interviews. As one person said:

I often "set aside time" for myself, but it is often co-opted by someone else's needs. I lack the ability to prioritise myself.

The difficulties people nominated were pretty consistent across these activities, with ‘too much else on’ clearly leading the way. ‘Too stressed or distracted’ and ‘doesn’t get scheduled’ came in second and third. The exception was ‘time with friends’, where ‘doesn’t get scheduled’ was just as big a factor as ‘too much else on’.

This is useful input for the features we’re building: ‘too much else on’ and ‘too distracted or stressed’ are exactly what we’re building the app to help with. But it’s striking how often ‘doesn’t get scheduled’ came up: this still came up when we removed responses that also pointed to ‘too much else on’, so it’s not just that it doesn’t get scheduled because there’s not enough time.

If this is you, it might be time to fix that: time for yourself or with friends aren’t luxuries. They’re how you “fit your own oxygen mask first”.

Baby steps

So far so good on the survey - useful to have some quants around some of the themes we’ve heard in customer interviews. It got even more interesting at the end, when we asked people to tell us what they’d like to get from an anti-burnout system like TANK. It was a long list, but we landed on a solid top five:

1. Spot patterns and learn from how I'm feeling at the end of each day
2. Stay motivated when I need to stick with something to achieve a long-term goal
3. Learn where my time goes, e.g., so that I can decide how to use it better
4. Manage priorities so I can make the best use of my time
5. Set boundaries so I can make time for what's important

Wait, what? How did we go from ‘self-care’ to ‘how I’m feeling’ and ‘long-term goals’? It’s a fair question, but the research tells us they’re all parts of the same system. I’ve met a lot of people whose first instinct when they’re at low ebb and feeling like they’re not making progress is to dump the blame squarely on themselves - to assume they’re not disciplined or motivated enough, that they don’t have ‘what it takes’. So then their second instinct is to double down, work even harder, crash through or crash out.

In other words, to accelerate the amount of energy they’re expending, like a driver flooring it to get to the service station before the fuel gauge hits empty.

We’d be far better off - individually and collectively - if we took slow progress and low motivation as a sign that we probably have too much on. Going even slower is counterintuitive, but it’s a good bet: retreat, recover, regroup. Top up the reserves for a bit before launching back in.

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Don’t wait until you get to the end of the to-do list. It will still be there when you get back.

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