Speaker A
I'm interested in this concept of burnout. Yeah. We hear about burnout. We associate it with too much adrenaline, lack of sleep, tired and wired, feeling disengaged.
Drs. Newport and Huberman discuss burnout causes in knowledge work, focusing on workload, digital communication, and systemic challenges.
Key Takeaways
- Burnout is driven more by the nature of work and communication overload than sheer workload.
- Digital communication creates constant distractions that fragment focus and reduce productivity.
- Individual efforts to reduce burnout are limited without organizational changes.
- Wholeheartedness and deep work are key to combating burnout.
- The current digital work environment is a systemic problem requiring systemic solutions.
Summary
- Burnout is linked to excessive administrative overhead and constant distractions rather than just work quantity.
- Digital communication tools like email and Slack create a low-friction but high-interruption workflow.
- Workers spend more time talking about work than doing high-value tasks, causing psychological strain.
- The current work system creates a suboptimal Nash equilibrium where individuals cannot easily reduce distractions alone.
- Burnout stems from the absurdity of excessive meetings and emails that prevent meaningful progress.
- Wholehearted engagement is proposed as an antidote to burnout, emphasizing deep focus and genuine interest.
- The systemic nature of digital communication in workplaces makes burnout difficult to solve individually.
- Organizational-level changes are required to break free from inefficient communication patterns.
- Smartphones and digital tools have adaptive uses but also contribute to cognitive overload.
- The burnout epidemic reflects both increased workload and the psychological frustration of ineffective work processes.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
The poet, David White, has a beautiful poem, I forget the title, about burnout where he says that, I think the cure to burnout is wholeheartedness.
Speaker A
And I always like that. It's a bit more abstract than the kinds of things we're talking about today.
Speaker A
But I like that because there's something about wholeheartedness, really leaning into something with the true desire to be there and to explore it, no matter how hard, that is the opposite extreme of burnout.
Speaker A
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think burnout in, if we're thinking knowledge work, like people with office jobs, my diagnosis there, it's not exactly quantity of work, that does play a role.
Speaker A
It's the kind of work, because I think what's happening, what's been deranging actually for people in these jobs is workloads are getting larger, in part because communication is low friction, and we always want to be demonstrating activity because of pseudo productivity,
Speaker A
and people are always asking us to do things and we say yes. Everything we say yes to brings with it administrative overhead, right?
Speaker A
Which is talking about the thing, but not actually doing it. So it's like emails about the commitment, it's meetings about the commitment, because our workloads are larger, what happens then is more and more of our time has to service this administrative overhead
Speaker A
because everything we say yes to brings with it its own overhead, it adds up, it aggregates, right?
Speaker A
So now more and more of our day is spent talking about work and not actually doing the work, and then make it even worse, it's not like this overhead is all batched together, it's sort of spread out throughout your day.
Speaker A
So it's also putting you in that state of constant distraction, which makes it hard to do work.
Speaker A
What I think is burning people out is they're now in this state where they're saying, I'm spending most of my day talking about work, sending emails, attending meetings.
Speaker A
Very little time is left to actually make progress on the work, and then the workload gets larger and larger.
Speaker A
This by itself is deranging, right? It feels like you're in some sort of nihilistic experiment.
Speaker A
Like, what is this? Why do I have six hours of meetings? I'm not actually, this can't be the right way to work and then what happens of course is you have to recover time in the morning, in the afternoon, maybe after kids go to bed
Speaker A
to try to actually make progress. So now you also have just a straight work quantity issue.
Speaker A
So you're working more hours, there's an energy drain. But I think that psychological piece of this can't possibly make sense.
Speaker A
That like, I am checking email once every two minutes and spent six hours in Zoom, like doing very little actual high value work.
Speaker A
Like this can't be the right way to work. That's what I think the burnout epidemic right now is coming from is that psychological component of, we all know this is stupid, but no one is saying the emperor has no clothes on.
Speaker A
We all know that the amount of email and meetings I'm doing is such a waste of my salary.
Speaker A
Like this is a highly trained brain, like I could be writing these reports or this code or creating these business strategies, but we're all just accepting this.
Speaker A
I think the absurdity of the current situation is creating as much of the burnout as it is just, we also have to add these extra hours.
Speaker A
There's just like a straight aggregation of work quantity. It's almost analogous to taking professional athletes or would-be professional athletes and having them do a bunch of other physical labor so that they're showing up not fresh for the game
Speaker A
and little micro injuries and distracted and- And no one's admitting that this doesn't make sense and everyone's just getting injured and no one's talking about it.
Speaker A
So it's the absurdity of it would drive people crazy, and it is driving people crazy.
Speaker A
It's so difficult though because certain things like smartphones are very useful on the hospital ward.
Speaker A
I mean, doctors can communicate, nurses communicate so much faster now, parents and kids can communicate, Who's going to pick up the kids?
Speaker A
Nope, got stuck in traffic. You go this way. Alternate route on Google Maps and, and on and on.
Speaker A
So it's all woven in with stuff that's also highly adaptive. It makes it tough.
Speaker A
Yeah. You know, it's almost like the work of being a selective filter- Yeah. is half the work of trying to deload the cognitive systems that would allow you to do deep work.
Speaker A
Yeah, well and the workplace is even harder than that because part of the issue is email and Slack, let's just say digital communication.
Speaker A
I spent a lot of time studying that closely, right? From like a techno critic standpoint, the introduction of digital communication to the workplace and the problem there is the reason why we're checking this all the time, it's not some like individual habit de-optimization.
Speaker A
It's not, oh, I should just check this less often. What happened is when we introduced low friction digital communication to the office, this emerging consensus came about that said, great, let's just use ad hoc messaging as our major way of collaborating.
Speaker A
Like we can just figure things out on the fly. I can just be like, Andrew, what's going on with the whatever?
Speaker A
And you can answer me and I can send it back. This was very convenient, the activation cost was low and so this is how we began actually collaborating on work.
Speaker A
Now what happens is as workloads get higher, we now have many things at the same time, they're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversations.
Speaker A
Most of these have some sort of time sensitivity, right? So if I email you and say like, what's going on with like the guests coming later today?
Speaker A
We have to kind of resolve this before later today so now, it's not just that these messages are going back and forth with all these different threads, but I have to keep checking my inbox to make sure the gap's not too big.
Speaker A
This is not a failure of habits, it's not a moral failure, it's necessitated by the fact that all these back and forth conversations have to keep moving forward.
Speaker A
So it is difficult then if you're in this system to step out by yourself because this is the way we're collaborating is these asynchronous back and forth messages and I can't disengage myself from that without slowing things down.
Speaker A
Like from a mathematical game theory point of view, it's a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. It's not the right place, not the right way to run this, the utility value of this configuration is low, but no one individual can deploy a different strategy
Speaker A
that's going to be higher value. We're stuck in it, right? And so now it becomes really hard for an individual just to say, I want to check my email less often.
Speaker A
It's built in systemically into this hyperactive hive mind workflow and the only way to break free from the suboptimal configuration is to basically have the organization itself do like a really high cost change to the rules of the game.
Speaker A
These are how we're collaborating now. We're not using email freely anymore. We're going to use this system instead.
Speaker A
Here, it it's a very expensive top down procedure to free ourselves from the suboptimality.
Speaker A
It's like in the world of work, that's partially why this is such an intractable problem and I tried to write a book about this recently and it was really hard to gain traction because it's not easy to solve this.
Speaker A
Like no individual can move out of this, and you have to put in a lot of energy as an organization to try to change this.
Speaker A
So, in some sense, email is a more insidious problem than social media on the phone, because at least over here, this is my engagement with this and I might have these moderate behavioral addictions, but I could make differences here.
Speaker A
In my company, oh, this is much worse. This is like a systemic problem. It's an emergent deterministic work impact on an economic, social, cultural system that was
Speaker A
So it's a really tough situation sometimes, especially in the world of work. How do we get out of this constant distraction?
Speaker A
It's why, you know, I wrote "Deep Work" and I was like, well, why don't people just do this?
Speaker A
That's why they don't just do this because it's not so easy to reclaim this time.
Speaker A
Well, it's like when I was a graduate student in postdoc, I was focused on eating pretty well, meaning just cleanish food and people talked less about that at that time.
Speaker A
Yeah. I was also really committed to exercise since I was 16, people were less committed to that in the academic sector at that time.
Speaker A
Now I think it's commonplace for people. Like, I'm going to my yoga class, I'm doing my zone two cardio, I go to the gym, you know, men and women do this.
Speaker A
Yeah. I remember having like this like sneak off to the gym like yeah, yeah and you know, you felt like a bit of an odd ball if you were the one bringing your lunch to the, you know, the pizza luncheon.
Speaker A
Yeah. Not that there's anything wrong with pizza, love pizza but I was trying to eat well.
Speaker A
I have for a long time. I feel better when I do and I'm grateful that I did.
Speaker A
But you get some weird looks like, "Oh, do you have an eating disorder or something like that?" That's what people would say then.
Speaker A
Yep. Now people would probably look, you know, that looks better than the pizza people start to understand.
Speaker A
So I think there needs to be a cultural shift. Yep. And I think there has been a cultural shift around food and exercise.
Speaker A
Certainly food, meditation, sleep. Yep. I think people are far more accepting and actually encouraging of their workers and coworkers taking really good care in order to function better for longer.
Speaker A
Yeah. I think it's going to be the next revolution and it's going to be a revolution that's going to unlock, we're talking on the scale of like a trillion dollar GBP.
Speaker A
When we go through knowledge work and have this revolution, I call it like the cognitive revolution.
Speaker A
Let's take really seriously how the brains our workers work. Like these are our number one assets.
Speaker A
Like, not to be too mechanistic about it, but what is our main capital asset if we're a knowledge work organization?
Speaker A
We have some buildings, but it's really these brains that we have like employment contracts with.
Speaker A
These brains create value. Let's take seriously how the brains actually operate and as soon as we do, we'll say, "Oh my god, these brains are checking email once every two minutes.
Speaker A
What a disaster." It's like if we had a car factory and we spent $20 million on one of these German robots that can, you know, put cars on the doors or whatever and we just weren't taking care of it
Speaker A
and it was like rusty and it was dropping the doors and the production pipeline was going down.
Speaker A
It's like, this is crazy, we got to take care of this equipment, right? When we have the cognitive revolution, the sort of cognitive capital revolution and knowledge work, I think it's going to unlock a trillion dollar GDP.
Speaker A
I think that's how unproductive we've been. If we just think in the pure raw terms of brains producing stuff that's worth money.
Speaker A
Like if we're just like super deterministic and kind of inhumane about it, so much is being lost because we're in these suboptimal nash equilibriums, everyone just email everyone all the time, everyone's just on Slack all the time, that when we finally have the revolution to get over that,
Speaker A
it's going to be a massive economic hit. And you know, AI might play a role in this, right?
Speaker A
Because maybe AI, once it gets planning capabilities, is going to be able to take the burden of some of the back and forth planning, I think it's easier to get there with cultural shifts, I don't think we have to wait to build
Speaker A
an email capable Chat GPT to do this, like you could solve this tomorrow, This is cultural as much as it's tool based.
Speaker A
But I think it's going to be a huge revolution when we get there. Akin to like the assembly line in manufacturing, which was like a 10x improvement in productivity metrics, when we figured out the continuous motion assembly line
Speaker A
with interchangeable parts was a massive, it created this productivity engine, I'm using the economic sense of productivity now, you know, dollars per worker, the economic miracle that came from this process-based industrial innovations in the late 19th, early 20th century
Speaker A
that the money generated by that, the wealth generated by that was the foundation of the modern west.
Speaker A
Like the whole world as we know it was built. So there's these huge latent potentials, and right now I don't think we're there with the brain and I think it's going to be a huge revolution.
Speaker A
It's just difficult, right? It's not an easy revolution to start, but I think it's going to change whole industries in ways that we're not, it's going to be hard to even imagine.
Speaker A
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Topics:burnoutknowledge workdigital communicationemail overloadworkplace productivitydeep workpsychological burnoutorganizational changework distractionsHuberman Lab
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