Anne Truitt Zelenka

How do you find high performance in your work life without burning out? That’s what I’ve been wondering after I crashed at the end of last year. After two months of nonstop work and work-related worry, I couldn’t continue. So I arranged to take a mini-sabbatical.

I first needed immediate stress relief, but I also wanted to study stress management so that when I return full force to the world of work I don’t go through this again. I found two books that seem to offer the tools I need for going forward: Stress Free for Good for immediate relief and The Power of Full Engagement for ongoing productivity without burnout-causing stress.

I share my experience here along with some ideas from each book in case they might be helpful to you.

For immediate stress relief: 10 practices from Stress Free for Good

For immediate stress relief, I found the suggestions in Fred Luskin and Kenneth R. Pelletier’s Stress Free for Good invaluable. They offer 10 practices that can calm you down immediately. I especially found the practices of deep breathing, appreciation, and quitting doing what doesn’t work to be helpful.

And I needed help. During December and early January, I woke up each morning with a racing heart and shallow breathing — worried about what I needed to do, what responses I would face online, and how the world would greet my book. I began using more and more coffee and wine to manage my energy cycles. I was a mess, and it couldn’t go on. I couldn’t go on.

So I didn’t. I quit writing for GigaOM even though I had many hopes for the future tied up into that. I cut back on my Web Worker Daily writing even though it had been an inspiring and engaging activity for over a year. I did far less book launch follow-up than I planned because I felt utterly empty of the confidence and energy I needed for that.

Stress management going forward: Managing energy with a bursty work style

Once I removed the stressors, I needed to find a way of going forward that allowed me both to engage with the work I love but yet live an energetic, productive, and connected life. That’s where a second book suggests a way forward. That book is The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. They bring their years of experience helping athletes find top performance to the world of work.

Here’s what they say about achieving high performance without burnout:

The key to expanding capacity is both to push beyond one’s ordinary limits and to regularly seek recovery, which is when growth actually occurs.

Loehr and Schwartz distinguish oscillatory styles of work from linear styles. With oscillation, you balance spending and recovering energy, interspersing periods of work that challenge you beyond your current capabilities with recovery activities and rituals that replenish your energy.

Linearity, on the other hand, represents over- or under-training: “too much energy expenditure without recovery or too much recovery without sufficient energy expenditure.”

Oscillation in your work life is bursty — you work according to your energy and in order to get what you need to done, not according to standard hours or to what expectations other people have for your behavior.

How do you put oscillation into practice? First you build regular periods of recovery into your day. Loehr and Schwartz suggest working about 90 to 120 minutes at a go then taking some sort of break. You also build recovery into your life on a more macro level, scheduling exercise, socializing, hobbies, and other activities that replenish your energy into your daily life.

There’s much more to Loehr and Schwartz’ approach than just what I’ve sketched here, so if you’re looking for a way to maintain high performance in your work life while avoiding burnout, get the book.

My experience with linearity vs. oscillation

I was working linearly starting in November, when I began writing for GigaOM regularly in addition to Web Worker Daily blogging and book launch preparation. I stopped painting. I stopped blogging at The Everyday Cafe, my family food blog. I stopped socializing with my friends, online and off. I stopped engaging with my kids. I worked, or I thought about work, all the time.

What’s next? I don’t know. I’m going to take February off from contract work to regroup. I’m not going to be idle during that time, because working too little is just as bad and just as un-bursty as working too much. I am going to focus on what matters most to me: connecting with my friends and family and professional contacts, writing out of inspiration and for insight, and finding a way to make a contribution while I earn a living.