I have seen a lot of tired looking colleagues around. I have spoken to people that are tetchy who are not normally tetchy. I know of colleagues who have been working far in excess of their normal working hours…

Is this the new normal?

It has made me wonder about the sustainability of it all, and how many people are going to “fall over” next year when they come to realise that this pandemic is not going to go away anytime soon, even with the introduction of a vaccine.

It became obvious quite quickly that COVID-19 was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. Being a marathon runner myself, I am well used to pacing and knowing what happens if one sets off too quickly! There will be few people working in microbiology who have not been affected by the extra work pressures that this pandemic has recently caused. In my opinion 2021 will be more of a risk for burnout than 2020. Continued pressure leads to burnout…

Here are a few of my own personal tips for avoiding burnout, in the hope that I will be able to get through the next year relatively unscathed.

1. Be very selective about voluntary work:- We may not realise it, but a lot of work we do is to a large extent “voluntary” in nature. Whether it is giving presentations, reviewing research papers, attending webinars, participating in advisory groups. In a pandemic situation all this type of work just adds to the stress, and eats away at our working hours. Please, be ruthless with this type of work, and just focus on your core work, even if some onlookers think you are being lazy…
2. Don’t get caught up in the “work” hype:- In the pandemic situation, people lose perspective, and have a tendency to get caught up in the work frenzy, feeding off each other’s nervous tension, reading and responding to every work request. Don’t do this, keep perspective and be aware that you only have so many working hours each week to be as productive as possible.
3. Take leave:- Mix this up between intermittent “treat” days off and the occasional period of longer leave (1 week plus). When you are on leave, you must be completely detached from work, no email contact, no texts, no Whatsapp groups, nothing. Switch off all your notifications. Ideally have a dedicated work phone and leave it there. I find that the people that adhere to these leave rules are the ones who have the best work-life balance.
4. Don’t do backlogged work on return from leave:-  Taking leave is one thing. Returning from it is quite another! The last several times I have been on leave I have left an Out of Office message saying. I will be on leave between dates X and Y. Emails received during this period will not be read. If you have an important personal message for me then please resend it after date Y. I  then have an empty inbox within 1 minute of returning to work because all the emails received during leave get dumped immediately and unceremoniously into an archive folder without review. Trust me, the sky does not fall!, and I do not return from leave with an impending sense of doom. Rarely does anyone actually resend an email on my return, which goes to show how “impersonal” or trivial most email is…
5. Don’t go to every meeting you are invited to:- I get invited to approximately 15 meetings a week. If I went to all of them, half my work hours would be gone in one fell swoop, just like that. I therefore am fairly ruthless about which meetings I go to. Are they meetings where I can influence the outcome, or where I need agreement from others for the agenda I am following? Otherwise it is just another hour down the drain.
6. Be ignorant:- Nobody can be expected to be up to date with all the COVID research. Even if you are up to date, you will almost certainly be out of date within weeks, such is the pace of knowledge acquisition. Accept that you will be a bit ignorant! Pick a topic within COVID that particularly interests you and keep abreast of developments in that field. Then try and contribute in that area.
7. Leave work at work:- Working out of hours should very much be the exception as opposed to the norm. When you finish work, go home to your family and the rest of your life and your other passions outside of work. You can start thinking about work again the next day.
8. Connect and be kind:-. It is very easy to become short-tempered when you have a lot of work on your plate. However, before you have an argument, remember that you need to see and work with this person the next day, and the day after that. You can connect and be kind without having to be best friends.
9. Share the blame:- I am a big believer in the philosphophy that a problem shared is a problem halved. There is nothing more stressful than trying to sort out a complex issue single handedly. 
10. Build teams rather than being a linchpin:- From an individual point of view, it is nice to be seen as a linchpin, to be viewed as indispensable in your particular department or area of expertise. However from an institutional point of view and particularly during a simmering pandemic like this one, linchpins can be detrimental, because of an over-reliance on the linchpin. When the linchpin eventually falls over, because nobody can keep going forever, then the whole system runs into trouble. What you need is an effective team, where one person can go off on leave (or off sick) and there will be little difference to the productivity. This pandemic has made me realise how critical it is to function as a team, rather than putting all your efforts into being a linchpin.

I currently have 2 jobs and a family of 8 at home. If anyone is going to burn out, it will be me! I am very aware of the need to listen to my own advice and follow the rules above. Sometimes I lapse and then need to discipline myself in order to optimise work-life balance. 

Even with a vaccine on the horizon, the COVID-19 pandemic will keep us all occupied for at least the next year, and most likely a bit longer than that. We each need to have a personal plan of how to navigate through it from a work point of view.

Look after yourself, and look after each other.

Michael