One of the questions I like to ask people as they’re considering what they might do after academia is what their ideal workday looks like. When do you get up? What do you put on? Where do you go? What kind of work do you perform? Who do you work with?
Often, people respond that they can’t think of an ideal workday, that everything they consider sounds stupid or pointless or wrong somehow.
Then they tell me that they’re afraid that, in their heart of hearts, they’re just lazy and don’t want to work at all.
Oh sweetie, that’s not it
When I ask them for evidence that they’re actually, at heart, lazy, they usually can’t come up with any real examples. Maybe they’ve procrastinated sometimes, especially around a big or meaningful project.
Most of the time, in fact, these same people have taken on extra work. They’ve volunteered for non-profits or organized fellow graduate students.
They aren’t lazy. They’re exhausted.
Burnout just happens to look like lazy
People who are basically lazy aren’t likely to end up in academia, because academia involves juggling insane workloads with really tough intellectual effort. No truly lazy person is going to sign up for that.
In fact, the kind of people who do sign up for academia are much more likely to be the kind of people who thrive on challenge, who love learning new things, who take on too much.
And let’s face it – academia is not a place that generally values work-life balance. In fact, it’s the kind of place that points fingers at any time away from work as evidence that you aren’t sufficiently committed.
That, my friends, leads us all straight to burnout.
The way back out
One of the perks of academia is that, other than classes and required meetings, most of the deadlines are, shall we say, not immediate. In other words, there’s often wiggle room to let other things slide for a time while you sleep and commune with nature and watch bad television and do whatever else will help you recover.
Aha! You say. I already slack off like that!
But recovery takes longer than I’m guessing you’re giving yourself. It takes big swathes of time, but it doesn’t actually take that long once you give yourself big swathes of time. Two weeks. Maybe three.
When you can give yourself a real recovery, you can often start to tell the difference between “I love this job / career / program but holy hell, I’m crispy burnt-out” and “oh dear god, get me out of here.”
In that space, you’ll be able to tell what your ideal workday looks like. You’ll be able to notice which jobs or careers or whatevers actually excite you. And from there, you can figure out your Next Right Step.
Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.