This article on the history of burnout notes its origin in New York City’s East Village in the 1970s. A psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger coined the term, borrowing from language that his patients used to describe the effects of drug use, while also calling out to the wave of landlord-driven arson that rocked the neighborhood in those years. In a neat bit of sleight of hand, his definition of burnout managed to exclude the people he expropriated the term from. And yet, as Bench Ansfield notes, “it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings. Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed.”
Recent entries from the blog.
-
Emma Hayes has tips for baking with brain fog, among them getting prepped, keeping track of time, and playing to your strengths. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is all good advice for doing anything with brain fog—whether you need that counsel for yourself or are looking to support someone on your team. I’m particularly fond of the advice to stick to one bowl—that is, to choose projects that reduce the margins for error when you know your likelihood to commit an error is high.
-
I work with people from all different kinds of organizations—different sizes, different industries, different countries and cultures and processes—but everyone I’ve ever worked with talks about how their organization is, in myriad ways, busted. I come back often to this piece from Lane Becker about how all human systems are enormous trash fires—that every time people come together to make something, things start to blaze, in one way or another. The question to ask yourself, as Becker does, is “Am I surrounded by a team of firefighters or a team of arsonists?”
-
Jeff Eaton rants about how AI is not going to replace design systems, but I think the more interesting part of this is the recognition that systems are a kind of language—that is, they don’t exist to eliminate the need to communicate but to facilitate that communication. As Eaton writes, “The solution is to engage with the concept of a design system, to grapple with its language-like nature, and to create one that can evolve through use to meet emerging needs. One that can vary contextually but retain consistency across many communities. One that is only successful when it enables groups of creative humans to communicate effectively.”
“These last few years have been hard for trying. The act of surviving in a global pandemic, in the chaos of climate change, in waves hands in all directions, taps a lot out of you.” Here’s Dan Sinker with some wisdom about trying. What I like about this: the recognition that most of us, most of the time, are just trying—with no guarantee of success or even a plan for getting anywhere, just making it up as we go. And also the acknowledgement that even trying has its fallow periods—but given time to rest, a fallow field will eventually reseed itself.
-
This exceptionally rigorous and insightful article from Maurice Mitchell outlines the challenges faced by social justice institutions, alongside a set of clear, actionable, and thoughtful approaches to addressing them. Somewhat unsurprisingly, nearly everything in here is just as applicable to those of us working to build equitable and resilient mission-driven workplaces, whether nonprofit or otherwise. The trends Mitchell outlines—from maximalism to cherry picking to glass houses and unanchored care—would be familiar to most workers and managers I know. In addition to absorbing all of the strategic advice he offers here, I’m struck by how much of his framing involves not avoiding conflict but navigating it with grace, transparency, and patience.
-
I love this post from Elspeth Michaels about a year-long daily creative habit. Michaels and her friend note that the small (twenty minutes) daily commitment helped them to make incremental progress while also making more ambitious projects feel accessible. I don’t personally care for tracking streaks—I think they can make taking care of your body (or someone else’s) feel like a failure, and that’s never my goal—but having a regular habit you can return to over and again is a magical way of staying rooted in work that you like while also finding new (and fun) ways to keep learning.
-
From adrienne maree brown, a short incantation that holds some balanced new year energy. Her phrasing of a “right sized extension of energy”—neither overextending nor witholding—is something I come back to often. But the strongest resonance for me here is about practice, and how regular commitments to practice are a kind of fortifying and learning and healing all at once: “we become what we practice. what are you practicing?”