Signs of Work-From-Home Burnout

Luke Lazarus
2 min readSep 11, 2020

Working from home may seem like a smooth ride, but it is not as easy as it sounds. Ideally, when working from home, you may end up feeling demotivated faster than when you are in a working environment. It is because at home you are working alone, meaning most of the time you lack the motivation to keep working. Moreover, you may also experience stress and pressure of covering unaddressed work. Thus, you may end up overworking.
In truth, if you don’t rest adequately, you may end up suffering from chronic exhaustion. Hence, you need to know when you are exhausted from working so that you take adequate measures. Primarily, there are three main dimensions of home-work burnout, and we have discussed them in this piece.

• Energy Depletion

Generally, energy depletion is mainly due to excessive workload, and the incredibly high expectations you may have. While having excessive work is normal, you have to ensure that you plan your time well, and give yourself a realistic time window of completing the work. Ideally, there are several ways you can use to tell if you are overworking. For starters, if you work for more than eight hours in a day, you are probably overdoing it, and your chances of experiencing energy depletion get elevated. Additionally, if you are skipping lunch, or if you are ignoring phone calls to work, you are also overworking, and you should take some rest to avoid being energy depleted.

• Mental Distance From Work

Essentially, if you start calling in sick or procrastinating working, it may also indicate burnout from working. While some extent of procrastinating is usual in everyone, increased feelings of not wanting to work are indicators of mental exhaustion. Thus, to prevent having a mental distance from your work, it would be helpful to take adequate breaks when working, and you should not work for more than eight hours.

• Reduced Efficacy

Finally, burnout leads to reduced quality and productivity. If you work for long hours, chances are, the quality of your work reduces, especially when you skip breaks. As such, you should take adequate breaks to ensure that you do high-quality work. Besides, human beings are not robots, and rest is essential for us.

The best way of avoiding burnout when working from home is by identifying it as a problem, and you should take adequate measures to solve it. A good working pattern is essential for doing excellent work.

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