A CEO’s Guide to Avoiding End-of-Year Exhaustion
The year is winding down, but your inbox keeps filling up, and your phone won’t stop ringing. Decisions take longer to make, you’re snappier than usual, and you’re worrying over every minor issue.
That doesn’t say anything about you as a leader. It’s just your body reminding you that it’s been a long, tough year and you need to take it easy. Or, as it’s otherwise known, burnout.
With 71% of leaders reporting significantly higher stress levels since assuming their current position, exhaustion is a part of the role. And we’re particularly prone to it at year-end with looming targets and deadlines hanging over us.
But rather than working through it, I’ve found that there are plenty of practical ways to reduce the pressure and minimize the exhaustion:
Set a to-do list deadline
As the holidays approach, it’s easy to take on extra work to support your team while they clear through their own backlogs, but it always ends up eating into your own time off.
My advice is to set a firm cut-off date for new tasks. Anything that lands on your desk after December 20th can wait until the New Year. Then, make a wrap-up list and split it into ‘this year’ and ‘next year’, prioritizing only the tasks that truly can’t wait. You’ll actually get some time to relax, and you’ll get through the rest far quicker once you’ve recharged.
Give yourself the evenings off
You work hard all day. The least you can do is give yourself the evenings to truly switch off.
That’s impossible with your phone constantly buzzing. Sure, you don’t answer it because you’re off work, but every ping draws your attention back to that issue that needs fixing or a target you haven’t met yet. You’re not actively working, but you’re constantly thinking about work, and that’s exhausting.
For your sanity, turn it off, or at the very least put it on mute.
Avoid decision fatigue
Decision-making is your day job. Do you really want to spend your lunch hour mulling over which sandwich to eat or your evenings over which outfit to wear? Those everyday choices are contributing to your fatigue.
My advice? Plan ahead. Create a weekly schedule for meals, outfits, and other minor decisions. Stick to it, and don’t overthink it. It will take some decision-making off your plate, helping you to save bandwidth for the choices that actually matter.
Reframe guilt as sustainability
I love my startup, and I struggle to step away, too. There’s never a shortage of challenges to solve, and I often catch myself feeling guilty when I’m not plugging away at a problem.
You have to remind yourself that you’re not being lazy by taking a break, and you haven’t failed if your to-do list isn’t empty by Christmas. There’s nothing sustainable about exhaustion and burnout, and if you put too much pressure on yourself trying to end the year on a high, your body and mind are likely to quit on you in the New Year when business ramps up again.
The bottom line
End-of-year exhaustion comes with the title. You can’t avoid it, but you can change the way you think and work around this time of year to minimize it. Protect your evenings, resist taking on everyone else’s stress, and give yourself some time off. You’ve definitely earned it.
Written by Natalia Shahmetova, CEO of Woofz by nove8
