How “Quick Wins” Can Become A Quick Road To Burnout.

September 8, 2022

We’ve been reading a lot of good quotes recently, here’s another we want to share with you:

“Nothing incredible comes quickly.”

You can’t lose 10kg overnight. You can’t become a global tennis superstar in a week. You can’t gain 100 000 followers for your company’s LinkedIn page in 2 weeks.

Despite this, we’re often led to believe that if we work agile, lean and hard, then anything is possible at work. We just need to find those “quick wins”.

What’s worse, is that when we find the courage to push back on unrealistic goals, we’re often told that we’re not being ambitious enough.

So when feeling tempted to use the expression “quick wins” at work, consider the following:

Do quick wins actually exist? 🤔

Spolier alert. Often, no, they don’t. 9 times out of 10, “wins” come from dedication and working on something systematically over time.

Am I adding unnecessary stress to my colleagues? 🤔

“Quick wins” implies that a goal should be completed in a short amount of time and should provide positive results instantly. But let’s be honest with ourselves. Most things don’t work that way.

If your colleague, or team, feel like they are consistently under-delivering, they’ll try to overcompensate by working… more. This can become a quick road to burnout.

Does quick = best? 🤔

It feels easier to pick the quick thing to do. It doesn’t take as much effort and we believe that it will still yield incredible results . But again, that’s often not true. Quick does not mean best in most cases.

So what can we take away from all of this?

🧠 Ask yourself: “what is the best thing I can do?” and not what is the quickest.

⌚ Be patient: acknowledge that incredible things take time.

🥳 Celebrate: when your investment  pays off and your team have not burned out.

This Beating Burnout tip was curated by everyone at Team Velbi.

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