Divya Tak on burnout

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Divya Tak is a game designer and a product designer. She does illustrations and writes comics. She describes herself as a general-purpose creator. She’s working on a couple of games with her sister and building an experience design studio with a friend. 

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What do your days look like?

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My business partner lives in the US, so I usually end up working and sleeping quite late. 

I usually wake up around 10 AM. 

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I start my day with some meditation and journaling. I then have my breakfast and spend some time reading 🥞

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I start my day around 12:00 PM. I spend some time in the morning just doing some deep work, and around 3:00 PM, I start doing my meetings which can last till 8:30 PM or even 10 PM 😪

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How do you manage your workload?

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I think dividing my work into:

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• work I need to do with other people 
• work that I need to do by myself.

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Once I get all of that done in the morning, just discussing things and ideating becomes a lot easier. That ends up being a lot less cognitive load . It's made me more efficient 💪

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How do you Identify areas to improve?

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It comes from different places. 

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Just having conversations with people that I'm regularly working with often helps me identify where I can make changes 🕵️‍♂️

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I don't have this kind of mental model or feel like this is a space where I am being inefficient. 

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I also am in therapy, and I have a coach. Both these things help in identifying where I can grow.            

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What do you do for your mental health?

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I journal in the morning. That's super essential. I micro-journal throughout the day. 

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We try to fill up our days with scrolling on the Internet,  I try to limit that time. I have only two social media apps, Reddit and Instagram, and I have limited time on both of them. 

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I try to journal my thoughts and my insights, and it has really shifted how my mental health has become and how I feel about things 📚

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I also meditate or work out three to four times a week.

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Both my coach and my therapist have really helped me identify areas where I would normally feel stuck and then help me work through those 😇

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I think that has also really helped my mental health.                                                              

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Any advice for team leaders?

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One thing that I would 100% say is it's very easy to think that you do yoga and your mental health would be better. 

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One fundamental thing that you have to do is limit the amount of time that you are spending just burning the candle on both ends 🕯

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If you're continuously doing too much work, you will not be able to take care of your mental health. 

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A very interesting thing I heard in an interview with a psychiatrist:

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He described burnout as people-pleasing, gone to the self-harm extreme.

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And that was like, I don't think that I could ever let myself burn out again because he used the word self-harm in the same sentence 🔥

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It was a very interesting perspective because you're not really thinking about how is this thing going to affect me, You're just thinking, maybe I'm doing this for my people or for my company. 

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I think team leaders and entrepreneurs have to set an example. If you are the first person to come into the office and the last person to leave, your team takes some information out of it. 

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The same thing will happen if you prioritize your mental health, and you will be able to prioritize it for others too.

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Thank you 💙