After a while (a few months to a few years) the workplace politics becomes unbearable, or culture becomes too toxic, or managers straight up ignore our feedback.

In all likelihood, these are not time-variable conditions. When you first start you don’t know about the politics - who’s going behind your back to sabotage you, who’s a climber, who is getting preferential treatment from management or HR. Ignorance is bliss. As you learn what terrible people you work with you find their existence to make the workplace “toxic.” And it doesn’t matter where you work - there will be terrible people, just different grades and distributions. Finally, the managers were ignoring your feedback from day one - they just pretended that you mattered so that you would settle in and become part of the machine. It’s basic onboarding.

This isn’t going to help you, but I quit and started my own business. It was…challenging. Prior to that, I found routines and resets in my daily work which let me (mostly) ignore the noise. Most were mental, setting timers to focus on tasks; learning to be a non-joiner with tact; roll with the sameness and view the work as “just a job”. Some were physical, like eating lunch quickly and spending the rest of my half hour lying down in my car.

I should say that I still get burnout, even though I’m a one-person consulting company. I recognize that my focus comes and goes and I when I get a manic period I try to push though work to “get ahead” (or at least catch up). More importantly, I try to recognize when my energy is flagging and not try to push through it. I let myself have the afternoon off. Two years ago I started taking an “admin” week every quarter. I put a message on my phone that I’m in training or in meetings (so people think I’m “working”) but I mostly just clean up the office, get personal project done around the house, and generally reset my focus. Sometimes I even do a little online training. Specifically - I don’t go away on vacation. Vacation doesn’t reset me like removing the life clutter that builds up when I’m busy at work and can’t get to (or are too tired to) do the peripheral things. I fully recognize that this is not really a valuable strategy for a most jobs, but if you have a certain amount of autonomy and you’re getting your deadlines met otherwise, scheduling some “training” time might be good. Just make it as regular as possible - put it in your year’s calendar on Jan 1. For me, it’s my reward for getting things done, and if I don’t make it a hard commitment, I’ll just move it - and it will never happen.