What are the three Ps for avoiding burnout?

Practices, places and people. Practices are daily activities that anchor you, such as exercise, prayer or journalling. Places are physical locations you can reach easily and reliably. People are the ones who have your interests at heart with nothing attached to it.

Is burnout caused by working too much?

Not only. Hours matter, but people doing enormous amounts of work they find meaningful often do not burn out, while people doing far less work they feel disconnected from do. Treating it purely as a workload problem means the obvious fix, working less, sometimes changes nothing.

How do I know if I am burnt out or just tired?

Tiredness generally resolves with rest. Burnout tends not to, and usually comes with avoidance, so the work you cared about becomes the work you cannot make yourself start. If a good weekend does not touch it, it is probably not tiredness.

How many people should be in the people category?

Fewer than you would expect, and that is normal. Most relationships exist for reasons other than unconditional care, including convenience and mutual benefit. Two or three is a realistic answer, and knowing who they are matters more than the number.

Do I need to do all three every day?

No. Practices are daily by design, places and people are not. The point is that all three exist and you know what they are before you need them, because the moment you need them is exactly when it is hardest to work out the answer.

How to avoid burnout with the three Ps

Ziyaan Virji · April 8, 2024

"I am feeling a little burnt out. I am struggling to manage school, part time work, volunteering, and all of my social commitments."

Some version of that came up in almost every one of the fifteen minute conversations I used to have with people in our community on Fridays. It was the single most common thing anyone said.

I know the feeling well. In 2021, after I moved to Canada, I could not get out of bed. I stopped showing up to classes and meetings. I found every available way to distract myself, and it went on for months.

At the time I had a straightforward explanation: I had overworked myself and let my wellbeing go. Which was true, and turned out to be an incomplete account of what was happening.

Burnout is not only about the hours

What changed my thinking was hearing Farhan Thawar, who leads engineering at Shopify, speak on a panel about burnout.

His argument was that burnout has less to do with how hard you are working and more to do with how connected you feel to the reason you are doing it. The purpose behind the work, not the volume of it.

That reframed 2021 for me. I had been treating it as a workload problem, and by that logic the fix was to do less. But I knew people doing far more than me who were fine, and I had done more than that myself in periods when I was not fine at all. The variable was not hours.

What was actually true is that I had stopped believing in what I was doing. The work had become a set of obligations I was executing, and I could not have told you clearly what any of it was for. The exhaustion followed from that rather than the other way round.

This matters practically, because if you diagnose it as overwork you will rest, come back, and find the feeling waiting for you.

The three Ps

Understanding the cause is not the same as having something to do on a Tuesday. The framework that gave me that came from a course built on a Harvard Business School programme, taught by Adel Gamar, an executive leadership coach.

The idea is to name three things and then keep them constant, so that when everything else is moving you have not lost your footing entirely.

Practices

The day to day activities you can do regardless of what else is happening, that make you feel anchored.

Working out. Meditation. Prayer. Journalling. Walking without headphones. It genuinely does not matter what it is, and it does not need to be impressive. What matters is that it is small enough to survive a bad week, because a bad week is exactly when you need it and exactly when an ambitious practice collapses.

For me it is the gym three times a week and journalling. Neither is remarkable. Both hold.

Places

The physical places you can get to easily, every day, when you need to reset.

A corner of your room. The gym. A park nearby. A library. Somewhere on a walking route you know.

The constraint that matters is accessibility. A place that requires a forty minute journey is not going to be there for you on the day you need it most. It has to be close enough that going costs you nothing to decide.

Mine is the mosque, once a week.

People

The people in your life who unconditionally have your best interests at heart, both consciously and without thinking about it.

This one takes the longest, because the honest answer is smaller than you would like. Most relationships are there for other reasons. Convenience, proximity, shared circumstances, mutual benefit. That is not a criticism, it is just how most relationships work, and it means they behave differently under pressure.

For me it is my family and a small number of close friends. Working out who they are before you need them is the whole exercise, because in the moment you need them you will not be in a state to work it out.

Why this holds up

I have used the three Ps for years now. What makes it useful is that it is a short list you can check yourself against.

When something starts to feel wrong, the question is not the vague one about whether I am doing too much. It is specific. Have I kept the practices? Have I been to the places? Have I spoken to the people? Usually at least one has quietly dropped, and it dropped a while before the feeling arrived.

None of it is a substitute for actual help if you need actual help. It is a way of noticing early.

If the underlying problem is pacing rather than anchoring, that is a different fix, and the clearest thing I have found on it is in consistency beats intensity. If it is that your week genuinely does not fit, start with how to manage your time as a student.

Write down your three. It takes ten minutes and it is much harder to do once you need it.

Frequently asked questions

What are the three Ps for avoiding burnout?: Practices, places and people. Practices are daily activities that anchor you, such as exercise, prayer or journalling. Places are physical locations you can reach easily and reliably. People are the ones who have your interests at heart with nothing attached to it.
Is burnout caused by working too much?: Not only. Hours matter, but people doing enormous amounts of work they find meaningful often do not burn out, while people doing far less work they feel disconnected from do. Treating it purely as a workload problem means the obvious fix, working less, sometimes changes nothing.
How do I know if I am burnt out or just tired?: Tiredness generally resolves with rest. Burnout tends not to, and usually comes with avoidance, so the work you cared about becomes the work you cannot make yourself start. If a good weekend does not touch it, it is probably not tiredness.
How many people should be in the people category?: Fewer than you would expect, and that is normal. Most relationships exist for reasons other than unconditional care, including convenience and mutual benefit. Two or three is a realistic answer, and knowing who they are matters more than the number.
Do I need to do all three every day?: No. Practices are daily by design, places and people are not. The point is that all three exist and you know what they are before you need them, because the moment you need them is exactly when it is hardest to work out the answer.