I want to talk about burnout, actually. I'll be talking specifically about the rabbinate, but others may find resonance.

Those of us who have jobs that are salaried, jobs that follow us home, jobs that are also an identity, are at a very, very high risk of burning out.

For example, my husband and I share a solo rabbi position, and our contract is 1.25 rabbis. So one of us is 0.75, the other 0.5. At least that's how it should be. Hours in the rabbinate are always variable.

For example, Tuesday, we each put in 5hrs in the office with no evening activities (10hrs total). Definitely part time work. Yesterday, my husband worked from 8 am to 9pm with an hour for dinner, because he had a special event in the morning and committee meetings at night.

(I was sick as a dog at home yesterday, but I would have also had a similar day had I been well.)

We have two days off a week (unlike most rabbis who have one) and they are split days, Monday & Thursday. We have set events Wednesday & Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday morning.

On our days off, we need to be by our phone and monitoring our email (though we try hard not to reply unless necessary), so work is always on our mind. We usually have to handle an average of one to two things for work every day we have off.

The first symptom of burnout is exhaustion, that feeling that you've been running and can no longer run, that the to-do list never goes down. This is a feeling that anyone in non-profit work just lives with. It's a feature, not a bug.

There's never enough money, never enough willing volunteers, and paid staff spend their time managing crisis after crisis, smoothing over feathers even as the things that are our daily responsibility fall by the wayside. We go to bed with longer lists than when we woke up.

This breeds cynicism, symptom number 2 of burnout.

I'll never get this finished.
No matter what I do, someone's angry.
Nobody cares about all the work I've put into this.
I can't do my job because I'm handling emergencies that aren't mine.
I can't get away on my days off.

And symptom 3 rears its head. "Feelings of reduced professional ability."

I haven't had time to study in weeks. It should be a feature of my job, keeping up on my skills, learning more Torah. But emergencies keep coming up, the urgency of the now, and it gets pushed off.

Because we work for our congregants, we love our congregants, and when we are the only rabbi, we're it. 150+ families turn to us. So I give them time that should be mine to study or to rest.

And yes, boundaries are part of this. And boundary-setting is painful.

This is also a feature. I can't go to the store in my PJs and a dirty ponytail. People look in my shopping cart when they say hi. I'm always representing Judaism and my congregation, and I want to do it well. https://twitter.com/rebitzman/status/1197569705634156544?s=19

But this lends to the feeling of always being "on," contributing to burnout.

So what's a rabbi to do? Especially those of us in small communities, those who can't get lost in the anonymous streets of a big city?

To some extent, I'm asking, because I'm still figuring this out. I've done a lot to try and mitigate the harm of my job sucking up my well-being, but it's still hard. Here's some of what I do to stay sane.

1. I use vacation responders on my work email all the time. If I'm sick, I tell people I'm sick and if they have an emergency, who to contact. If it's around the holidays, I tell them that I'll get to their email but things are really busy. Because sometimes people forget.

2. I schedule the first hour each work day to respond to emails in the morning. If the day goes off the rails, at least I've done that much.

3. On my day off, I check email twice, deleting anything unnecessary, only responding to emergencies and time-sensitive stuff.

N.B.: Please, for the love of all that is holy, do not email someone if you are in an emergency or need something time-sensitive. Call the office or text/call the person. Email is absolutely inappropriate for something that must be done NOW. Please spread the word.

4. I count hours. Yeah, it's cold, but I need to know that we aren't short-changing our family. Time spent at work is important, but it's time that we are not raising our children. My congregants need me, but my kids need me more. Not even a contest.

Counting hours also allows us to see if we're really giving our 1.25. Last year, we weren't counting and we were giving more like 1.75. It was bad for everyone.

This year, if we give an hour extra here, we'll go home early another week. It's better for everyone.

There are still a LOT of things we haven't figured out. But these 4 have been really helpful to mitigate bleed-over. Other thoughts?

Wow, @Comfortablemess suggested this article. Yes and yes. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work

"Great school, then, is where I learned to work like a millennial, which is to say, all the time... Things that should have felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should have felt "bad" (working all the time) felt good because

I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed."