Dr Helen Lawson Williams - Co-founder anti-burnout app ‘Tank’
“Let’s turn our phones into a force for good.”
The 16th person I met for The Burnout Conversation is a doctor in organisational psychology. As Helen Lawson Williams was in the last stretches of her PhD studies, she took up a management consultant role. It took a few months for her to realise something was wrong. She was working long hours to manage all her activities and was never really resting. In essence, the way she worked and lived her life was not sustainable. Twenty years later, strong of her personal burnout experience and tremendous expertise in change management, she is now building an app to fight burnout called Tank.
”We need to change the conversation and re-frame the problem,” says Helen. She believes that burnout is a systems problem that stems from how we are taught to be productive but never taught to rest.” She also notes that this imbalance disproportionately affects caregivers as ”unpaid work tends to be ignored and undervalued, which is why Helen passionately advocates that ”as a community, we need to work together and consider both unpaid and paid work.”
Central to Helen’s approach is the concept of energy management. Drawing an analogy to a fuel tank, she emphasises the importance of monitoring and replenishing our energy levels to prevent burnout. ”If you are not paying attention to your fuel tank and keep using fuel, you will run out,” She says. It is this principle that underpins Tank, the app she and her co-founder have developed to empower users to cultivate healthier habits and reclaim their time.
Tank guides users to establish new habits conducive to well-being. Through a structured onboarding process, the app assists users in striking a balance between work, rest, and play. ”Very few people are aware that we have 168 hours in our week -112 hours if we sleep 8 hours per night. How do we use those 112 hours? Too often, work dominates our calendars, leaving little time for recovery and play - the other activities that keep us healthy and make for a good life,” Helen explains. Tank helps users reclaim control of their time by including replenishing activities as a priority.
In a landscape saturated with dire content about mental health, Tank offers a breath of fresh air with soothing visuals and uplifting images. Indeed, Helen and her co-founder designed the app with a vision ”to see possibilities over problems and make it easier to remember that life is good.”
Tank was born from a simple observation Helen made, ”We use our phones all the time and we know they affect our behaviours. What if we turned them into something awesome that makes our lives better?”
Book recommendation: “An Immense World" by Ed Yong
Dr Helen Lawson Williams is based in Sydney, Australia. The Tank app is currently available for beta testers at https://www.thisisyourtank.com/
“What if, instead of distracting you, your phone actually helped you get awesome stuff done?”