Burnout, or chronic job related stress due to work-imbalance issues and career disillusionment, has always been a significant problem for library information science professionals, but it has become a major crisis in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Bury 2024, Kenyon & Henrich 2024). Academic librarians are in a state of burnout as the values of librarianship come into continued conflict with the neoliberal corporate models that have been broadly adopted within academia (Nardine 2019, Wood et. al. 2020). As part of this on-going conversation, the researcher will showcase how they used assessment tools and techniques to create an "anti-burnout" plan for their team of librarians and support staff that make up the First-Year Writing (FYW) library instruction program at a large four-year research university. While acknowledging the limitations of individual-driven solutions in combating burnout, they share their work with the hope of encouraging participants to develop their own plans to reduce burnout in their own instruction programs. While the focus of the presentation is on academic FYW instruction, the tools shared are applicable for all forms of library instruction and applicable for those with minimal assessment knowledge. These tools include visualizations created using instructional request data, predictive models, and guides for structured conversations on teaching capacity. The researcher used the information gathered from these tools to create realistic boundaries for librarian teaching capacity; while recognizing that the process of saying "no" to an instruction request is difficult and comes with the fear of harming relationships with faculty members. To reduce this pressure, the researcher and their team developed infrastructure that would support saying no to instruction requests. In addition, the researcher will discuss how their team balanced the necessity of saying no to some instruction requests with the reality of the poor labor conditions of the contingent faculty and graduate students who disproportionately make-up the instructor pool for FYW programs. By engaging with the researcher's presentation participants will walk away with practical strategies for creating an "anti-burnout" plan tailored to their instruction programs, informed by tested assessment tools and techniques. They will begin the process of setting realistic boundaries with faculty, while fostering team accountability and as a result, address the impacts of neoliberal decision-making on librarians.
