How do you handle burnout?

Hey,

First, I owe you an email and I'll get to it this weekend or next week.

Second, coming from a brain injury and near-fatal crash, burnout is real and needs to be taken seriously and need to be protectively managed. Waiting until burnout happens is a really bad idea, IMO.

One of the tools my OT gave me is "pacing points". Essentially you set an achievable budget of maximum pacing points for each day, let's use 20 as an example. Then you assign 2 pacing points to meeting prep, 10 points to meetings, 2 points to travel home from the meeting, etc. Every Friday for the coming week I review my calendar and assign pacing points. If I exceed my daily or weekly Max I have to cancel events or take rest days to stay within budget.

As you've seen, my email signature also says " life/work balance is a core belief. If the subject line doesn't say urgent this email isn't urgent ". I think putting life, 2/3+ of our lives, first and work second is important. As is top-down corporate culture of having a balance and making achievable promises. A leader who says " my team can't deliver that until next week because otherwise they'd have to work overtime" is, IMO, taking an important step to preventing burnout.

I find North American culture socially rewards burnout and being busy. I call it the "North American pissing contest" where everyone needs to be busier than their neighbour, have a bigger house, have a nicer car, etc. Everything is a competition and that, again IMO, is a core driver of burnout.

Long story short, its a lot of little tools that prevent burnout, not one magic fix.

There's a difference between the daily "decompression session", which could be mountain bike racing, running, walking, music, painting, or shouting at the mountains!!!
or
The burnout fix, which is what you need after spending too much time everyday for years, doing something that you don't fully love, for reasons that you are not fully behind.

I'm wondering if there are 2 different but similar elements being discussed here (not just your original post Josh but in the comments)?

Burnout as I know it is a longer term thing. When you're burnt out, its not just you are tired and can't think clearly during a single occasion. Rather, its a perpetual suffering (until of course you address it) for a prolonged period. For example, I knew I was suffering from burn out when I couldn't get my head back in the game after a 2 week sabbatical around the festive period. Despite having the longest "rest" I'd had in 18 months, from almost the first day back I was exhausted, demotivated, disinterested. No amount of games of basketball in between bursts of work for example were ever going to stop that from happening.

Needing some headspace during a particularly hard slog of coding (while real and justified) is not the same thing.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong?

Walk to lunch (and eat a real lunch) everyday. Those were the most productive and enjoyable times.

I wrote an article about burnout for developers, if somebody is interested. It explains what is burnout (it's not that self-evident) and how to deal with it.

In short, burnout can come from many different things and is more a scale than a black and white state ("I'm having a burnout" / "I'm not having a burnout"). Knowing your limits and how much you can push yourself in some precise contexts is essential to avoid it.

Doing something else, alone or with other people, is my way to deal with it. Another powerful technique: having healthy social contacts (family / close friends). It's not very easy nowadays, that's why we need to be extra careful.

From my perspective, I can run hard focused on building my MVP for 2 weeks or so, then I hit a point of revulsion (for the biz, the tech I need to learn, all the factors). At that point, I know any more work on it is futile and I will take a full 24 hours off, doing something totally different. Walks, read, go grab a beer with friends, play an old school video game. I think everyone's cycles are different, but when you consider the insane amount of info we must ingest to make a go of a bootstrapped business (these days I am wrestling with aws amplify, graphql, reactjs, material-ui, formik, and multi-tenant considerations, many missed a few), downtime is critical

I handle burnout by playing basketball, doing a workout, or just by turning off my laptop and having social time with others.