How to prevent burnout
Hey fellow hackers,
If you're like me and 77% of other individuals, you've probably experienced burnout at some point in time.
While building a company is exhilarating at times, there's no denying that it's a long tough road and if you're not careful you can quickly burn yourself out.
We built a tool called Vork (https://vork.app) that helps you manage and reduce your burnout so you can maximize your productivity, and be happy while doing it.
We launched our closed beta a couple months ago and received overwhelmingly positive feedback so we've made it public for anyone who's interested.
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P.S. We would love any feedback that you have with the product and/or website (positive or constructive)
Interesting! I understand the approach, as you need some data to make decisions.
But, from what I know, burnout is not necessarily because you have meetings in off hours, or because you have too many meetings, it is because you are overwhelmed, tired and experience a self-efficacy, among other things. How do you get the soft data points out of a calendar and todo list?
Great question and you're definitely right on the money. One of our core features that we recently released (We eventually will display on our site) is a daily checker. It simply asks how you're feeling day-to-day and gives you options to select why you may be feeling that way.
Using that daily data we're able to understand changes to mood and attribute that to the data we gather from your calendar to give more context as to why you may be burning out and provide suggestions on how to improve your mood.
We will also be aggregating that data to help you understand your trends overtime to further understand what your triggers are and how to mitigate them.
For example:
Let's say that our algorithm notices that you tend to have a decline in mood on Monday's and Wednesday's and both are days where you have a 1 hour product meeting. Our algorithm will be able to make that correlation and suggest that maybe you should look deeper into how that meeting is affecting you.
There's definitely a lot more we'd like to add, but the feedback has been well received and a large number of users have stated that our algorithm has accurately predicted their likelihood of burnout so hard and soft data points seem to be working in most use cases.
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Lastly I'll mention that burnout often creeps up on individuals. One value our tool adds is that it "forces" you to think about how your work day is affecting your mental health since it's visible each time you look at your calendar. That added awareness seems to be helping users make better decisions about their work day which is making them much happier :)
Very cool! Good luck!