Tips I use to avoid burnout
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addyosmani.com
- Doubled down on focus. Went back to using a single monitor, cut down notifications on my phone and carved out time in my diary to do focused deep work. Constant task switching has always been bad for burnout for me.
- Was much more intentional about how I presented my work to others. I used to think that if I needed to focus on how I communicated my work upwards, that was somehow a reflection on the quality of the work itself. Instead I learned that taking time out to focus on how you present your ideas acts as a force multiplier on them.
- Get out of toxic environments. Often I’ve found that the cause of burnout is not hard work, I am capable of hard work for sustained periods, but hard work with an expectation or repeated experience of failure in forms of projects being scrapped or canceled. Success isn’t always its own reward, but it does seem to help ward off against burnout.
- I also spend a couple of hours in the gym nearly every day. It’s a high end gym and this is my splurge for myself. For other people, their release may be family.
It's a process that I struggle with, but I truly want to improve. Do you have any suggestions or resources?
This gives a logical framework for presenting people with new information - starting with a 10,000 foot view of how ‘the world has changed’ and gradually going into more detail about how this change will impact them before providing a solution. [1]
Where it really excels is enabling you to ‘bundle’ ideas into a larger trend, which others may not have seen as connected in the past. Depending on your background, using a sales framework may seem ‘icky’ but it’s a fairly tried and true method of presenting information.
In terms of books, other than Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer I can recommend To Sell is Human by Dan Pink, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath and How to Deliver a Ted Talk.
An area where you can get a huge leg up over others is in use of PowerPoint / Google Slides. Most people are terrible at it, so if you can deliver a presentation which is 15% better than most you will be at a huge advantage also. The key here is not to see PowerPoint as a tool for conveying information, but as a tool for creating pitches. If you treat every new idea you present as a ‘pitch’ it will transform your effectiveness.
In the same way as gift wrapping a gift ‘elevates’ the gift, wrapping an idea or proposal in a presentation means it’s automatically taken more seriously.
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/insight-selling-better-pitch
Nerds often have a tendency to be hyper focused on the details of the solution because that's the most fun part and the part they have directly thought about intensely.
Many people "up the chain", or in general who don't have intimate details of the problem space may not grasp why such a solution is needed. So starting off with it doesn't resonate with them.
I've found its better to first tell the story of "what got us here", that led to this solution. If you do it right, you'll see the "a ha" moment go off in people's faces and they're right with you.
- What is the problem?
- Why is it a problem? (Eg, Business impact, impact on customers, etc.)
- What are we doing about it?
- What consequences do we expect (or do we already see)?
Depending on the medium, do a sentence, a paragraph, or a page for each.
For me it's the opposite. Working on a single monitor means hundreds of alt-tab a day. That's a lot of distraction that is avoidable by using multiple monitors.
Recently switched from a two to a triple monitors setup (mainly for IDE/terminal/browser). I feel like it reduced how much tired I am at the end of the day.
Having multiple monitors means being able to switch between windows without constantly changing what’s on my screens.
I currently have three that I use for IDE, browser, terminal(s), Slack, and SQL. Often one or more of these aren’t needed often, and/or I can share two on a single monitor. But I am able to carry out most of my day without having to change windows around.
I occasionally have two browsers that I will be working in simultaneously so will split those across monitors, but that’s rare.
I read this and it does not sound real. To avoid burnout I simply need a new job. I also packed my all personal belongings and am ready to hand in my notice anytime I see it’s too much. Better unemployed for some time than mentally broken.
My last job I was at least the fourth or fifth person to break down and cry at work. Plenty of those happened in meetings where the boss man was present. They just quietly get replaced and that's that. Burn em and churn em. Never shows up on the ledger and everyone writes it off as a crazy one-off situation.
Then oh gosh a big deadline hits and we're down a person, better show off what a team player we are and make sure we hit the deadline.
it's a deeply wired need, and it would be interesting to discuss that. I found it easier to wake up in the morning when I felt part of team rather than going to a company be a nameless cog. Surely being a cog may avoid being overworked by never ending night shifts .. hence the debate.
Man, it’s killing me how true this is. It’s never “we treated them so poorly they needed to quit to preserve their sanity”, it’s always “they just weren’t a great fit. Oh well.”
Writing a resignation letter, even if you're not planning to hand it in immediately, might help you clear your head and make a better decision. Handing in your notice straigh after another fire/argument/nuissance, i.e. in a direct response to a single event, might turn out to be worse than doing it when things slow down a bit—purely because you'll have more control over the situation and will be able to approach it with less emotions.
> anytime I see it’s too much
Honestly, why wait?
After a short period of regaining your breathe and what purpose you had before you started then you will start to work on marketing yourself - GitHub profile/LinkedIn/meeting with a few recruiters...
You’re situation will probably remain the same until you jump. But you have to do the jumping, is my experience.
And honestly in our field (software) it just takes a few weeks to sign a new offer. Plenty of opportunities out there.
Depends a bit on the location though - but in certain EU countries it's not a good idea to have a gap in your employment, as it is used to calculate your holidays and retirement savings.
I have not heard of something like that. Sure the more month you have worked the more you paid into the retirement insurance, but a couple of months won't make a difference.
Not sure which employer would give you less holidays either.
Regarding your workplace: I had a similar problem and I kept searching and changing desks whenever possible. I bought noise cancelling headphones and occupied empty meeting spaces. I also managed to show that I was able to deliver better solutions when I worked from home, because it was easier for me to focus. Now I use a standing desk for 50% of my time in he office. It's placed next to the window where I have a great view and nobody is moving through my peripheral vision.
I still struggle with burnout - a lot of times because of context switching - but I learn to say "no". A lot of people don't even try to debug their problems or google for errors, they just like to ask someone else. I just say: "I need to type this email first" or "there is a meeting in a few minutes, but I'll come to you right after" and when I check back with them they often solved their own problem.
Regarding your review: I think this is a chance for you. Just come prepared with a list of known problems. Software devs need to take shortcuts in order to meet clients timeline plans, but we also need to pay back the technical debt. It's not incompetence, it's prioritizing time-to-market over quality / robustness / security / maintainability.
- Remove most, if not all notifications from your phone. Not just work-related, anything that will stimulate your brain for no good reason
- Try to leave work on time to allow other activities after. Could be ranging from going to the gym to raising your kids.
- Monitor your smartphone usage and cut it down (use something like RescueTime).
- Go to places where there is no internet connection to have some you time (e.g., a steam room is perfect to relax, or yoga)
- Sleep the right amount of hours for you
- Eat, drink well
- Remember, in most jobs, no one dies if that thing is not done today.
- Remember, if you have to work too much it's probably not your fault, but poor planning / constraints in your org. that you cannot control
My phone slipped into water and is not working. I liked it, huge screen, great battery life. So I took some old one I had at home. Smaller. Terrible battery. Old Android, so many apps don't work. I can only use it for calling and texting a couple of times a day. I need to save the battery. I cannot read in bed, as it's too small to be comfortable. It's small, so it fits into all my pockets.
Oh, it's so great that I'm not going to buy a new one. I feel like I don't have phone at all. I didn't know how it was slowly changing (destroying?) my life.
Now, I read HN too much.
Is it better, is it worse?
Certainly not bad, if, the addictive, time wasting aspects are muted / avoided.
I think not using a smartphone in 2020 is actually a massive evolution step back. Used wisely, at the right time and for the right tasks, it's a killer device.
But used for everything, all the time, it's just another form of crack.
Get your phone back, get on top of it, you'll be as happy, I'm sure.
(also, running an old Android version is quite risky on top of being annoying)
Eventually I got a new smartphone though - especially when travelling they are a useful tool.
1. Work exists only to support your lifestyle. If your work doesn't allow you to live a lifestyle you are happy with, it's not serving its purpose. This is obvious to most people when their work doesn't pay them enough, but it's not as obvious when their work doesn't give them enough time.
2. You are a person of worth who deserves to have proper boundaries around your work.
3. Your job is a transaction where they need you just as much as you need them.
Thanks to a three months time off I'm through it now.
I've been writing about my experiences and my recovery, maybe they can be of help to anyone else in a similar situation:
https://www.damienklinnert.de/a-passion-lost/
My one piece of advice for you if you're in a similar situation would be to take time off.
After the last time it took me about two months to recover.
Having some hobbies outside of code can help as well.
Personal coding and learning, in the same sort of area you work, would accelerate burnout for me.
Make sure you get 8 hours/night, and (say) 10 hours in stressful periods. If you already think you have burnout, then sleep as much as you can.
- Constantly thinking and outsourcing the time i spend on stuff that doesn't matter (especially the bottom 10-20%). Good hack for doing this is calendering all the things i do in a typical day and then reviewing it over the weekends to subtract the automatable and (probably boring) non impactful pieces.
- Having two different phones, one for work and the other for everything else. The work phone/number gets shut down as soon as i am done for the day (no exceptions. Android has the concepts of users which can emulate similar experience without the need to invest on another phone.
- Not syncing emails constantly, instead i have 3 hour blocks for syncing/replying to emails. Can't check emails all the time and neither at the end and beginning of the day so three hour blocks work well for me.
https://medium.com/@markpapadakis/how-to-prevent-burnout-and...
Easily took away 75% of the stress at work and stopped from it bleeding into my private life.
This can manifest itself as: - being upfront with what you do and don't know when asked to do anything so if delays occur, it won't be b/c you overpromised == lose trust - keeping stakeholders in the loop with any significant developments so there are no surprises down the road - estimate normal project work as if you can only work ~8 hours a day/5 days a week (while taking meetings, vacactions, other normal overheads into consideration)
This, IMHO, is a pre-req to properly implementing any of the other common helpful tips others have listed.
I still use several monitors because one task is done more efficiently across several but notifications are truly the worst thing in the world.
Honestly there's only one type notification/email/IM/phone call I don't mind... when something is down and needs fixing.
This is a huge thing. I often feel pressure to improve my individual programming skills, but this next year I want to focus on what I can do to be a better collaborator and team member. I can only do so much in a day.
- sport
- friends
The author works at Google. I presume that if one is getting paid in excess of $200k, you're a damn good professional at the very least. These things need not be reminded or taught - they're required and necessary as a professional software engineer.
Burn out happens when - the company or team is under duress, imagine running a manufacturing software system and your factory lines are down. Yes, that gets intense and you can have a burn out if problem requires rehauling the system (takes 6 months say). Or the company is on the brink of collapse and you're one of the 3 engineers holding it together. But, that's not because of the reasons listed here. In fact, writing such an article is dismissive because it distracts the discussion on what really leads to burn out.
If we take one of your examples, „the company is on the brink of collapse and you're one of the 3 engineers holding it together.”, we could still apply advice from the article: „Learn to say "no" more often. Know your limits. It's easy to over-commit”. It seems as if it would still help.
I’m young and inexperienced but in my opinion there’s a difference between “willing to work extra late on something occasionally when something unexpected comes up and working late will actually help”, which is helpful for the team, and just getting killed because of bad decisions other people did, or business circumstances that are beyond your pay grade.
I wouldn't say that's the case at all.
The first time I struggled with burnout was because the organisation I worked within was built in such a way that the rank and file are irrelevant and take some sort of grim pleasure in being low status.
In that situation there doesn't have to be any crisis or external pressure. You can just be stuck in a bureaucracy with a drone manager that makes your working day pointless.
The further I get away from that, the happier I am.
IME the company, your life, whatever, can be falling apart as long as you know that those around you are actually playing the same game as you and care about the outcome.
Burnout is caused by excessive/prolonged stress. Your pay or your skill level have no influence on that. Nor is stress limited to 'existential duress'. It's not even limited to work-related causes.
If there's anything dismissive, it's your idea that you must experience a special kind of stress, or it's not really burnout.
Until fairly recently - let’s say the last five years or so - did anyone ever tell me it’s OK to say no. To the contrary: rise to the occasion! Meet all challenges! Dazzle with your ability to do all 100 things at once! I think it’s very important that we tell people early in their careers what they can do to manage stress while still advancing.
The other two major components are sleep and physical activity. Just get that 30 minutes of HIIT cardio done, every day like clockwork, and sleep _at least 8 hours_ a night, every night.