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Comment by sinenomine | Hacker News Reader

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now.

In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

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Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).

>In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way

In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?

I don't find KPIs terribly useful in the software development at the level of an IC (which is btw my own level), unless we talk about performance & latency of large services where it is very useful and helps save millions. Software IC is special because motivation-wise it is almost self-sustaining, which is evident from massive open-source participation and pet projects.

On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth.

It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.

I like to define burnout as expending effort without makng perceived progress.

If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout.

If not, it might be depression or something else.

In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.

Any example of a smart KPI ?

"Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely"

Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...

It sure sounds smart, just isn't. Another example of a mechanistic approach in a field were humans are the major factor. Goals at best are arbitrary targets reached via consensus.

In my honest opinion one of the largest meta-problems ever amounts to decent mechanistic routes of helping each other being not taken in favor of more feel-good decent sounding verbal coping.

Virtue signaling should be banned.

it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is:

Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month

Some examples of directly measurable KPIs:

1. Mood diary

2. Time spent on social media, negative

3. Hours of sleep

4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt

5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/

6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220...

7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence

8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi...

You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once.

SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.

I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction.

My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.

Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe.

I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.

I too would like if my life were nice by default, but it is not. When faced with a hard problem we have to resort to hard measurements of progress, because otherwise we tend to go in circles in high-dimensional parameter space.

Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice.

> If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.

And that's a big if.

If I could upvote your comment twice, I would. Measurement has become the be all and end all, and it's useful of course. But it's easy to make the mistake that you've captured the whole of something on your graph, or spreadsheet, and usually that is far from the case. The spirit of a thing is not easily captured.

I'll give him one on your behalf.

I'd upvote this multiple times if it were possible.

These can also be SMART KPIs.

Compare "take at least two weeks of vacation, where vacation is defined as not checking any email or voicemail and engaging in purely arbitrary activities not directed by an external authority, within the next six months" to "you need a sabbatical."

Heck, even your own wording is already edging toward SMART. Staying off the Internet and not measuring steps or sleep duration are quantifiable goals. Binary, but still quantifiable.

> I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction.

Those things actually help reduce burnout, in my experience. An hour of sleep can make a big difference.

So what are your goals?

1 - Wake up happy each day?

2 - Do not use social media?

3 - Sleep 8 hours per day?

4 - Walk 3000 steps per day?

5 - I fail to see how a personality test can measure mental clarity? Even if they aren't useless constructs. Thought "core self-evalutions" if taken regularly can be a good indicator of issue.

6 - Not sure what are you measuring. Work memory?

7 - "Available crystallized intelligence". Isn't this an oxymoron?

8 - Only if our bodies didn't show signs of aging.

My goals, as I have already said, are pretty obvious: find a good set of lifestyle changes (including exercise types and patterns, diet, sleep conditions, outdoor activities, supplements and drugs, but also including choice of country & city to live in), so these metrics are optimized in good direction, and I feel better. I tried less systemic approach and it didn't work for me. In my impression our genetic makeup tends to make us choose a complementary sort of environment, so it all (behavior, health, mood) comes to equilibrium and balances out - it's really hard to make consistent progress when you are inside such perverse equilibrium. Thus the need for heavy-handed hard measurement approach.

1. Mood diaries are more about trends and avoiding depressive episodes, it's better to rate your mood in the evening so your professional life is included in the rating. For example if your manager stresses you out on your job, you may not think about it in the moment, but it may show on your mood diary as a week-scale trend.

2. Completely avoiding social media is an unattainable goal, thus usage should be limited to 0.5-1.0 hr.

3. Yes, and sleep well, which is quite hard.

4. 3000 is too little, I'd aim to 5000-10000.

5. There are various tests, I'm specifically interested in IQ-test https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/FSIQ/ but it's more or less interchangeable with N-back. IQ is a scary number, but it's a good barometer for how good you really feel. A difference between "a good day" and a "bad day" is clearly seen on such test.

6. Working memory and attention, yes. These are degraded by lack of sleep & stress & aging.

7. Again, lack of sleep & stress & aging tends to degrade active vocabulary, in my case.

8. Of course we age, but this aging process is malleable: some interventions are shown to decrease (!) the value of various aging clocks. Yes, the aging clocks themselves are imperfect, but this decrease is often correlated with subjective & objective improvements on other axes.

If you accept fundamentally mechanistic view of nature, biology and ourselves, you might as well position yourself to reap the benefits.

> If you accept fundamentally mechanistic view of nature, biology and ourselves, you might as well position yourself to reap the benefits.

You're missing my point. What I deny is the usefulness of presented frameworks and tools. But it's fine if it's working for you and can work for others.

I envy your energy to even spend time tracking all those things. Just reading and imagining keeping them as a routine sounds exhausting.

You can track only the most important ones. Biological age isn't something you need to track every day - more like every month, or every week if you are rich. Step-tracking & sleep tracking are given for free.

To be honest I don't have much energy either, unless I take stimulants. Which I don't do often due to reasons.

Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore. If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen.

This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways.

Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it.

I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto":

https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...

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