Burnout

For a while, I was filling every waking moment with something "productive". Going to class during the day, working on the startup at night, listening to economics and political podcasts during my commute, and filling any spare minutes with writing or learning the guitar.

After a while, I just couldn't get anything done. My language learning slowed to a crawl, my coding output dropped, and I developed a wicked case of writer's block. My brain just... stopped. Thank God my wife's a patient woman, because I understand I became rather difficult to live with. The painful part was that I didn't feel "burned out". I loved everything I was doing, but I became frustrated because I just couldn't get things accomplished.

Sanity was regained only after I cut back. I canceled almost all my podcast subscriptions, reduced my startup work, and actively took some time off. "Noprocrast" helped too. :) After a while, productivity eventually came back.

Since then, I've been careful about tackling too much at once. I think the brain has a buffer that deals with all the stimulus that you deal with in your daily life. If you take on too much, the buffer gets full and performance drops to a crawl. Taking time to occasionally "clear the buffer" is critical to maintaining a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

My cofounder was the same way, and our downtimes never seemed to be synchronized, which was a good thing because it meant there was always someone going full steam ahead.