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Ask HN: How do you deal with being burnt out?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with being burnt out?

#11
I'm going to go ahead and give you the solution that works for me, even though it's probably not all that practical for you at the moment:

Get off the grid and go traveling for a month or so.

I make a point of switching off for a while each year, sometime for only a month or two, other times for most of the year. During that time, I'm just backpacking across Africa, climbing rocks in Thailand, or otherwise laying low someplace cheap and sunny, with the important bit being that I'm not working at all for long stretches at a time.

Every once in a while, I'll find a little window of good internet connectivity and boot up. What follows will be a couple days of the most intense productivity I've ever had. It's like my brain had been solving problems in the background for the last few weeks and now all I have to do is CTRL+V it into the editor. Sometimes I honestly believe I'm just as productive working one week out of four as I would have been working all four straight.

So yeah, if you've built yourself some runway to pull it off, I'd recommend looking for a flight to Bangkok leaving, say, this afternoon. Throw a pair of board shorts in a bag along with your laptop and go have some experiences.

Some time in January, you can pull that machine out, prop it on the bar at the beach, and knock off the rest of your site in an afternoon.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with being burnt out?

#12
I suffered from the same problem as you. I did some long thinking about what caused this issue and in my case it was fear of failure.

Fearing that whatever I'd launch would suck and that I just spent months working on something that would make no difference at all.

I'm working at a product that I believe in right now, and will force myself to launch within 3 months.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with being burnt out?

#14
I feel I am in the same situation, haven't really come around to building something serious yet. The goal for me is to build mobile games, I have started and had some freelance work for my old company which have given me some more time to think about what I wanted to do, the only problem is that I can't get around to actually code or design, I keep falling back to playing game, for the same reason as you described. Hate it but don't know what to do about it :(
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