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highly recommend checking this site out: https://osmihelp.org/ and there's a forum devpressed.com I think is the address, the corporate firewall won't let me go to it for some reason though.
Oh sweet irony.
- Are you experiencing a lot of stress at work or at home?
- Are 60hrs/week the norm at your workplace?
- Are you sleeping 8hours a day? Has you sleep changed (getting either more or less sleep than usual)
- How is your diet? Are you eating hurried meals at your desk or sitting down with colleagues or family?
- Are you experiencing physical fatigue?
- Do you have some close friends you can interact with regularly? (especially outside of work)
My general advice would be to:
- Take a 2 week vacation as soon as possible, and disconnect completely from work during that period.
- Reduce work hours to 40hrs/week
- Spend time with friends or family, have a laugh.
- Make sure you are getting enough sleep.
- Exercise. If fatigued physically, keep to mild exercise like walking in nature. Aerobic exercise is fine if not fatigued.
- Disconnect from work evenings and weekends, no monitoring slack channels or cellphones.
- Reduce cellphone use to minimum to perform specific tasks.
Secondly, you absolutely have to get your life back. 60-hour-work weeks are inhumane. Your job is taking 20 hours of time with your family away from you every single week. You will never get that time back and you will always regret having lost it.
I will always regret the lost weekends with my previous employer. Management never gave me better evaluations or bigger raises for that time I spent improving their bottom line. I could have spent that time making happy memories like I do now. My experience is that if you start holding firm to 40-hour weeks, management will adjust their expectations to be more realistic.
Remember, your kids are only kids once. You must stand up for your right to spend time with them.
As a psychologist/cognitive scientist, I personally advise 1. Exercise 2. Meditation in the morning (it works!) 3. Stay healthy! It affects your mood a lot (especially having a regular sleep schedule) 4. At least for now, reevaluate your long-term goals and how to achieve them 5. Don't work for such a long time period (especially if its not engaging).
Maybe "this too shall pass", but I'm open to suggestions as well.
You might feel that it's impossible right now, but that's not true. Once you break the loop, things will look completely different.
I wish you the best.
Maybe do a little guerilla refactoring? If you're spending 55 hours per week staring at the screen, then using some of those hours to work on something unauthorized isn't really stealing or cheating your employer at all. Either openly or in secret, come up with a rewritten or refactored version of your product that doesn't have all the technical debt. Couldn't hurt!
1. Cortisol and adrenaline are your new arch-enemies. Burn out is caused by loss of control at work and other factors that skyrocket your cortisol and adrenaline and keep them high all day long. You must reduce your cortisol throughout the day or you will keep feeling burned out. To end burn out you must replenish your hormones with deeply restful sleep and eliminate the loss of control and health practices that are causing these elevated levels. Cortisol is literally poison, get rid of it.
2. Cut coffee / diet coke and replace with green, herbal or black tea. Coffee / diet coke contain an insane amount of caffeine and it can damage your ability to get truly restful sleep and linger in your system for many hours. If you aren't feeling rested it may be because your caffeine intake is damaging your ability to achieve REM sleep (a known side effect of too much coffee). Tea contains less caffeine and also contains mood-soothing chemicals that take the edge off the buzz and promote calm and focus. Caffeine elevates your cortisol and adrenaline and puts you into a constant state of fight or flight. If you are chugging diet coke and coffee, cut that shit out immediately.
3. Renegotiate your job description. Burn out is caused by feeling like a puppet at work and having too many people with a remote control to tell you what to do. Independence and autonomy and individual decision making are a requirement to be happy. Programmers tend to get treated as factory workers where other people get to dump work on them / drag and drop tasks and they have to do the work. Your manager is supposed to be providing cover for you. You need to get a new deal.
Those are the main points that helped me recover recently from burn out.
2. Reestablish your passion. Read some interesting books (and take a break from coding). Pick up a different language. Work on a tetris clone in javascript. I found that getting away from Java was a nice break from work (back when I was unfortunate enough to work with Java)
3. I really second exercise as a way to recharge.
4. Have any hobbies outside of computers? I find hiking/woodworking/etc to be extremely beneficial to my coding side. When Monday rolls around and I haven't touched a computer since Friday it's like "oh nice, I get to exercise my brain again".
5. At work, I'd definitely suggest working on some sort of test suite. This can be extremely daunting if you don't know where to start, "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" is a great book for dealing with adding test cases to super shitty legacy code. It'll walk you through learning how to test (if needed), and how to refactor to make code easier to test.
GL! Hit me up if you need anything else.
Here is my list for treating burn out: 1. Cortisol and adrenaline are your new arch-enemies. Burn out is caused by loss of control at work and other factors that skyrocket your cortisol and adrenaline and keep them high all day long. You must reduce your cortisol throughout the day or you will keep feeling burned out. To end burn out you must replenish your hormones with deeply restful sleep and eliminate the loss of…
While reducing your overall levels of caffeine consumption is probably good, the important thing is to keep your levels consistent.