Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?

Consider adding "deluded" to the initial list.

As animals we're built for a fast effort/reward loop. Look at most people and how they operate -- they desire immediate gratification.

Something that makes us special is the ability to push out that loop and make long term plans. Not everybody is able to do that.

I can count, to the specific decisions, among my friends, what things they decided to do in their lives where they had a choice of a long term plan that would have yielded great fruits, or a short term plan yielding immediate gratification (but with long term problems stemming from that) that ultimately ended up with them being impoverished, without health care, unable to get better jobs, save up for retirement, etc. As an external actor I know exactly where they made those decisions and what they chose instead.

But I can't really blame them or think less of them for how they ended up in their circumstances. They are simply acting the way we as animals are built -- they are acting normal.

In every case, I believe that the difference between a long-term planner and an immediate gratification fixer is willpower.

Doing something like what many people do here, starting up a company, takes extraordinary long term planning - it's not normal. A simple observation of large groups of humans shows that it's abnormal behavior. It takes mountains of willpower in most cases since we don't see the immediate benefits of what's likely hundreds or thousands (or tens of thousands) of hours of work. The payoff, if there even is one, is an abstraction that even the smartest and most dedicated can have trouble using to reconcile their labors.

What you can try to do instead is find clever hacks to reduce the friction it takes to get a task done. For example, reduce your problem into very small steps. That way you feel a faster reward for your labors -- even if it's just the feeling of accomplishment at getting another step out of the way. Use lots of small arrows pointing to your goal instead of one big one.

Or try giving yourself an explicit reward for making small milestones, something proportionate to the magnitude of the step. Eat at a favorite burger joint, or hike a favorite trail, or watch a movie you really want. Whatever floats your boat.

You might even try a program of personal denial, don't allow youself to have certain pleasurable things unless you make a milestone. Pull at both ends, the "work hard play hard" system.

In other words, make the effort/reward loop as small as possible to help keep you motivated. This is especially important during tedious/grinding parts of your work that are often mistaken as burnout when in fact they're just boring and you're really desiring a reward at the end of it.

Some people really thrive on 80-hour workweeks, but if you don't (and I'd say most people don't), there's no particular reason to hold them up as a good thing. If you're starving and have to do it to keep from being homeless, then grit your teeth and do it, sure, but if someone's unhappy with their situation and has options, a rational solution is to look into those options...

"I am not getting work done, even though I want to. What aspects of this work are bringing me down? Do I have the resources to do this work properly? Can I think of any ways to make the work more appealing? Can I combine it with anything else that I enjoy, like by getting a friend/colleague to look at it? Should I take a break from it and come back to it later? Should I consider dropping the project entirely? Is it actually what I want to do?"

Or "I'm lazy, I should work harder."

I strongly believe that the idea of laziness leads to burnout. Every time you force yourself to do something, you're using up a little bit of your willpower. It's a stopgap, not a strategy, and it does run out if overused.

The primary engine that generates results in your life should be based on aligning your desires, goals, resources and actions. Good self-management looks like good management of others, and I've never heard of a good manager who calls his employees lazy.

The problem with asking about burn-out is that it's a spectrum. Life is full of little "just push through" moments: approaching a stranger, hanging out your washing, sitting down at your desk without opening reddit, being bothered to cook, not deleting your nearly-written comment. Any time you can't do it, your willpower has failed you. If you don't stop to understand why, it will keep happening. And get worse.

For me it started small: missing appointments, not eating well, finding it hard to get through my to-do list, even easy decisions got slowly harder to make. Ideally burnout is kind of self-regulating because as your productivity decreases your opportunities decrease as well. Unfortunately I was organising an event and getting less done only meant having more to do.

Afterwards... it's hard to describe, but even considering any kind of executive function felt like a cross between lifting a car and hearing a burglar walk up the stairs. I don't think I got out of bed for a couple of weeks, and I didn't show up to an Easter lunch with my family because figuring out which train to catch was too hard. Things got better slowly - probably about nine months in all before I really felt right again.

Since then, I've made it a point to think long and hard when I get that "just gotta keep pushing" feeling. Almost every time it's been preventable: the result of poor decisions, overcommitment, badly organised work, lack of reward, or just plain doing something I don't actually want to do. If you're feeling something like that, make "I might be doing this wrong" your first port of call, and only go to "I should work harder!" later.