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

In fact if you're putting that many hours, you're probably also mistreating your body, doing little to no exercise and incurring in sleep debt. And I repeat, I know because I'm being this stupid. After two months of this ridiculous schedule I find myself fairly drowsy during the day, unable to resolve challenging problems. My body is acquiring fat very easily and I suffer from the stomach + a lot of headaches. And I just have been two months through this.

To be honest, the period in my life in which I succeeded the most was the one in which I had my needs completely met and I enjoyed every bit of my work, working as hard as I could. If you're a coder mental clarity is one of your biggest assets, so either run out of that health destructive spiral (that's what I'm going to do as soon as this quarter ends) or just stick with physical and mental problems.

He had a team of 10 interns and only one regular, and no interns would stay. He also had a specific way to breathe, like when you suffocate after 25 meters under the water in the pool.

He was so overwhelmed he grabbed a few set of random rules as his life buoys. For instance, use of s was forbidden because once a did float badly when resized. So we had pages with over 20 nested and not one had a raison d'être.

Then he got mad against the big boss, and I replaced him. Result: he was sick for 6 months. His body had to take a revenge.

I believe he is still looking for a job.

Maybe this could be a counter-point to the guy above saying that only work is important, and that all seconds spent not working or sleeping are lost. I think it is a dangerous way to dispose of your life.

Moreover, if the goal is to succeed, I think it is wrong that all "great achievers" are necessarily 100% focused on their one tasks. Many of them actually had hobbies, and a very wide and deep general knowledge of Humanities (which can only be gathered through extensive reading).

So I would say to the OP, just stop focusing, read books, try for example "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", feed your "gumption". (And go fishing!)

You mention hard work, but I would argue you are really not working that hard. Working hard (either physically or mentally) like you say you do is simply not sustainable long term. I have known people who have put themselves in the hospital through burnout. Sleeping at the office 6 days/week, living on vending machine food, and the stress of the whole thing is physically dangerous. This doesn't even address the quality of their work which went down over time.

It's similar to the overtraining concept when weight lifting. If you are only playing with the pink weights then it's easy to workout for hours each day, every day. Start messing around with real weight on the same schedule and your body will eventually start regressing. It simply does not have time to fully recover from each workout. I believe this also happens with tough mental work.

Keep in mind this isn't talking about a crunch time or short stints of crazy work. Burnout comes from long runs of working at a non-sustainable pace.

I was once in a situation similar to yours. The harder I worked, the more work got piled on me. After about two weeks, I started coming in at 8 and walking out at 4:30. Yeah, it was awkward to walk out when the rest of the team was still coding away. But a funny thing happened. I actually ended up contributing more functionality to the final project than the rest of the team combined. Why? I disciplined myself and made sure that the stuff I wrote worked the first time through, because I had set limits on my time and that set limits on the amount of rework I could do.

These aren't my values. They don't even remotely reflect who I am as a person, or who I was, at any rate, but I'm helpless to do anything about it, as someone has to do all this crap, and I'm not prepared to inflict it on any of the guys we employ, as I'd rather fuck my life up than someone else's.

First, that's a terrible attitude to have, and it ensures that you'll always be in over your head. Second, I'm willing to bet $20 that not all of that work has to get done. If you're really burning out as much as you say you are, you're not doing high quality work anyway. It'd be better to meet with the client and have some very frank discussions regarding the status of the project than deliver something that's complete on paper but only half-works in practice.