If you wake up and you're not excited to get started on the challenge(s) that your work will bring, then you're burnt out.
Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
91–100 of 106 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step away, man. It seems like you can't, but trust me. Step away. If an organization rests solely on the shoulders of one man, it isn't running properly, and it needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. Step away
Aye, there's the rub. I'm desperate for us to hire someone else to at least share the devops/project management/administrative/account management burden with me, however my business partner runs the design side of things, and therefore doesn't see the problems (I never get to sleep, I don't feel like it's permissible for me to do anything but sit in the office waiting for the next crisis), just the symptoms (me being…
Or you could... Stop.
Seriously, he's only seeing the symptoms because you aren't showing them to him. Step away is exactly the right advice. Leave the office. Don't handle a crisis.
That should trigger a proper discussion about unrealistic expectations and the fact that you've probably been doing your job progressively worse. A single crisis not managed is usually better than an increasing number of crises badly-managed because you were running yourself into the ground.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step away, man. It seems like you can't, but trust me. Step away. If an organization rests solely on the shoulders of one man, it isn't running properly, and it needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. Step away
Aye, there's the rub. I'm desperate for us to hire someone else to at least share the devops/project management/administrative/account management burden with me, however my business partner runs the design side of things, and therefore doesn't see the problems (I never get to sleep, I don't feel like it's permissible for me to do anything but sit in the office waiting for the next crisis), just the symptoms (me being…
Here's a way to think about this.
If the business is to survive (and continue to support you & your employees), you have something like these two options:
1) You continue at the existing intolerable grind until you lose it. The entire mass of work that you're currently doing will suddenly be thrown to everyone else, along with whatever else is required to clean up after your personal implosion (will they even know where you are or if you're coming back? will you start throwing servers out the window or screaming at customers?). Somehow with incredible difficulty they may figure it out and rescue the business, in spite of you.
2) You grind up this bitter pill and start giving it now, in little tiny doses. Hand out chunks of responsibility to others, and answer questions but don't micromanage; let them make their own mistakes (and clean them up themselves) until they've got it under control; shuffle things around as needed until folks are comfortable; repeat. Either you will make your way to a business that is sustainable, or you will find that this cannot be, in fact, a workable business that doesn't ride entirely on your back. Which means you should try something else.
It think it should be obvious which path is easier on your colleagues/employees.
If this were me, I think I'd just say "we're going to start having "X got hit by a bus" drills, and you guys have to handle something completely without me". It won't be as good as if you did it yourself, probably, but there's no way in hell they'll get any better without practice.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#94If you don't suffer from chronic depression but are depressed, you may be burnt out. I feel a person starts the cycle of burnout by forgetting that excellence is a habit, not an act. It's easy to fixate on the magnitude of individual iterations of a habitual activity and forget the importance of consistency and sustainability. This common confusion in humans may stem from the fact that our brains evolved to optimize for short-term rewards and respond only to short-term danger. The magnitude of your individual actions is trivial compared to how often you act.
My simple productivity hack: be happy with doing less--but very frequently and very well.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step away, man. It seems like you can't, but trust me. Step away. If an organization rests solely on the shoulders of one man, it isn't running properly, and it needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. Step away
Aye, there's the rub. I'm desperate for us to hire someone else to at least share the devops/project management/administrative/account management burden with me, however my business partner runs the design side of things, and therefore doesn't see the problems (I never get to sleep, I don't feel like it's permissible for me to do anything but sit in the office waiting for the next crisis), just the symptoms (me being…
wait, hangon. There are partial technical answers to a lot of these problems. First, is shit broken all the time? if that's true, that's the real problem. I've been in that situation before, and it's hellish because you know that if you had a week of 'full productivity' you'd be able to fix the root cause, and shit wouldn't be broken all the time, but you are always too wasted from firefighting to solve the root cause.
Hire some contractors or something to help you get things together to the point where you have emergencies once a week or less; This is a relatively low bar, but it will set things up such that you can sleep most of the time, which is key. Even if you have to pay full rates $150/hr or whatever, (and you should be able to get someone good enough to get you down to the 'failures once a week' bar fairly quickly at that rate.) do it. Have your hired gun bang on things for a week. Someone good and fresh should be able to get you down to 1 downtime-causing failure a week fairly quickly. (really. one failure every 7 days is an extremely low bar unless you have hundreds or thousands of physical servers. I probably get a bad disk a week, but those are 'fix as soon as you are awake' not 'wake up now' events. I get a downtime causing error maybe once every two months, and if you can only afford one sysadmin, chances are you are way smaller than I am.)
The important thing is to focus on bringing your failures down to reasonable rather than on making things perfect. Bring your failures down to humanly tolerable, recover, then start worrying about the failures that happen twice a year.
Next, you have a pager, right? sleep whenever you can. The caffeine makes this harder, but it's still possible. Sleep whenever you can. Set it up so that your pager wakes you, but also set up your alarms so that it only goes off if there is a /real/ problem.
Next, why are you staying at the office? I've bought one of those little verizon brand USB cellphone dongles for both my employee and myself. It's pretty great; you can be way out in the middle of nowhere, get a page, and you can do most of the things you could do in the office.
You need to set expectations. If you got woken up to fight a fire? you put out the fire, but then you aren't showing up the next day.
So yeah, first priority? sleep. Depriving yourself of sleep is false productivity. Next? make your system more reliable.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#96This is how to tell the difference between exhaustion and burning out: you get exhausted if you pushed hard, you burn out if you pushed hard for a wrong reason. If someone claims they can fix burn out by taking a walk or a getting a nap, they're not burnt out. You are burnt out when having hard time not just doing your work, but also when trying to recuperate. Basically, that "wrong reason" depresses you, making recovery very hard. If you are lazy due to overall fatigue, the next day you'll go back to work like it never happened; if you burnt out, the "next day" never happens.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#97Personally, I take issue with the entire "lazy" thing. I find most people who talk about laziness are using it as a way to avoid thinking deeply about their own motivation. "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…
Agreed...I do believe that working hard is great, but generally only if it is doing something you actually want to be doing.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#98My own experience suggests you are truly burnt out when you are no longer capable of doing work in the face of dire consequences like missing mortgage repayments and feeding your children.
Of course, this feeds back on itself, with further stress causing even more difficulty in fulfilling one's obligations.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Step away, man. It seems like you can't, but trust me. Step away. If an organization rests solely on the shoulders of one man, it isn't running properly, and it needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. Step away
Aye, there's the rub. I'm desperate for us to hire someone else to at least share the devops/project management/administrative/account management burden with me, however my business partner runs the design side of things, and therefore doesn't see the problems (I never get to sleep, I don't feel like it's permissible for me to do anything but sit in the office waiting for the next crisis), just the symptoms (me being…
I'm desperate for us to hire someone else
But not desperate enough to explain this to your business partner? A working relationship is similar a romantic relationship. You can't just hope the other person will "pick up" on what's bothering you. You have to tell them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you know if you're burnt out or just being lazy?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's fine once you adjust your value system to recognise that work is life, and that everything else is basically irrelevant. No family to speak of (apart from the ones who expect a monthly cheque from me (brother, aunt, mother)), co-workers are employees, so not appropriate for me to talk about it with them!
This has to be a well-executed joke... Or someone who has severely lost track of perspective. You know it's done well when you really can't tell.
Yes, but if its NOT a joke, am I a bad person for laughing?