Ask HN: Has anyone managed to find enjoyment in their work after burnout?

Write down a realistic but achievable set of tasks/subtasks at the start of the day. Start them, when it's time for lunch, take 1.5 hours and do something totally not work. A nap, a run, a swim something active and restorative. Then go back to work, and you'll finish you're list probably before the end of the day.

If you don't, resize you're list untill you can steal away a 1.5 hour lunch break each day. If you're doing something like hitting the gym or running you'll find you have a lot more energy and generally feel better. That may not solve the problem of liking your work, but you'll at least be in good shape and rested to deal with it.

If anyone calls you out on the long lunch breaks, just cancel / don't attend meetings to make up for missed time. and block book weeks and months of calander time out with complex sounding meetings no one is invited to.

Give yourself space. You're probably still burnt out a bit.

Obvious for me to say: there's a point in time when you're going to stop working and you're going to be draining away your safety net regardless, because you're retired.

So with a sabbatical now, just think that you're making time now so that you can have a better retirement later because you'll be ready for an enjoyable retirement as opposed to needing to take two or three or five years of your retirement, just calming down from your crazy career.

It's definitely not an easy thing to consider. Do evaluate with an extended pros and cons list and weight each item in the list.

Burnout for me weighed extraordinarily heavily.

I was pretty burned out when I was a tech recruiter running an office. It sucked. Was doing really long weeks, working any and all hours, often at the office till 7 or 8 on fridays.

Switched careers to dev work and enjoy it a lot more. As others have said enforcing a healthy WLB and 40 hour week has helped a lot.

I dont dread going to work anymore. I view work as part of my day rather than my entire day. I also try to do something with my lunch break other than sit at my computer. I go to some type of exercise class, because I enjoy it, many days. Bike/run with my dog others.

So Monday isnt, ugh the start of another week of work. Monday is a day where I do some work, go to a jujitsu class in the middle of the day, do some more work, walk my dog at 5, make dinner with my wife, play a little video games or read, and then get to wind down for the day.

Nothing work related on my phone. Notifications shut off on my computer. Slack gets closed at 5. Laptop gets closed at 5. Once in a while I need to do something extra for work but as long as that is rare then its easier to keep the balance.

It's less that and more that you're not maximizing retirement savings at that point, which is something that stresses a lot of folks out.

Also, even within software, I can't imagine trying to find a job with a 6-month gap on my resume. I'm not in the bay area, and even working remotely, competition is brutal. A gap on your resume is a great reason to get immediately rejected by wherever you're applying to.

Not all of us are in the niches of software where jobs are easy to come by. Not everything is web dev.

Burnout takes different forms and people create different methods for coping.

Twenty five years ago I began working on a large project that had no chance of success because of an impossible schedule. I was one of just a few senior people who had been asked to support it, while most of the team consisted of new-hires. (The reason for this was the classic "they won't know that it's impossible, so maybe they can do it" strategy.) After about a year and with some success, things began to go wrong. In order to get things done faster, the team had neglected documentation on the first build (of 13). So even though the first build was mostly on time, the whole team was so burned out that most of them had left. (Attrition was over 60% and many engineers became so disillusioned with their career choice that they switched to something else.) The new team was left with no documentation and no experience, but the impossible schedule remained. Management began having daily morning meetings (two hours) as part of our 12 hour day. Every morning we would re-plan the schedule and every day it would slip.

After working in this environment for almost two years, I moved on. Before I worked on this project I had a strong commitment to schedule and I would do whatever it took to make sure things were on time. After working this project I found that I never took any schedule seriously. I would do what I could to get things done, but I wouldn't work excessive hours or stress myself about being late. This coping mechanism has (mostly) helped me both in work and in life, but some program managers have viewed my attitude as insubordinate.

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