Avoiding Burnout
andrewdumont.me
Avoiding Burnout
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Re: Avoiding Burnout
#2I feel like this is useful information for much more than just people involved in work. Specifically, as PhD students, my partner and I (and pretty much all of our colleagues) often face burnout, and are always looking for ways to combat it.
I quite like the sound of most things in this article, and think I will try to adopt some of the principles to my study and see if they will help. Specifically, I need to get back into fiction, because that really did help when I read lots a few months ago. Also, evening walks sounds like a beautiful way to wind down.
Does anybody else here have other advice on ways to combat burnout during a PhD? I (and every other student) would be most interested to hear.
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#3You have a good regiment for burnout.
You can always feel burnout approaching which is usually about 2 weeks before it really happens (waking up and dreading working on the same thing).
Stop what you're doing and do something totally different for a while. For me its working on a vastly different project and spending weekends in the mountains.
This has never failed me yet as I always re-approach the offending project with the same drive I had when starting it.
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#4I feel like this is useful information for much more than just people involved in work. Specifically, as PhD students, my partner and I (and pretty much all of our colleagues) often face burnout, and are always looking for ways to combat it. I quite like the sound of most things in this article, and think I will try to adopt some of the principles to my study and see if they will help. Specifically, I need to get bac…
I have very clear advice for PhD: Agree to work 4 hours a day on your thesis + papers (including reading literature!), and stop. You won't get more done anyways, so enjoy the rest of your day guilt-free. It is a marathon, and the consistent 4-hour days add up. If you miss one day, don't do 8 hours the next day; just do another 4. Don't make more than 4 hours mandatory.
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#5I feel like this is useful information for much more than just people involved in work. Specifically, as PhD students, my partner and I (and pretty much all of our colleagues) often face burnout, and are always looking for ways to combat it. I quite like the sound of most things in this article, and think I will try to adopt some of the principles to my study and see if they will help. Specifically, I need to get bac…
I have very clear advice for PhD: Agree to work 4 hours a day on your thesis + papers (including reading literature!), and stop. You won't get more done anyways, so enjoy the rest of your day guilt-free. It is a marathon, and the consistent 4-hour days add up. If you miss one day, don't do 8 hours the next day; just do another 4. Don't make more than 4 hours mandatory.
I completely agree. The only point where I fail at this is when I compare it to the 8 hour days I do once a week as a web developer (unrelated to the PhD). It seems so easy to power through the 8 hours and still feel like you could get more done. Then you go to uni, and if you manage 4 hours, it is a success. I always feel like I should be able to manage 8 hour days at Uni too, but of course it is a different kind of work which stresses different parts of your brain.
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#6It's funny. I work in New Zealand, and I do my 37.5 hours a week as required (any more than that, and I get over-time) but that 37.5 hours takes such. a. long. time!
When I was working for a startup, and working from whatever time I woke up, till 3am in the morning, time flew by so quickly. I could easily do 80 hours, and have great fun. I was creative, and energised.
As soon as I went from a startup to working for a large employer and was forced to do 8.30am till 5.00pm all my productivity and energy flew right out the window.
Sigh.
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#7I remember reading this published insight[1] from Marissa Mayer a few months ago:
Burnout is caused by resentment
Which sounded amazing, until this guy who dated a neuroscientist commented[2]:
No. Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
Then I finally realized how many times I've burnt out in my life, and I became much better into avoiding it. Which is really hard to do.
And it seems to me that this is one of the many points that Ben Horowitz talks about on his What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology[3]
[1] http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment...
[2] http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment...
[3] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-diff...
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#8Excellent article.
This is the first time I've deliberately activated the Kudos mouse-over thing on this guy's blog.
I can't count the number of times I've done it accidentally.
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#9Excellent article. The funny thing is that when you don't have time to exercise, then it is the time you need it the most.
Re: Avoiding Burnout
#10Judging from the comments and the articles, it seems like I've never had a proper burnout. I always recover within days, this seems to be a longer matter however. The author talks about warning signs, and many of you mention you can feel it coming, even two weeks advanced.
Would it be possible to describe this to someone like me? Not the burnout, but the warning signs?