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Avoiding Burnout

andrewdumont.me

11–20 of 107 posts

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#11
post #6

It'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…

Sounds like there's a simple (to explain, not necessarily to do) solution for you. What's keeping you at the sucky job?

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#12
These ideas all seem like bandaids to me if they aren't personal goals that you care about. I've seen studies that show that burnout is caused by sustained imbalance between your personal goals and how you're living your life. This can also happen retro actively. For example, if you were to find out that you weren't going to get paid for a job you'd been working the last 6 months on, you would almost instantly be burned out. That is, if you were doing it for the money of course. Your personal goal is to spend a certain percentage of your time on things that will increase your wealth, and if you weren't to get paid, the sudden overwhelming sense of losing six months would burn you out immediately.

Likewise in a startup, I think the studies would say that you find yourself burned out because at some point, something inside you says, "80 hours a week for the last year wasn't really completely in line with all my personal goals. I have a goal to have personal relationships, spend time with my family, and exercise, yet this startup is the only thing I've been doing." At some point a voice inside says, "It wasn't worth it."

People have very different goals, so results will vary as to what causes burnout, but as a boss, something I know will cause burnout is anything that will pull the rug out from under an employee regarding benefits that they expected to receive. For startups this is super tricky because some employees are expecting an IPO with big payouts, and when they get disillusioned about that, there's really no way to stop the burnout.

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#15
post #11
post #6

It'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…

Sounds like there's a simple (to explain, not necessarily to do) solution for you. What's keeping you at the sucky job?

Not an OP, but I can answer the same.

Good pay, benefits, stability, lots of free time and overall an ability to "have life" now (between 5 and 8:30) as opposed to having it after a startup maybe exits.

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#16

I 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…

Nice read! It makes a lot of sense too.

We developers could probably do something as small as working on a projecteuler.net problem for 30 minutes at the end of a rough day.

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#17
post #6

It'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…

Nice, I didn't know about 37.5 hour weeks in NZ. Does that 2.5 difference from 40 hour weeks account for a paid 30 minutes of lunch time everyday, or just a shorter Friday?

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#18
while often overlooked in our industry, it's the importance of hitting the "reset" button. we're making sure clients are happy, sales people have the information they need, and that can creep very hard into the rest of they day. instituting a "hard stop" can go a long way, it did for me. i've spent 12-15hrs at the office, per day, dealing with meetings, questions, providing guidance and the like. eventually you must put you interests first. whether it's picking up that book, working on that personal project, or calling that friend who works in a different field. ultimately, the problems are not crazy new, but it's the day to day that burns people out. there's knowledge to be shared but when you feel like day in and day out it's the same old, then all the more reason to institute basic guides/metrics that let us know things are on track. vacation is equally important, truly the 'reset' button, get off the grid. after all, it things fall apart while we're getting replenished, it's time to rethink our priorities.

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#19
This article really hit home for me. If I could I would take this advice, but I literally can't afford to. My only option is to continue working 12 hour days or I'll actually become homeless. So if anyone here has been through a similar situation I would appreciate any advice you may have to offer.

Re: Avoiding Burnout

#20
post #9

Excellent article. The funny thing is that when you don't have time to exercise, then it is the time you need it the most.

Same can be said about getting enough sleep.

Same can be said about socializing.

In fact, here in grad school we have a rule: "Choose any two from -- Grades, Social Life, or Sleep".

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