Ask HN: Working through burnout?

I know, I know, the solution to burnout is to slow down and take some time off.

What do you do when you're exhausted, your brain is fuzzy, and you just plain have to meet a hard deadline in a few days? You have obligations to your team and your company and yourself that just can't put off.

It's all well and good to say you'll take a week off once the deadline is met, but how do you keep your brain operative and your mind focused enough to read and write code for those intervening 3 days when you can barely read a sentence of plain English text without having to go back over it 3 times to extract any meaning?

Take at least one hour consecutive walk every day without any gadgets. It'll give your brain time to recover and your body exercise to releave stress.

I have to say these three do wonders and are critical for sustainable productivity.

1) Stop reading HN.

2) Work your ass off for the next 3 days. You can do it. And for the next 3 days, have as many lunch and dinners with your team as you can -- meals with your team during a crunch time are a great morale booster. Also, don't pull all-nighters. Even if it's a crisis, you still need sleep.

3) On day 4, have the awkward conversation with your team lead, manager, etc... and quit.

4) Promise yourself you won't get into that kind of a situation ever again. And if you do find yourself in that kind of a situation again, promise yourself that you'll look for and deal with the warning signs sooner than three days before a deadline. (I know it's clichéd, but especially with burnout, prevention is much more effective than any cure.)

Honestly? Refuse. In my experience, there are very few situations where crunch time affects the bottom line. There are some, to be sure, but chances are slim that you have stumbled upon it. More likely, someone higher up got impatient and is driving this. I have worked many a Saturday nights until 3-4 am to try to launch a site on Monday, just to learn that there was going to be a month long delay because someone else didn't do something. I had a deadline of "we are launching this thing on Friday"... for 12 weeks straight (finally launched it once it was truly ready a year later).

For working weekends, I've adopted a policy of roughly one weekend a year. That's how often I believe true emergencies happen (at least for most situations; Google SRE need not apply).

Look, if it's an isolated incident, take some breaks, find something to distract and relax you, get sleep. If it's a second or third attempt to get the team to crunch hard, quit.