8 ms·

Burnout

274 points by talmir 13y ago

freebs 13y ago
As someone that has always found many things interesting, boiling it down to only a few things is very hard. Over the past year I've been slowly doing the same. I'm down to spending time with my family, web dev, marketing, and gaming. Choosing between web dev and marketing will be one of the hardest choices I make yet.
- passfree 13y ago
  I do not practice what I preach as effectively as I would want to but the best thing to do is to run them in sprints. In other words, a week worth of coding is complimented by a week of marketing regardless whether you employ people to do work for you or not. The same applies for life in general. You need to mix and match but also not to do too many things at the same time. Some days you will finish your tasks sooner than you expect. Do not bother starting anything else cuz you will drift into something and then realise that you have almost burned out. Don't do it! Instead let boredom grow on you for a little bit. Getting bored is good for you.
EC1 13y ago
>A few years ago I wanted to know everything. I spent the day at work thinking about what I would do when I got home and then spend the evening studying various things as hard as I could. I would stress over how there werent enought hours in the day to do what I wanted to do. There was rarely an hour in the day where I wasnt productive in some way. Oou, this resonates with me. For the past year I've been trying to optimize my life as best I could. This meant cutting out time for food + commuting which were my biggest factors in sucking away time, as well as distractions. I moved about 10 meters from my place of work, and I cook all 7 days worth of food on Sunday nights. Now I can work 7am - 4pm at my day job, then 4:10pm - 11pm I can work on my own side projects. Been doing this for a year now and it's working out great, the revenue I make from my side company is almost level with my salary, then I can quit and truly be free, working entirely under my own vision. I don't feel like I will ever burn out. I have a list of topics I want to know before I die, and they're sorted by priority. Any time I am distracted, I read a bit from the top item of my list. Now when I'm working and become distracted, my "distraction" is reading material based around the project I'm working on. If I don't want to get back to that material, I choose something else and drag it to the top of my list, I prioritize pretty much my entire life with the "Clear" app. It's been going great, I'm thinking of writing a very in depth blog post about the way I've optimized my life and how it has helped me out. I've read more than 30 books this year, I have 6 developers working for me full-time, I have learned SO MUCH. I hope to keep going like this for the rest of my natural life. I rather sacrifice my 20's to live it up in my 30's. I cannot stand wasting any minutes on anything, I don't know when the switch flipped, but at some point, it did. I used to love spending hours on video games or jerking around, now, there is absolutely nothing in this world that I wouldn't give just to buy me some more time. This mentality has engrained itself in my brain now. I find myself ecstatic if I can make a new hour or free up some time somewhere just so I can read or learn more. People often compliment me on how motivated and ambitious I am, but honestly, it's just how I am, I don't wake up every morning saying "okay you're going to be motivated today". It just is.
- napsterbr 13y ago
  Looking forward to that blog post
  - EC1 13y ago
    Mine was mainly about nutrition, and how I formed a super rigid and efficient routine. I have recordings of all my daily commutes, how many calories I ate every day, when, how much, every macronutrient, every coffee, beer, everything. Every movie, every "distwraction", every second I'm actually working. All of these things I've been working to decrease to as small as possible. I'll write it up ASAP.
    - sehr 13y ago
      Definitely interested in this as well, are you using any specific applications to track all the data?
      - EC1 13y ago
        iPhone logger that I wrote myself which I'll be releasing the source code + app to.
    - tvxedoman 13y ago
      Mind shooting me an email when it's up?
    - warrenmcwin 13y ago
      please let me know! your "zoom" is bossy
- teacup50 13y ago
  From someone in his 30s for whom this also resonates: The list never gets smaller. If anything, it not only gets longer, but the list items themselves grow even more ambitious and far reaching. I've done great things. I've started sustainable companies, released a prodigious amount of code, and some of it has shifted the course of industry and secured my position in it. At the same time, I'm exhausted. I'm tired of never taking breaks. My wife feels like she has to beg me to just go for a walk, or do something "non-productive". I view everythig through the lens of productivity, and barely know how to unwind anymore. There are experiences I'm missing out on. Outdoor activities -- 20s and 30s are the best years for them. Making friends -- it's well known that this gets harder to do as you get older, and many friends you make when younger will be your friends for decades. If I could give 20 year old me some advice, it would be to pick something off that list of mine, make my work on it economically sustainable, figure out how to get other people working on it, and live a balanced life. People like us may be able to do the work of 10 engineers, but if you hire 10 engineers, you'll have an economic engine capable of hiring 10 more. If you have the level of energy I do for solving problems, treat sustainability and scale as a problem to be solved; don't try to implement your entire list yourself.
SDGT 13y ago
> I might not be as good today as I would have been if I had kept grinding away. That is my overriding problem. If I stop, it means possible stagnation. There is no greater fear than becoming irrelevant.
- FLUX-YOU 13y ago
  I'm struggling with being irrelevant right now. Not a fun thing, I assure you.
- rwallace 13y ago
  Yeah, but it's bollocks. Too much grinding dulls your mental acuity. We're not talking about World of Warcraft where your score depends on how many times you press the button in the Skinner box. We're talking about real life where progress depends on understanding better ways to do things. A few years at a healthy, sustainable pace with work-life balance will leave you better at your job than a few years of demented grinding will.
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  But solid, foundational skills in any area of life do not make you irrelevant. Learn those, and you can adapt to whatever fashion is currently en vogue. Software is no different, there's only the clamor of employers refusing to train, along with the copious free time of privileged white males making you feel like it is. The media loves to tell you that you aren't working hard enough. Western culture defines itself by work, regardless of the consequences.
shadowmint 13y ago
That's true... but there's also the flip side to the coin. Finishing things is good; but if you have a project you want to finish, you'll never finish it if you halfheartedly look at it once a week for an hour. If you spend more than certain amount of time not looking at something or not working on it, you forget how it works and it takes all of that available time you have to get into 'the zone' where you're actually making progress on the task. So, I guess if you have an amazing forfulling job that is exactly what you're interested in, and you spend your days working on your interesting projects... sure. I'll be over here with my cup of 10pm coffee and a pile of rust code; blissfully hacking (and reading hacker news while head compiles :).
- talmir 13y ago
  If hacking away makes you happy, go for it :) I can only relate my own experiences. I do tend to code for hours on end on whatever catches my interest. The point was trying to make is to relax once in a while :) (Never expected this to reach nr.1 on hacker new, even if it is only for a couple of minutes)
- deleted 13y ago
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- krosaen 13y ago
  I think it depends on how you feel when doing extracurricular work - if you're energized and excited, awesome. If you eventually find yourself drained and/or beating yourself up, take it easy on yourself and rest up.
- deleted 13y ago
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JamesBaxter 13y ago
I'm nearly two years into my programming career and I'm really struggling with this balance. Every day at work I face a new programming challenge. Every night I feel guilty about not being able to motivate myself to work on either of the two side projects I've started. Video games work well as something mindless that clears my head at the end of the day. The problem is stopping playing before I've wasted my whole evening and the pain I get in my fingers/wrists after a whole day of repetitive movement. I need to find something less addictive that doesn't require much dexterity. I'm considering chess.
- morganherlocker 13y ago
  I have always found music good for this sort of thing. It is very relaxing, uses the creative part of your brain, and you get a skill that stays with you for the rest of your life. While it is engaging, it somehow gets boring after about an hour or two, so it is unlikely to suck away an entire evening. Over the years I have learned to play dozens of instruments just by devoting an hour here and there.
  - deleted 13y ago
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jscheel 13y ago
I am finding that it's better to just leave the stupid computer off when I get home. It gives me more time with my wife and daughter, and I feel more rested and ready for the next day. For example, last Saturday was filled with bike rides, walks, and playing outside. That's it. Yes, I have a list of about 10,000 different things I'm interesting in learning and doing, and another list that size of things that actually need to get done, but none of that will ever relax me or come close to the quality time I spend decompressing with my family and friends.
- goalieca 13y ago
  Sometimes I find that instead of reading about tech and trying little hobby things at home, I'm better off trying to fit that into my work somehow. Even a full 8 hours of programming 5 days in a row can be enough to mentally drain you if you're actually working the whole time.
  - beebs93 13y ago
    Excellent point. If you find yourself at a job where they discourage programmers from reading tech blogs once in a while then RUN. FOR. YOUR. FKING. LIFE.
    - cfontes 13y ago
      Excelent advice. I have a mental list of companies that block the internet from their employees so they don't do that. I think that is just stupid. If you hire people you have to at least trust them to do their work otherwise fire them and unlock the freaking internet.
    - gauravpandey 13y ago
      What if someone likes blogs to become entrepreneur more?
  - mathattack 13y ago
    It's self development, and very few folks have 8 hours of continuous concentration in them.
thu 13y ago
What do you do if chilling out is not an option ? If your day job is maddening (and you feel like any other job would probably be maddening too) and the only alternative you have is to start your own company ? What do you do if you need to keep the day job to pay bills and work on your own product in the evening and the week-end until it can bring money ? When it seems that you can either burn out or succeed ?
- stevenkovar 13y ago
  Learn to enforce boundaries. If you let your job walk all over you, it will.
  - ihsw 13y ago
    It's not that it will walk all over you, but that it will keep taking away from every other part of your life until there is nothing left to take away. You'll feel helpless precisely because you will have nothing left to give. Everybody has their limits. You will be straining your mind all the time, never able to let your guard down for a second. The only hope you have is that someone else will save you by taking your job from you.
- wprl 13y ago
  There's nothing wrong with "going hard" to reach a short-term goal. Burnout comes when "going hard" becomes a lifestyle. You need to make sure to allow plenty of time for resting afterwards, or your intellect and will wear out.
- goalieca 13y ago
  If your job sucks, be patient and make a long term plan to improve it/get out. Find/make something awesome outside of work to look forwards to and focus on. All work ends up being boring to some extent, so focus on the good things in life like your nephew or perhaps that microbrew taste testing night with your old friends.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Well, first, you run away from fast growing startup business. You may want to start consulting first, instead of creating products. If you insist in products, do something that can be lucrative right at the beginning (Patio11 is famous for having lots of material on that). Anyway, that advice is hard to follow. If you can't, I can't really blame you, I'm still unable to follow it either. But I've failed enough times to know that it's the right way to do it...
stevenkovar 13y ago
No matter how sharp your blade, your steel must be tempered. Life is about balance. You will break if you don't give your mind and body the rest it deserves. Often, great ideas find me when I am cooling down.
- vvvVVVvvv 13y ago
  I'm sorting my day out when in the morning shower. There's no better place / moment to think. No distraction, just your mind clearing up the midst.
snarfy 13y ago
Burnout is a syndrome that happens from a series of failures, resulting in your brain automatically associating work with failure. The cure for burnout is a series of successes. You need to retrain your brain to associate work with success. Start small. Don't take on more than you can handle. Quit trying to make the uber server app and write a few simple command line utilities that work and work well.
- stupejr 13y ago
  This, I'm so sick of hearing burnout stories, you're responsible for how you're feeling. When you take the stance of the "victim" all the time you set yourself up for failure. I see countless people attribute "failures" that had nothing to do with themselves to them just so they feel like they have some control over the situation and then wind up feeling burnt out when they're accepting the responsibility for the entire companies success or doom. Then they're asking why they're feeling so burnt out and can't completely their daily responsibilities that they actually have.
- stevenkovar 13y ago
  Burnout is like being sleep deprived; you can be wildly successful and still burn out if you don't give yourself time to mentally sort through all the ideas and toss out the trash, even if just subconsciously. When you've been working too hard for too long, small problems can feel like big issues because the cumulative weight of all the stuff going through your mind. Clarity is tough to maintain.
beebs93 13y ago
Good post - short, sweet and to the point. It's important to find that balance between what you love and what keeps you healthy. Some people here may go on the defensive and read it as "I don't work every waking hour and you shouldn't either", but hopefully they'll take a deep breath, release the kung fu grip on their copy of "Design Patterns" and remember to just grab a decent night's sleep every so often.
daGrevis 13y ago
Here's a theory — an ideal job is a job that fulfills your desire to code to a level in which you don't want to do any coding after work hours. There's so much challenging tasks and new things you learn right away by doing things you are paid for that you don't need to search for something new after work.
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  Indeed, this is far more sustainable than burning the candle from both ends. It may seem like a bit of a unicorn job; but the current SV boom tends to overvalue inexperienced engineers so much that it can seem like there are no interesting jobs in tech left. After ten years, you start wanting something different from work. Nothing wrong with that, you just need to find somewhere that will keep you intellectually fed.
- chadillac 13y ago
  I've found the contrary to be true lately. I was a serial burnout case. I'd crank hard for 3 or 4 months and it'd take me 6 months to recover. I've found more recently that it wasn't the projects at home or at work, it was a lack of diversity. Doing the same thing when I got home that I did all day burned me out because it wasn't any different. Coming home and working of stuff I can't work on at work be it new languages, games, new ideas, whatever, just so long as it's different than what I did for 8 hours then I don't get burnt. Now the problem is I don't have enough hours in the day to do it all and working until 4 am and being up at 7 isn't sustainable.
  - jonalmeida 13y ago
    Quite true in terms of my work habits. At the end of the day, you want to learn something new, but you've given it 110% during the day that you can't get yourself to start a new hobby project. In my case, I always seemed stuck back at the same mindset and mental "data structure" in my head, so it would be difficult to push it aside to make room for something new. It might sound stupid, but it could also be the fear that I would lose said structure, and the next day would go entirely into rebuilding it.
  - 13y ago
sdegutis 13y ago
> For the first time in years I had time to do silly stuff like playing video games, going out for a walk or watch movies. For the first time in years I didnt grit my teeth and churn out that little bit of code that would help me develop my skills further. > It feels great. I can totally relate. A few months ago, I started giving up on my open source projects, as a side-effect of burnout. Admittedly part of the solution was working hard to give up the hubris inside me that made me think my code and my ideas were vital to the world. But now that it's given up, I really do have a lot more free time. Last night, I was under a blanket on the couch, reading two full Sherlock Holmes[1] stories to my wife and children, who were just drawing or cuddling on the couch or whatever. We just kicked back and relaxed, and we all enjoyed it. The downside is that I now have a hard time keeping the motivating excitement going for new ideas I have. Just the other week I had an idea for a node-webkit-like idea based on JSCocoa, but it involved rewriting major parts of JSCocoa to get it to work properly. I've gotten pretty far[2] but I'm losing steam quickly and falling back into the "meh" state of life in which I'm now more interested in playing Starcraft 2 for an hour or two, or drawing some doodles. So it's a weird balance that I can't figure just yet. [1]: Later that night I read The Purloined Letter to my wife as she painted some walls, and we both enjoyed it but thought it was a little bit long-winded for what it had to say. [2]: http://github.com/sdegutis/chaos http://github.com/sdegutis/chaos
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  That's a pretty neat project. Since it's a big effort, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it. You should be honest with yourself about motivations and reasons for doing open source. Do it because you like tinkering, not because it's a resume-builder. Truth is, open source is not a meritocracy, it's more of a lottery. I've been mildly successful (as in, entranced a nascent community) at it for a time, but I found it a bit stressful with expectations and all. PS: do you work at 8th Light?
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - sdegutis 13y ago
    > That's a pretty neat project. Since it's a big effort, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it. Thanks. > You should be honest with yourself about motivations and reasons for doing open source. Do it because you like tinkering, not because it's a resume-builder. Truth is, open source is not a meritocracy, it's more of a lottery. I've been mildly successful (as in, entranced a nascent community) at it for a time, but I found it a bit stressful with expectations and all. I was initially motivated by it being an interesting problem to solve. But I quickly ran into it being more difficult than interesting, so my steam started running out faster. I may be able to salvage it if there's any community interest in it, but it's difficult to get anyone interested without having a working prototype to demo, which is actually the hardest part of this project (i.e. dealing with libffi and boxing ObjC objects, etc). > PS: do you work at 8th Light? I used to. Now I work for http://www.cleancoders.com/ http://www.cleancoders.com/
pfortuny 13y ago
Yes, try and look for happiness, which means a life you have control over, for a meaning of life much richer than 'the one with the greatest income to be had with my skills.' One needs a definition of happiness which a) Is appealing b) Is a long-term (lifelong) project c) Is valuable (in the sense of 'personal values') Usually, this means sharing your 'life' with other people first and foremost. And yes, burnout should not be a dirty word ever.
quaffapint 13y ago
I've got a crappy dev job that I've been in for over a decade that only gets worse with less pay. I don't bring home enough money and have my family living paycheck to paycheck. I stress over it and keep trying side stuff to bring in more, which mostly fail. I'm working hard right now trying to get this next side project out the door in the next month. I'm in my 40s and no one in the area has raised their dev salaries since the 2008 drop. Given my age, it's only going to be harder to find jobs if it comes to that. I'm stuck. It's stressful and it sucks. But, I still make time for the family. I go to their school functions, and help with their homework. I play games and watch movies. I'm doing it for them. I just wish I could do more. Someone once said they were jealous of me because I seem so content. My poker face must be pretty awesome.
- jshen 13y ago
  are you in a big city? All the devs I know make good money, and their salaries have been steadily rising for over a decade. Also, all the devs I know can get a new job in a week or so. Then I hear stories like yours and wonder what the difference is. Maybe location?
  - tracker1 13y ago
    Location has a lot to do with it... It also factors in heavily with cost of living differences, and quality of life for a single guy vs. a family. I'm in Phoenix, which has a lot of developer work, though most of it is fairly boring line of business stuff. Compared to say San Francisco, which has a little more developer work, but the pay is the same or not enough more for most positions I've looked at and the cost of living is a lot more. There are other trade offs as well that favor SF over Phx, for example Phx is hot 3 months a year, and hotter than hell another 4. There's a few more rural communities in southwest Oregon I'd like to live in, but there's not really any tech/dev work near what I'd need to make there. Being a software developer outside the top 10-15 major metro areas in the U.S. is a lot harder, and the pay is significantly less. I'd honestly suggest the guy consider relocating... it's rough for everyone, but Houston, Austin, Phoenix and a few other spots have a pretty nice income to cost of living ratio, and plenty of developer work.
jwmoz 13y ago
I got burnt out on a contract a few years ago, was a horrible feeling, continually tired and falling asleep, no enthusiasm for the role. Switched to a different contract and halved my commuting time and turned into a different person. Now when I finish work I'm out of here, no more coding or hacking at home, instead, I train at the gym or go out for food or more recently chill a lot.
- jtbigwoo 13y ago
  I've discovered that a commute over 30 minutes, even to an interesting job, just destroys my ambition both at work and for an hour or two after work.
dkhenry 13y ago
I am not happy doing nothing. I don't understand how you can be do content just "chilling". Now don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with recreation and spending time with your family, there isn't even anything wrong with doing nothing, if its for a purpose, but just wasting time because you can is a waste of time. You should be optimizing your time to get the most value out of it. Maybe I am just odd, but I would much rather be hacking on my side projects then playing games and watching movies. I guess that the difference between your vocation being your passion and it just being something to pay the bills. Perhaps the author needs to find a different career that provides some fulfillment to him so he doesn't feel the need to waste his life decompressing from his job.
- ddoolin 13y ago
  No. I can't speak for the author, but I can empathize. I'm VERY satisfied with my career. I honestly couldn't imagine doing anything else...but I couldn't do it anymore either. The late nights, always being in front of the computer, always working on something. People burn out, even doing things they love to do. I still do what I love, I just have more of an appropriate balance. I think you're just odd, like you said.
- talmir 13y ago
  Talk about taking every single word I wrote literally :) Thats ok. I do regularly work on side projects. But being 100% productive 100% of the time, in my mind, is not healty. This is my personal opinion. The assumption you make about your vocation being your passion and for me it being just to pay the bills could not be more wrong. I have been a coder all my life. It is my job now and will continue to be as well as my passion. I will continue improving and working on all kinds of things. The difference is that I allow myself some breathing room to be a person, not just a machine, on a regular basis.
  - dkhenry 13y ago
    Here is how I see it. If your going on a drive and you have three choices, one of them is the most direct route its on the freeway and you will make it there is the shortest amount of time, the second is a winding country road it takes twice as long, but you get to enjoy the country road maybe listen to the radio maybe roll your windows down and enjoy the fresh spring air, and you have a separate freeway that is underground and always has a traffic jam. Doing nothing as your described is to me the third option, your just wasting time for no reason whatsoever and your telling yourself this is nice because I am not stressing out about whatever, but your still wasting you time. Relaxation doesn't have to be fruitless, for instance I relax by gardening. It is both calming and productive. After watching that movie or playing that game _most_ of the time all you have is three less hours to do something productive. You have just sat in that underground freeway when you could have been enjoying a spring drive or getting to your destination faster.
agentultra 13y ago
My theory is that "burnout" is a symptom of the endemic "hero" meme of our culture. Think about all the movies you've seen since the 1980s, the shows you've watched, the books you've read. Embedded in the majority of them is the simple idea that there's something special inside you that can set you apart from everyone else. It whispers seductively to that part of your brain that lies to you about how important you are. Any story or idea that fills the need to feel different, special, and unique passes through our scrutiny without a second thought. We want to believe it's true even as we examine our motivations for doing so because it's hard wired into our brains. The problem is that this weakness is easily exploited. Writers, motivational speakers, game designers, poets... they're all in the business of hacking our brains. We've been doing such a good job of it since the sixties that our popular culture is unconsciously driven by it. And it manifests as burnout when it clashes with other popular memes like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you just put in a little elbow grease and work harder you will stand out. If you write that amazing library to make programmers' lives easier they will shower you with praise on the Internet and invite you to speak at conferences so that you may shower the masses with your brilliant message. Burnout happens when all of the rewards of those fantasies fail to materialize despite all of the effort and hard work you've put into chasing them. Worked 60 - 80 hour weeks for the last six months and still got overlooked for that promotion? Burnout. Put off investing time with your family in order to work on that semi-popular open source library and pimp it out at every conference you can submit a proposal to... and you STILL aren't getting the accolades and recognition you deserve? Burnout. My advice for avoiding burnout? Figure out where your desires and ambitions are coming from. Why do you want to work so hard for recognition? Why do you feel you need to be recognized? What's so important about it? Start from there.
- gamegoblin 13y ago
  Hanging out on sites like this definitely doesn't help. In every thread it seems like there is someone who is a perfect expert on whatever being discussed. Need to diagnose a problem in a defunct modem using only an oscilloscope? Someone can. Strange behavior of the JVM? Oh, someone has implemented their own JVM on a 4kb machine as a hobby project. Then you get username delineation and there is this idea of some abstract "hacker" of hackernews (or whatevertechsite.com) that can do everything with ease. Because after seeing all that I think if I can't debug modems with oscilloscopes or implement the JVM I'm behind and subpar.
Bahamut 13y ago
As much as I'd like to constantly be productive, I know that it's not healthy for my mental balance. If I want to be sharp in the long term, I find it ok to take a break every once in a while and chill out from being laser-focused & super-productive. YMMV
dubeye 13y ago
In my mind, the term burnout is incorrectly used as a synonym for 'overworked and stressed to the point of collapse'. Whilst for me burnout means an expiry of enthusiasm and motivation which is a subtle difference perhaps.
dceddia 13y ago
This post really got me thinking, because I feel exactly the same way. The sequence of events described mirrors my own life so closely it borders on creepy. I've been falling further and further into the trap of "optimizing" lots of little things. Spending 5 hours reading Amazon reviews to buy an $11 guitar tuner. Trying to leave the house at exactly the right time to arrive at my destination on the dot. And then, becoming very frustrated when traffic does not cooperate or someone on the road is being less efficient than I want them to be. This post made me realize that thinking this way is almost like an addiction. The more I worry about how to squeeze productivity into a day or which tasks to work on to provide the most benefit (80/20!), the more anxious I feel. And it compounds. Because the next thought through my mind is "I can fix this anxious feeling by planning things out better!" I'm beginning to think that maybe the best way off this train is to stop trying to optimize and control for variables entirely. It's not enough to pick-and-choose, because then you're just meta-optimizing ("I'll just figure out which of these to-do items is the MOST important!") Much akin to an alcoholic having just one drink, I think any sort of optimization thinking might be enough to get the cycle started again. Maybe the only way to tame it is to avoid it entirely.

274 points by talmir 13y ago

As someone that has always found many things interesting, boiling it down to only a few things is very hard. Over the past year I've been slowly doing the same. I'm down to spending time with my family, web dev, marketing, and gaming. Choosing between web dev and marketing will be one of the hardest choices I make yet.

passfree 13y ago
I do not practice what I preach as effectively as I would want to but the best thing to do is to run them in sprints. In other words, a week worth of coding is complimented by a week of marketing regardless whether you employ people to do work for you or not. The same applies for life in general. You need to mix and match but also not to do too many things at the same time. Some days you will finish your tasks sooner than you expect. Do not bother starting anything else cuz you will drift into something and then realise that you have almost burned out. Don't do it! Instead let boredom grow on you for a little bit. Getting bored is good for you.

EC1 13y ago

>A few years ago I wanted to know everything. I spent the day at work thinking about what I would do when I got home and then spend the evening studying various things as hard as I could. I would stress over how there werent enought hours in the day to do what I wanted to do. There was rarely an hour in the day where I wasnt productive in some way. Oou, this resonates with me. For the past year I've been trying to optimize my life as best I could. This meant cutting out time for food + commuting which were my biggest factors in sucking away time, as well as distractions. I moved about 10 meters from my place of work, and I cook all 7 days worth of food on Sunday nights. Now I can work 7am - 4pm at my day job, then 4:10pm - 11pm I can work on my own side projects. Been doing this for a year now and it's working out great, the revenue I make from my side company is almost level with my salary, then I can quit and truly be free, working entirely under my own vision. I don't feel like I will ever burn out. I have a list of topics I want to know before I die, and they're sorted by priority. Any time I am distracted, I read a bit from the top item of my list. Now when I'm working and become distracted, my "distraction" is reading material based around the project I'm working on. If I don't want to get back to that material, I choose something else and drag it to the top of my list, I prioritize pretty much my entire life with the "Clear" app. It's been going great, I'm thinking of writing a very in depth blog post about the way I've optimized my life and how it has helped me out. I've read more than 30 books this year, I have 6 developers working for me full-time, I have learned SO MUCH. I hope to keep going like this for the rest of my natural life. I rather sacrifice my 20's to live it up in my 30's. I cannot stand wasting any minutes on anything, I don't know when the switch flipped, but at some point, it did. I used to love spending hours on video games or jerking around, now, there is absolutely nothing in this world that I wouldn't give just to buy me some more time. This mentality has engrained itself in my brain now. I find myself ecstatic if I can make a new hour or free up some time somewhere just so I can read or learn more. People often compliment me on how motivated and ambitious I am, but honestly, it's just how I am, I don't wake up every morning saying "okay you're going to be motivated today". It just is.

napsterbr 13y ago
Looking forward to that blog post
- EC1 13y ago
  Mine was mainly about nutrition, and how I formed a super rigid and efficient routine. I have recordings of all my daily commutes, how many calories I ate every day, when, how much, every macronutrient, every coffee, beer, everything. Every movie, every "distwraction", every second I'm actually working. All of these things I've been working to decrease to as small as possible. I'll write it up ASAP.
  - sehr 13y ago
    Definitely interested in this as well, are you using any specific applications to track all the data?
    - EC1 13y ago
      iPhone logger that I wrote myself which I'll be releasing the source code + app to.
  - tvxedoman 13y ago
    Mind shooting me an email when it's up?
  - warrenmcwin 13y ago
    please let me know! your "zoom" is bossy
teacup50 13y ago
From someone in his 30s for whom this also resonates: The list never gets smaller. If anything, it not only gets longer, but the list items themselves grow even more ambitious and far reaching. I've done great things. I've started sustainable companies, released a prodigious amount of code, and some of it has shifted the course of industry and secured my position in it. At the same time, I'm exhausted. I'm tired of never taking breaks. My wife feels like she has to beg me to just go for a walk, or do something "non-productive". I view everythig through the lens of productivity, and barely know how to unwind anymore. There are experiences I'm missing out on. Outdoor activities -- 20s and 30s are the best years for them. Making friends -- it's well known that this gets harder to do as you get older, and many friends you make when younger will be your friends for decades. If I could give 20 year old me some advice, it would be to pick something off that list of mine, make my work on it economically sustainable, figure out how to get other people working on it, and live a balanced life. People like us may be able to do the work of 10 engineers, but if you hire 10 engineers, you'll have an economic engine capable of hiring 10 more. If you have the level of energy I do for solving problems, treat sustainability and scale as a problem to be solved; don't try to implement your entire list yourself.

SDGT 13y ago

> I might not be as good today as I would have been if I had kept grinding away. That is my overriding problem. If I stop, it means possible stagnation. There is no greater fear than becoming irrelevant.

FLUX-YOU 13y ago
I'm struggling with being irrelevant right now. Not a fun thing, I assure you.
rwallace 13y ago
Yeah, but it's bollocks. Too much grinding dulls your mental acuity. We're not talking about World of Warcraft where your score depends on how many times you press the button in the Skinner box. We're talking about real life where progress depends on understanding better ways to do things. A few years at a healthy, sustainable pace with work-life balance will leave you better at your job than a few years of demented grinding will.
mattgreenrocks 13y ago
But solid, foundational skills in any area of life do not make you irrelevant. Learn those, and you can adapt to whatever fashion is currently en vogue. Software is no different, there's only the clamor of employers refusing to train, along with the copious free time of privileged white males making you feel like it is. The media loves to tell you that you aren't working hard enough. Western culture defines itself by work, regardless of the consequences.

shadowmint 13y ago

That's true... but there's also the flip side to the coin. Finishing things is good; but if you have a project you want to finish, you'll never finish it if you halfheartedly look at it once a week for an hour. If you spend more than certain amount of time not looking at something or not working on it, you forget how it works and it takes all of that available time you have to get into 'the zone' where you're actually making progress on the task. So, I guess if you have an amazing forfulling job that is exactly what you're interested in, and you spend your days working on your interesting projects... sure. I'll be over here with my cup of 10pm coffee and a pile of rust code; blissfully hacking (and reading hacker news while head compiles :).

talmir 13y ago
If hacking away makes you happy, go for it :) I can only relate my own experiences. I do tend to code for hours on end on whatever catches my interest. The point was trying to make is to relax once in a while :) (Never expected this to reach nr.1 on hacker new, even if it is only for a couple of minutes)
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krosaen 13y ago
I think it depends on how you feel when doing extracurricular work - if you're energized and excited, awesome. If you eventually find yourself drained and/or beating yourself up, take it easy on yourself and rest up.
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JamesBaxter 13y ago

I'm nearly two years into my programming career and I'm really struggling with this balance. Every day at work I face a new programming challenge. Every night I feel guilty about not being able to motivate myself to work on either of the two side projects I've started. Video games work well as something mindless that clears my head at the end of the day. The problem is stopping playing before I've wasted my whole evening and the pain I get in my fingers/wrists after a whole day of repetitive movement. I need to find something less addictive that doesn't require much dexterity. I'm considering chess.

morganherlocker 13y ago
I have always found music good for this sort of thing. It is very relaxing, uses the creative part of your brain, and you get a skill that stays with you for the rest of your life. While it is engaging, it somehow gets boring after about an hour or two, so it is unlikely to suck away an entire evening. Over the years I have learned to play dozens of instruments just by devoting an hour here and there.
- deleted 13y ago
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jscheel 13y ago

I am finding that it's better to just leave the stupid computer off when I get home. It gives me more time with my wife and daughter, and I feel more rested and ready for the next day. For example, last Saturday was filled with bike rides, walks, and playing outside. That's it. Yes, I have a list of about 10,000 different things I'm interesting in learning and doing, and another list that size of things that actually need to get done, but none of that will ever relax me or come close to the quality time I spend decompressing with my family and friends.

goalieca 13y ago
Sometimes I find that instead of reading about tech and trying little hobby things at home, I'm better off trying to fit that into my work somehow. Even a full 8 hours of programming 5 days in a row can be enough to mentally drain you if you're actually working the whole time.
- beebs93 13y ago
  Excellent point. If you find yourself at a job where they discourage programmers from reading tech blogs once in a while then RUN. FOR. YOUR. FKING. LIFE.
  - cfontes 13y ago
    Excelent advice. I have a mental list of companies that block the internet from their employees so they don't do that. I think that is just stupid. If you hire people you have to at least trust them to do their work otherwise fire them and unlock the freaking internet.
  - gauravpandey 13y ago
    What if someone likes blogs to become entrepreneur more?
- mathattack 13y ago
  It's self development, and very few folks have 8 hours of continuous concentration in them.

thu 13y ago

What do you do if chilling out is not an option ? If your day job is maddening (and you feel like any other job would probably be maddening too) and the only alternative you have is to start your own company ? What do you do if you need to keep the day job to pay bills and work on your own product in the evening and the week-end until it can bring money ? When it seems that you can either burn out or succeed ?

stevenkovar 13y ago
Learn to enforce boundaries. If you let your job walk all over you, it will.
- ihsw 13y ago
  It's not that it will walk all over you, but that it will keep taking away from every other part of your life until there is nothing left to take away. You'll feel helpless precisely because you will have nothing left to give. Everybody has their limits. You will be straining your mind all the time, never able to let your guard down for a second. The only hope you have is that someone else will save you by taking your job from you.
wprl 13y ago
There's nothing wrong with "going hard" to reach a short-term goal. Burnout comes when "going hard" becomes a lifestyle. You need to make sure to allow plenty of time for resting afterwards, or your intellect and will wear out.
goalieca 13y ago
If your job sucks, be patient and make a long term plan to improve it/get out. Find/make something awesome outside of work to look forwards to and focus on. All work ends up being boring to some extent, so focus on the good things in life like your nephew or perhaps that microbrew taste testing night with your old friends.
marcosdumay 13y ago
Well, first, you run away from fast growing startup business. You may want to start consulting first, instead of creating products. If you insist in products, do something that can be lucrative right at the beginning (Patio11 is famous for having lots of material on that). Anyway, that advice is hard to follow. If you can't, I can't really blame you, I'm still unable to follow it either. But I've failed enough times to know that it's the right way to do it...

stevenkovar 13y ago

No matter how sharp your blade, your steel must be tempered. Life is about balance. You will break if you don't give your mind and body the rest it deserves. Often, great ideas find me when I am cooling down.

vvvVVVvvv 13y ago
I'm sorting my day out when in the morning shower. There's no better place / moment to think. No distraction, just your mind clearing up the midst.

snarfy 13y ago

Burnout is a syndrome that happens from a series of failures, resulting in your brain automatically associating work with failure. The cure for burnout is a series of successes. You need to retrain your brain to associate work with success. Start small. Don't take on more than you can handle. Quit trying to make the uber server app and write a few simple command line utilities that work and work well.

stupejr 13y ago
This, I'm so sick of hearing burnout stories, you're responsible for how you're feeling. When you take the stance of the "victim" all the time you set yourself up for failure. I see countless people attribute "failures" that had nothing to do with themselves to them just so they feel like they have some control over the situation and then wind up feeling burnt out when they're accepting the responsibility for the entire companies success or doom. Then they're asking why they're feeling so burnt out and can't completely their daily responsibilities that they actually have.
stevenkovar 13y ago
Burnout is like being sleep deprived; you can be wildly successful and still burn out if you don't give yourself time to mentally sort through all the ideas and toss out the trash, even if just subconsciously. When you've been working too hard for too long, small problems can feel like big issues because the cumulative weight of all the stuff going through your mind. Clarity is tough to maintain.

beebs93 13y ago

Good post - short, sweet and to the point. It's important to find that balance between what you love and what keeps you healthy. Some people here may go on the defensive and read it as "I don't work every waking hour and you shouldn't either", but hopefully they'll take a deep breath, release the kung fu grip on their copy of "Design Patterns" and remember to just grab a decent night's sleep every so often.

daGrevis 13y ago

Here's a theory — an ideal job is a job that fulfills your desire to code to a level in which you don't want to do any coding after work hours. There's so much challenging tasks and new things you learn right away by doing things you are paid for that you don't need to search for something new after work.

mattgreenrocks 13y ago
Indeed, this is far more sustainable than burning the candle from both ends. It may seem like a bit of a unicorn job; but the current SV boom tends to overvalue inexperienced engineers so much that it can seem like there are no interesting jobs in tech left. After ten years, you start wanting something different from work. Nothing wrong with that, you just need to find somewhere that will keep you intellectually fed.
chadillac 13y ago
I've found the contrary to be true lately. I was a serial burnout case. I'd crank hard for 3 or 4 months and it'd take me 6 months to recover. I've found more recently that it wasn't the projects at home or at work, it was a lack of diversity. Doing the same thing when I got home that I did all day burned me out because it wasn't any different. Coming home and working of stuff I can't work on at work be it new languages, games, new ideas, whatever, just so long as it's different than what I did for 8 hours then I don't get burnt. Now the problem is I don't have enough hours in the day to do it all and working until 4 am and being up at 7 isn't sustainable.
- jonalmeida 13y ago
  Quite true in terms of my work habits. At the end of the day, you want to learn something new, but you've given it 110% during the day that you can't get yourself to start a new hobby project. In my case, I always seemed stuck back at the same mindset and mental "data structure" in my head, so it would be difficult to push it aside to make room for something new. It might sound stupid, but it could also be the fear that I would lose said structure, and the next day would go entirely into rebuilding it.
- 13y ago

sdegutis 13y ago

> For the first time in years I had time to do silly stuff like playing video games, going out for a walk or watch movies. For the first time in years I didnt grit my teeth and churn out that little bit of code that would help me develop my skills further. > It feels great. I can totally relate. A few months ago, I started giving up on my open source projects, as a side-effect of burnout. Admittedly part of the solution was working hard to give up the hubris inside me that made me think my code and my ideas were vital to the world. But now that it's given up, I really do have a lot more free time. Last night, I was under a blanket on the couch, reading two full Sherlock Holmes[1] stories to my wife and children, who were just drawing or cuddling on the couch or whatever. We just kicked back and relaxed, and we all enjoyed it. The downside is that I now have a hard time keeping the motivating excitement going for new ideas I have. Just the other week I had an idea for a node-webkit-like idea based on JSCocoa, but it involved rewriting major parts of JSCocoa to get it to work properly. I've gotten pretty far[2] but I'm losing steam quickly and falling back into the "meh" state of life in which I'm now more interested in playing Starcraft 2 for an hour or two, or drawing some doodles. So it's a weird balance that I can't figure just yet. [1]: Later that night I read The Purloined Letter to my wife as she painted some walls, and we both enjoyed it but thought it was a little bit long-winded for what it had to say. [2]: http://github.com/sdegutis/chaos http://github.com/sdegutis/chaos

mattgreenrocks 13y ago
That's a pretty neat project. Since it's a big effort, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it. You should be honest with yourself about motivations and reasons for doing open source. Do it because you like tinkering, not because it's a resume-builder. Truth is, open source is not a meritocracy, it's more of a lottery. I've been mildly successful (as in, entranced a nascent community) at it for a time, but I found it a bit stressful with expectations and all. PS: do you work at 8th Light?
- deleted 13y ago
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- sdegutis 13y ago
  > That's a pretty neat project. Since it's a big effort, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it. Thanks. > You should be honest with yourself about motivations and reasons for doing open source. Do it because you like tinkering, not because it's a resume-builder. Truth is, open source is not a meritocracy, it's more of a lottery. I've been mildly successful (as in, entranced a nascent community) at it for a time, but I found it a bit stressful with expectations and all. I was initially motivated by it being an interesting problem to solve. But I quickly ran into it being more difficult than interesting, so my steam started running out faster. I may be able to salvage it if there's any community interest in it, but it's difficult to get anyone interested without having a working prototype to demo, which is actually the hardest part of this project (i.e. dealing with libffi and boxing ObjC objects, etc). > PS: do you work at 8th Light? I used to. Now I work for http://www.cleancoders.com/ http://www.cleancoders.com/

pfortuny 13y ago

Yes, try and look for happiness, which means a life you have control over, for a meaning of life much richer than 'the one with the greatest income to be had with my skills.' One needs a definition of happiness which a) Is appealing b) Is a long-term (lifelong) project c) Is valuable (in the sense of 'personal values') Usually, this means sharing your 'life' with other people first and foremost. And yes, burnout should not be a dirty word ever.

quaffapint 13y ago

I've got a crappy dev job that I've been in for over a decade that only gets worse with less pay. I don't bring home enough money and have my family living paycheck to paycheck. I stress over it and keep trying side stuff to bring in more, which mostly fail. I'm working hard right now trying to get this next side project out the door in the next month. I'm in my 40s and no one in the area has raised their dev salaries since the 2008 drop. Given my age, it's only going to be harder to find jobs if it comes to that. I'm stuck. It's stressful and it sucks. But, I still make time for the family. I go to their school functions, and help with their homework. I play games and watch movies. I'm doing it for them. I just wish I could do more. Someone once said they were jealous of me because I seem so content. My poker face must be pretty awesome.

jshen 13y ago
are you in a big city? All the devs I know make good money, and their salaries have been steadily rising for over a decade. Also, all the devs I know can get a new job in a week or so. Then I hear stories like yours and wonder what the difference is. Maybe location?
- tracker1 13y ago
  Location has a lot to do with it... It also factors in heavily with cost of living differences, and quality of life for a single guy vs. a family. I'm in Phoenix, which has a lot of developer work, though most of it is fairly boring line of business stuff. Compared to say San Francisco, which has a little more developer work, but the pay is the same or not enough more for most positions I've looked at and the cost of living is a lot more. There are other trade offs as well that favor SF over Phx, for example Phx is hot 3 months a year, and hotter than hell another 4. There's a few more rural communities in southwest Oregon I'd like to live in, but there's not really any tech/dev work near what I'd need to make there. Being a software developer outside the top 10-15 major metro areas in the U.S. is a lot harder, and the pay is significantly less. I'd honestly suggest the guy consider relocating... it's rough for everyone, but Houston, Austin, Phoenix and a few other spots have a pretty nice income to cost of living ratio, and plenty of developer work.

jwmoz 13y ago

I got burnt out on a contract a few years ago, was a horrible feeling, continually tired and falling asleep, no enthusiasm for the role. Switched to a different contract and halved my commuting time and turned into a different person. Now when I finish work I'm out of here, no more coding or hacking at home, instead, I train at the gym or go out for food or more recently chill a lot.

jtbigwoo 13y ago
I've discovered that a commute over 30 minutes, even to an interesting job, just destroys my ambition both at work and for an hour or two after work.

dkhenry 13y ago

I am not happy doing nothing. I don't understand how you can be do content just "chilling". Now don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with recreation and spending time with your family, there isn't even anything wrong with doing nothing, if its for a purpose, but just wasting time because you can is a waste of time. You should be optimizing your time to get the most value out of it. Maybe I am just odd, but I would much rather be hacking on my side projects then playing games and watching movies. I guess that the difference between your vocation being your passion and it just being something to pay the bills. Perhaps the author needs to find a different career that provides some fulfillment to him so he doesn't feel the need to waste his life decompressing from his job.

ddoolin 13y ago
No. I can't speak for the author, but I can empathize. I'm VERY satisfied with my career. I honestly couldn't imagine doing anything else...but I couldn't do it anymore either. The late nights, always being in front of the computer, always working on something. People burn out, even doing things they love to do. I still do what I love, I just have more of an appropriate balance. I think you're just odd, like you said.
talmir 13y ago
Talk about taking every single word I wrote literally :) Thats ok. I do regularly work on side projects. But being 100% productive 100% of the time, in my mind, is not healty. This is my personal opinion. The assumption you make about your vocation being your passion and for me it being just to pay the bills could not be more wrong. I have been a coder all my life. It is my job now and will continue to be as well as my passion. I will continue improving and working on all kinds of things. The difference is that I allow myself some breathing room to be a person, not just a machine, on a regular basis.
- dkhenry 13y ago
  Here is how I see it. If your going on a drive and you have three choices, one of them is the most direct route its on the freeway and you will make it there is the shortest amount of time, the second is a winding country road it takes twice as long, but you get to enjoy the country road maybe listen to the radio maybe roll your windows down and enjoy the fresh spring air, and you have a separate freeway that is underground and always has a traffic jam. Doing nothing as your described is to me the third option, your just wasting time for no reason whatsoever and your telling yourself this is nice because I am not stressing out about whatever, but your still wasting you time. Relaxation doesn't have to be fruitless, for instance I relax by gardening. It is both calming and productive. After watching that movie or playing that game _most_ of the time all you have is three less hours to do something productive. You have just sat in that underground freeway when you could have been enjoying a spring drive or getting to your destination faster.

agentultra 13y ago

My theory is that "burnout" is a symptom of the endemic "hero" meme of our culture. Think about all the movies you've seen since the 1980s, the shows you've watched, the books you've read. Embedded in the majority of them is the simple idea that there's something special inside you that can set you apart from everyone else. It whispers seductively to that part of your brain that lies to you about how important you are. Any story or idea that fills the need to feel different, special, and unique passes through our scrutiny without a second thought. We want to believe it's true even as we examine our motivations for doing so because it's hard wired into our brains. The problem is that this weakness is easily exploited. Writers, motivational speakers, game designers, poets... they're all in the business of hacking our brains. We've been doing such a good job of it since the sixties that our popular culture is unconsciously driven by it. And it manifests as burnout when it clashes with other popular memes like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you just put in a little elbow grease and work harder you will stand out. If you write that amazing library to make programmers' lives easier they will shower you with praise on the Internet and invite you to speak at conferences so that you may shower the masses with your brilliant message. Burnout happens when all of the rewards of those fantasies fail to materialize despite all of the effort and hard work you've put into chasing them. Worked 60 - 80 hour weeks for the last six months and still got overlooked for that promotion? Burnout. Put off investing time with your family in order to work on that semi-popular open source library and pimp it out at every conference you can submit a proposal to... and you STILL aren't getting the accolades and recognition you deserve? Burnout. My advice for avoiding burnout? Figure out where your desires and ambitions are coming from. Why do you want to work so hard for recognition? Why do you feel you need to be recognized? What's so important about it? Start from there.

gamegoblin 13y ago
Hanging out on sites like this definitely doesn't help. In every thread it seems like there is someone who is a perfect expert on whatever being discussed. Need to diagnose a problem in a defunct modem using only an oscilloscope? Someone can. Strange behavior of the JVM? Oh, someone has implemented their own JVM on a 4kb machine as a hobby project. Then you get username delineation and there is this idea of some abstract "hacker" of hackernews (or whatevertechsite.com) that can do everything with ease. Because after seeing all that I think if I can't debug modems with oscilloscopes or implement the JVM I'm behind and subpar.

Bahamut 13y ago

As much as I'd like to constantly be productive, I know that it's not healthy for my mental balance. If I want to be sharp in the long term, I find it ok to take a break every once in a while and chill out from being laser-focused & super-productive. YMMV

dubeye 13y ago

In my mind, the term burnout is incorrectly used as a synonym for 'overworked and stressed to the point of collapse'. Whilst for me burnout means an expiry of enthusiasm and motivation which is a subtle difference perhaps.

dceddia 13y ago

This post really got me thinking, because I feel exactly the same way. The sequence of events described mirrors my own life so closely it borders on creepy. I've been falling further and further into the trap of "optimizing" lots of little things. Spending 5 hours reading Amazon reviews to buy an $11 guitar tuner. Trying to leave the house at exactly the right time to arrive at my destination on the dot. And then, becoming very frustrated when traffic does not cooperate or someone on the road is being less efficient than I want them to be. This post made me realize that thinking this way is almost like an addiction. The more I worry about how to squeeze productivity into a day or which tasks to work on to provide the most benefit (80/20!), the more anxious I feel. And it compounds. Because the next thought through my mind is "I can fix this anxious feeling by planning things out better!" I'm beginning to think that maybe the best way off this train is to stop trying to optimize and control for variables entirely. It's not enough to pick-and-choose, because then you're just meta-optimizing ("I'll just figure out which of these to-do items is the MOST important!") Much akin to an alcoholic having just one drink, I think any sort of optimization thinking might be enough to get the cycle started again. Maybe the only way to tame it is to avoid it entirely.