
Are you suffering from burn-out? - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/Are+you+suffering+from+burn-out
======
jakevoytko
My personal test for preventing another burnout:

    
    
        Can I do this forever? (Y/N)
    
        If you answered N, stop making excuses, realize you deserve positive changes 
        in your own life, and do it.

~~~
Hexstream
This. The keyword is: S-U-S-T-A-I-N-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y.

------
DanielBMarkham
I my early 20s, after getting out of the service, I worked as an assistant
manager at a fast-foot restaurant in the evenings while I did college during
the day. It was a full load of credits, and the food place I was working was
very busy too, so it made for a long, hard slog.

One day I was talking to another of the assistant managers. I asked him about
burn-out. Do you ever feel like you might be burning out?

"Not me. Can't happen"

"Why"

"Because I got burnt-out a year or two ago. I just pushed through it."

He was smiling. Sort of in a fatalistic way.

I'm not denying burn-out: I get it all the time. But I do think we over-
emphasize it. As Jacques points out, if you live a life of leisure you have
little danger of burning out. You also have little danger of living a life of
challenging yourself to do new and complex things.

I think, as my friend pointed out so many years ago, that the problem is
viewing burn-out as an yes-or-no situation. In fact, there are degrees of
burn-out, and you can drift into burn-out land and drift back. What people
really need to do, in my opinion, is learn their own rhythms. Personally, I
like working hard for a few months then skating for a month or two. I find I
get more done. I find when I am working hard, taking a ten minute break every
hour helps. Sometimes I take all day on Saturday and watch movies. Or go for a
hike.

So the trick isn't avoiding burn-out. The trick is learning your own rhythms
so you maximize your productivity while you're stuck on this rock. Burnt-out?
Back off, sure. But note your rhythm, and next time you won't burn out as
much.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't get your
kick on.

EDIT: That didn't come out exactly as I wanted. It sounded as if I were just
telling folks to buck up. But that's not what I meant to say. The point was
self-reflection.

This gets back to learning yourself -- your rhythms and values. I find that if
I immerse myself in something I am deeply committed to, burning out is a
learning experience. But I immerse myself in something I hate -- working for
some other guy, doing something because I am forced to? Burning out can really
hurt and require lots of time to recover from.

That's why I don't do that.

Burning out early and for a long time -- indication that you are putting a lot
of effort in something you resent.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm still trying to figure out if the 'fast foot' restaurant was a mistake or
a pun in relation to life being a marathon ;)

That's an excellent point though, and if life is a marathon then being burnt
out is probably best compared to having to sit out a part of the race because
you can't run any more.

I'm all for tackling all kinds of stuff, sometimes more than what you can
naturally expect a person to do, as long as it doesn't leave any lasting marks
(or at least none that are disfiguring) I say go for it. But keep an eye on
the limits. When I was 23 the wife of a friend told me I'd be dead by 30 if I
didn't slow down. So far so good. But I do understand now that there are
limits to how much you can do without paying the price for it, and in some
ways (in terms of missed opportunities and lost friends) the price was pretty
high indeed. If I had slowed down just a bit somewhere in the early 2000's I'm
fairly sure my life would have been quite different compared to what it is
today.

You are spot on that it is all about learning yourself, your rhythms and
values, that's exactly what it is. The machine called your body does not come
with a list of 'do not exceed' parameters, and they're different for
everybody, so only experience will tell you what you can and what you can't
do.

I tend to live like a cat nowadays, either extremely lazy or hyper focussed on
some project for a while, and then I take a break again. It's worked well in
that I can still push myself to achieve something when I have to (and those
lists really help), but at the same time I've learned that there are limits
and that there is more in life than a keyboard and a screen.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_I'm still trying to figure out if the 'fast foot' restaurant was a mistake or
a pun in relation to life being a marathon ;)_

Hey I was up until 2am coding and got back up at 8. When I get the coding Pon
Farr on my mornings get a little hazy :)

This actually relates to your article. For the last month or so, I have been
trying "banker's hours" coding -- 9-5 and taking time for everything else. It
was great.

But something funny happened: I stopped making progress. Sure, I would make a
little bit at a time, but nothing like what I used to do.

I finally figured it out a couple of days ago. For some reason, unless my body
and mind is convinced I am serious about driving through to solve a problem, I
get very little traction. But if it's 11pm and I'm getting ready to go to bed
but realize I can code it better _and then go act on it_ , things work out.
Unlike working for a BigCorp, working for yourself involves a gut check.

A lot of problems are like hills -- tough on the front side but easy on the
back side. If you only go 1/4 way up the hill, you just slide back down
overnight. But if you go balls-in and stay with it until you make it, suddenly
it becomes easier.

Perhaps one must suffer for their art.

At least that's my experience, for what it's worth.

------
fierarul
What does this blog bring besides an abstract of what Wikipedia says ?

I mean, the timing is right: we just had some burnout discussions on the first
page, but what does this blog post bring ?

~~~
jacquesm
An abstract is a reduction, I tried to write this with some context so that it
becomes easier to figure out if this is something that you might be flirting
with or not, to make it live. As a person that has come pretty close to
burning out (not quite ready to admit that I did) I figure I can sketch the
situations a bit clearer than if you've never experienced this first hand.

I know we just had a burn-out discussion on the first page, that's exactly why
I wrote this.

Please note that it is very well possible to be well on the road towards being
burned out without realising it and that by showing what is and what is not
burn-out related it might help a few people to realise what is going on.

Sometimes the 'normal' lack of inspiration or drive for a while gets
mistakenly labelled as burn-out, sometimes you get the notice that person 'x'
is no longer because they and those around them failed to notice the
seriousness of the situation until it was _much_ too late.

If you feel that it is a waste of space and time to write this you're welcome
to use the 'flag' option, I thought it was relevant and that's why I spent the
time on putting it together.

~~~
fierarul
The problem with your blog post is that it doesn't show your voice at all! I
couldn't tell that you were pretty close to burning out nor did you mention
anything that seemed to be part of your own experience.

You start the blog with some introduction, you put a link to Wikipedia and
then you re-list the Wikipedia phases.

So, I'm not dismissing your time spent writing this and I'm pretty sure it
helps, but there are probably much better ways to rewrite that blog post and
make it better.

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is HN. Writing stuff here is like writing it in two-foot high letters on
a prominent wall in NYC, except more public, more accountable, and far more
permanent.

So, rather than beg for more, I thank jacquesm for being willing to share as
much as he already has.

Yes, his sharing is mostly in the form of ambiguous subtext. That's okay. I
can read hints and I enjoy ambiguity.

Here's a general piece of valuable advice: If you want people to tell you what
their life lessons _really_ are, meet them offline, perhaps in a bar or
coffeeshop. Keep all recording devices off. Promise not to blog what they tell
you without permission, and/or until one or both of you are dead. Keep that
promise.

Meta-advice: Make a habit of meeting people in coffeeshops. Though it has many
advantages, the Google-enabled internet is a lousy medium for heart-to-heart
honesty.

------
SMrF
I wrote about my experience with burnout on a HN comment earlier:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1508844>

I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it
thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of
burnout jacquesm mentions.

A compulsion to prove oneself:

This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up
or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like
getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.

Working harder:

My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course
fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much
work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I
could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and
they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into
pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the
next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.

Neglecting one's own needs:

At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since
I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my
'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but
instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like
personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule
was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was
hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around
dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through
dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I
would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.

Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the
distress):

Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their
attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize
these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost
entirely my own fault.

Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed):

It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have
a social life and I killed all hobbies.

Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent):

\-- See displacement of conflicts

Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression:

I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I
became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full
month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people
will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't
cry, but during this period of my life, I did.

Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still
convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my
output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very
productive.

~~~
justlearning
Thank you for sharing your experience. combined with the 'exact' same
experience as <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774>, I have been in
this phase for couple of years. I am trying to fight it (have to due to peer
pressure to make money). It has come to my losing interest in anything. I used
to love programming for the sole reason of enjoyment. I haven't made any
changes to my lifestyle (I probably cannot). Last 3 weeks, I have been in the
'isolation phase' My work place, it's a farce of work with people pretending
to get work done with unnecessary complex sub systems. My family raised
concerns (they understand my phase, my wife often tells me to pursue
academics, as I seen not raised for the corporate world). It's only when three
members in my family asked the same question, I started to wonder. I have a
thousand things in my mind and a struggling pain of not accomplishing
anything. I encounter this every single minute of the day. I am so stressed by
the whole lagging behind the world that I feel I cannot learn anything new. I
have finished the first chapters of how to prove it, foundations of computer
science and algorithms book. Although I am interested, I find myself lacking
the motivation to continue...And this adds up, days to weeks and then months.
Then the cumulative depression rides me to hell. The thought that someone
started learning math about 6 years ago when I too picked interest and the
comparison istantly drives me for a whole day of depression. During those
days, I don't absorb a thing of what I read. I shake my legs when I think and
I think all day. I am supposed to working on getting xml schema related work
done and I am here shaking my legs and thinking. I have frequented HN enough
to know to that I should visit a doctor. But I know that it will not work for
me. I don't have the comfort in talking to a 'stranger'.I have heard few here:
try a physically involved job. I want to try out (but feel I cannot due to the
money factor). I have to earn the bread. I fight with myself saying 'there is
do or do not, there is no try', the difference between doing it and thinking
about it. I have all the motivation inside, but I just cannot bring myself to
do anything. I can never finish any task that I start. This has been going for
years. My sanity is still in positive numbers, thanks to my wife.

could you share how did you come out of this phase (perhaps there is much more
than just moving to a different job). Do you have any personal stories? I ask
this because, as I understand this is not the nature of the job but an
intrinsic battle that you won.

~~~
SMrF
I don't know how to fix your situation, but I do know what helped me, so I'll
tell you that and maybe something will be helpful to you.

The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at
work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you
like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart
enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so there is something wrong
with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life
questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the
problem was exactly none of these.

The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly
affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and
psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life,
especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting
balance and getting my health back.

I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I
got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of
work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun
projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself
play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting
and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with
my wife again.

And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a
week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit
smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two years to
lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year
of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew
what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure
other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that
was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life.

And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my
problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted
away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career
milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have
meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing,
less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still
compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of
stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then.

And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But
the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless.
Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.

~~~
justlearning
A sincere thank you!

I could relate the 'balance' aspect to (unburnt) people I see (both I whom
look upto and them, who are seemingly 'happy' in doing the chores of the day).
I am by code/articles/hn all of my waking hour. During work hours and when I
go back. I even have my lunch and dinner by my laptop. I read articles or
watch (from the huge list of google tech videos, that I have to finish).

What I gathered from earlier posts here is to 1) not compare with anyone. If
anything learn and use yourself as a benchmark to improve upon. 2) don't worry
about the results. 3) don't fear the failure. 4) baby steps (do anything that
is answerable to big task, anything.) and from you : 5) balance.

I look forward to doing a 'Tell HN' after I overcome this struggle.

------
jonsen
Yes, I am suffering from burn-out. And I can tell you, it •is• suffering. You
wouldn't want it happening to you.

It started to manifest itself in 2002. I worked too much, had too much
responsibility. I went into a decline and 2005 it all went awry because of
change in circumstances I didn't have the resources to cope with. I was wise
enough to quit my job, but it was too late. Anything I tried after that
wouldn't succeed.

It's a condition where it's hard to reflect on yourself. To see your personal
condition. And accepting it, even less. I couldn't.

One day I stumbled upon a stress test and took it. Bang! Almost full score.
Then I took notice of myself, started analyzing my condition, and realized,
"I'm a burn-out. God dammit".

That was 2007. I've been laying low, really low, since then. Living off my
pension. Recently I realized I was better off again. I could read book again.
I even felt an urge to start some coding again. I took a stress test again.
Much lower score, great!. But right there was also a test for depression ... I
took it. Bang! Almost full score. "Now I'm _depressed_. God dammit".

That was shocking. But I have this strange feeling, that depression is much
easier to deal with. I'm growing in my capabilities. I can learn again. I
believe I'll become reasonably functioning again. Only time will tell. And
time it will take. I can wait. I want my life back.

I could give you details quite similar to SMrF's comment. Read that, and take
care.

~~~
SMrF
Please do make sure you are getting help.

My personal path to recovery involved a complete redo of my entire life. I
quit my job, moved to a new city. I took an entire month off and did nothing
but stuff that was fun, (mainly programming :-) My new job is a boring
corporate coder type job that requires very little of my attention. I also
started dieting, quit smoking and took up running.

You can get better! It just takes time. Please be patient with yourself.

Believe it or not, even after everything that happened to me, I very nearly
did it again! I began spending all of my spare time working on my side
project, (my goal here is to eventually own my own company/startup). But at
least this time when I started getting anxiety I realized, "wait a minute, I
think I know why this is happening..." :-)

~~~
jonsen
Thank you. I'm reasonably confident in my progress. The hardest part is
realising, that you may never be able do again, what you once did. I think I'm
there now.

~~~
SMrF
I look at it as a battle scar, or a really cool limp or something. I've been
there, done that, and now I know my own limits better than almost anyone else.
To me it's an advantage. I also admit to worrying I wouldn't be able to
accomplish what I have in the past, but you know what? I simply don't want to
ever, ever do that again...so what did I lose exactly?

------
Sindrome
When I was in college I took an internship at a Call Center building reporting
software and some websites. I went in with a positive attitude and wanted to
help as much as I could and prove myself and get a full time position, all
that jazz.

They ended up taking advantage of me. Even though I was a Part-Time worker
they would try to give me Full-Time work. In the end I was leading projects
still as a part-time employee. I had endured many late nights and one full on
24 hour marathon coding session to prepare for a big telethon (American Idol -
IdolAid). I frequently found myself wishing I could just walk out, but I was
afraid of the effect it would have on my career. I developed trouble sleeping
at night. I would stay up all night laying in bed because my head was still
racing. Even though my body was exhausted, I couldn't fall asleep. I still
have this problem now and then till this day.

When I finally got my degree I decided to leave that place and it was the best
decision I ever made. Even though I didn't have a job lined up yet I was not
nearly as stressed. Everything turned out fine for me, though I still feel the
effects sometimes. I often joke that it was like Frodo in LOTR, once I had
borne the ring (stress) for so long I could never be the same.

------
eliben
While a lot of what's written in that article sounds fearfully familiar, I
think he's taking it too far, by referring only to the most extreme forms of
burn-out. Burn-out can be temporary and mild, and I suspect this defines most
of the cases. For example, a few weeks of low productivity (not 0!) with a
recovery within a month or so.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Yeah. This sort of burn-out is definitely the extreme, but it's also the
rarest. I think there's a far more common level of burn-out (perhaps "brown-
out") which misses a few of the more serious symptoms and yet seriously
impacts ongoing productivity and motivation.

The danger of defining burn-out as only this extreme is that there are a lot
of people with milder though serious cases who may not appreciate that it's a
problem.

------
pasbesoin
I'm at -- hopefully -- the tail end of a long and deep burnout. I can
summarize the experience as doing what other people wanted against / at the
expense of my own wishes. Life always involves a certain amount of this, but
in my case it came to dominate and to define my life.

Doing such things should be held to the level where they merely and as
optimally as possible enable your own wishes. Not that this does NOT preclude
altruism. I practice altruism and take great pleasure from it. But then, it
can thusly be seen as one of my wishes -- when I approach it on my terms.

For a long time, work and neighbors wanted me to meet their needs. But they
paid little or no attention to mine. Very one way, and very draining. Don't
mistake profession of mutual interest by another party for actual interest on
their part. (Actions speak louder than words.) If you continue to be rather
underwhelmed at what they offer in return, it's a good sign that your
interests do not align. You are at the edge of the tar pit of burnout; turn
around, before you turn into one of those fossils that will one day be
displayed in a museum. Very undignified. ;-)

------
hardik
Is it possible to be burnt out for extended periods? (2yrs+)

~~~
jacquesm
Without any doubt, in fact, that's probably a good sign that you need some
external help (friends, family, maybe professionals) to guide you back on to
the road to recovery.

I've spent 3 full years doing nothing but manual work (metalworking, building
a house and a windmill) because I was literally at low tide. Still not sure if
it actually was 'burn-out' (no sign of depression afaik) but other people I
know in my environment that structurally overworked themselves have taken
similar measures.

It's tricky because it is easy to confuse an extended case of 'programmers
block' with being burnt-out, I think the key difference is that a person that
is burned out will not be easily able to get back in to the same profession
that they burned out in.

~~~
jpdbaugh
Did working manual labor help you figure things out? I am seriously
considering working a job such as the one you described part time to pay the
bills after school while I try to build a freelancing business.

~~~
jacquesm
Absolutely, I think it kept - and keeps - me sane. Physical stuff is great in
that it keeps your body in shape and at the end of a day you can literally
touch the result, you can see it, it is solid. Virtual work is much less
satisfying in that sense, you could be programming the stars from heaven but
if it is business logic internal to some application you'll be happy if some
maintenance programmer sees it 10 years down the line.

I think that's a big part of what drives the open source movement, programmers
getting appreciation from other programmers about their work in a way that
'closed source' will never give and money can't provide.

The last couple of weeks I spent on two tracks, the one is building a small RV
(just drove it to the other side of Europe, so I guess that worked out well
:)), and a web project that I hope to launch sometime later this year.

When I'm tired of the one kind of work, I switch to the other, it seems to
work better that way.

~~~
mrtron
I think one of the biggest benefits of physical work is that you can more
easily turn it completely off.

You have to be in your garage to be woodworking for example. You can't be on
the couch with your wife pretending to watch a movie with her.

Perhaps we can also see the quality of work more easily from physical work
too.

~~~
jacquesm
That's so true. Especially for debugging, that's something I can't ever fully
quit until it is done and the bug is squashed. I might as well stay awake
until a bug is taken care of once I know about it because I'll just keep on
fretting about it and mentally reviewing the code trying to figure out what is
going wrong.

That sort of mental occupation does not happen with physical work at all.

------
mbutson
I think burnout can be a serious issue, as witnessed throughout many of these
comments. I seem to be a successful burnout about once every week. I go to
sleep early, take a deep breath and start the cycle over again.

I am 20 years old, and I feel that I have a lot of catching up to do. This may
be viewed as an insecurity, but it is an extremely motivating part of my life.

No matter how much of these I read, it is not going to slow me down. From an
outside perspective it is unhealthy, yet there is no way that I can withdraw
from this cycle until its the right time.

The right time will come for everyone. Just as it did for those telling there
stories.

Thanks. HN is the shit.

------
swolchok
What is the effect of increased exercise on the burned out? I've started
getting 20-30 minutes of additional almost daily exercise by bicycling for
transportation, 10-15 minutes and 2.5 miles each way. I wouldn't say that I am
a lot happier or that I'm sleeping earlier, but my legs are tired all the time
and I derive some intellectual satisfaction from the perceived increase in my
health. The psychological reality has not quite lived up to the hype.

------
tbrooks
Uhh... jacquesm is following me around and writing about my life. This article
is something I really needed to read. Thanks for writing Jacques!

------
SMrF
I wrote about my experience with burnout on a HN comment earlier:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1508844>

I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it
thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of
burnout jacquesm mentions.

A compulsion to prove oneself: This was my entire purpose in life. I worked
for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my
desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character
in an RPG, except in real life.

Working harder: My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder',
which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when
I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I
didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said
as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break
it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with
me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.

Neglecting one's own needs: At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend
off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I
remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not
so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting
or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually
rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and
start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich
and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I
would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of
dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I
did this for months.

Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the
distress) Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and
their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally
realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was
almost entirely my own fault.

Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed) It's hard to
have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life
and I killed all hobbies.

Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent) \-- See
displacement of conflicts

Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression I went from
occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became
physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to
get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will
learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but
during this period of my life, I did.

Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still
convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my
output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very
productive.

------
buzzblog
Modern technology makes it so much easier to flirt with burnout without even
realizing it. The laptop is always open on the kitchen table. The cell is
never out of reach. There's no conscious thought to the work day or work week
having a beginning and an end. It's amazing how easily all of this just
becomes "normal."

~~~
roqetman
I fully agree with this one. By simply switching my blackberry to not buzz me
when emails came in felt like a vacation. I realized at that point that I was
close to burn-out.

