Ask HN: How do you keep going without burning out?

I’ve quit my job from burnout multiple times and on the 3rd iteration, it’s been even more difficult to get back to a non-burnout stage. So I would try to focus on a long term strategy as opposed to bursts of productivity.

I’ve had to slow down. This means reducing all the things that distract me. It means coming to grips with “missing out”.

I’ve leaned into some life hacks like:

– Designating social media time to just after work but not after dinner (includes HN).

– Leaning into meditation. Not just 10min via an app but a walk to and back from my favorite cafe every morning without my phone or any headphones.

– Going to bed early and waking up early. The quietest, non-distracting moments are in the early morning.

– Using a pomodoro timer. For both work projects and personal projects.

– I try to spend some time focusing on activities that are intentionally slow like writing poetry and personal essays.

– Avoid bright light after dinner

– Religiously take off the weekends

– Take several days off about six times a year (for example a long weekend, however to avoid crowds, sometimes take off during the workweek)

– And once a year for at least two weeks

– Don’t do too much in the free time or have buffers of dolce far niente between work and busy free time

I like my audiobooks during my morning walk, but other than that I’d subscribe to this suggestions.

I think you hit the nail on the head with “dealing with missing out”.

The vast majority of what happens is irrelevant and trying to keep up with, say, the latest tech drama, the latest framework, the scandal du jour, the currently popular TV show.. it feels important but it’s not, and giving up is hard but not harmful.

One word: Alignment.

It’s a Buddhist concept that says that to achieve tranquility (end of suffering) you need to have what you value, what you think and what you are actually doing aligned and going in the same direction.

When you’re feeling lost, ask yourself these 3 questions:

– What do you really want?

– What do you really value?

– What are you really doing with your life?

I’ve wrote a longer post that you can read here: https://kerkour.com/alignment

Not being flippant about it, but my current requirements to pay the mortgage and support my wife and kids tend to push any sense of burnout down the priority list. I simply decide to keep plugging away, because if I stop to “find myself” things can get bad for lots of other people quickly.

That’s not how it works. If burnout is indeed looming over you, it does not care how far down you push it on your lists. It will get you. And then you and your dependents are proper fucked.

The only thing to do is to meet it on your own timeline, not its.

All due respect, this isn’t burn out. This is boredom or being uninspired. It can be a drudge, uninteresting, and procrastinated, but actual burnout is a very different beast.

I have mortgage, wife, kids also and continue to plug along, but know the difference.

Sounds like a bad time if the burnout actually comes in full force and you have dependents + mortgage. All the more reason to actually research what burnout is and how to avoid it if you ask me.

What you wrote is like saying “well, I’ll just work through the pain” when someone asks about avoiding heart attack. That’s not how heart attacks work, and that’s not how burnout works either.

Hey, so I’ve got a few thoughts here that I’ll word. I’m sure other people are going to say it better, but here we go:

* Remember that Social Media is the place that everyone shows ‘their absolute best’ – even a fake version of their best. It doesn’t show their times of down, their stress, and so on.

* the social media that you’re using may connect thousands or hundreds of thousands of people together. There’s only 365 days a year, and even if each person only has one good day a year that they show off, 273 people (out of 100k) would share each individual day. It’d look like you’re going slow.

* As other people have said, life is a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve got a whole lot of years left and you want to be able to function in them, too. Burnout can absolutely ruin developers, and has, many times in the past.

* As other people have said, “work to live”, don’t “live to work”. Now, I get the feeling that this is your personal project or your business you’re running at. That’s awesome! You still need to give yourself space between a singular project so you can recuperate from it. How often do you look at code you wrote or things you worked on when you were at a fever pace and go “wow, what was I thinking?”; or, when you couldn’t solve a problem for days, go to bed and then hey, the solution is right there! Give yourself the space so that those events can happen – and they happen because you’re getting away from the work, you’re getting rested, you’re relaxing.

Your health, your life, the connections you make are of incredible value and as you get older, they get harder to train, recover, grow. Make sure you’re tending to yourself like you should in ways that are completely disconnected from your work.

Make sure there’s more to your life than only work. Work to live, don’t live to work.
I used to think this was bs, but, after scaling back on work hours and filling them up with time for my own hobbies and side projects all not work related, I think I’m even more productive at work than before

I have been unable to make this strategy work. If I lean into hobbies and things outside of work, I completely stop caring about my job, and my performance goes way down.

For me, social media platforms are on a scale that goes from negative to positive values. The negative side is energy-burning, the positive is energy-adding. One side inspires me. The other makes me feel drained.

I have to keep on the positive side of the scale – Hacker News, some great YouTube channels about things that really interest me. Sometimes, I can venture to the slightly negative side, like “funny” videos about people farting in public and cute dogs… but this is like diving – it is fun for a short while, but if you stay too long, you run out of air and die. And I know from experience there are depths of the negative side where I cannot go – TikTok, Twitter, those crush my soul (subjective thing, I’m sure some find those inspiring).

Also, like with everything else, moderation is key. Even with things on the positive side.

I’ve got a lot of ideas regarding preventing and recovering from burnout. This is from my own personal experiences and also researching it a ton. I want to turn these ideas into an online course. The reason is that there’s a lot you have to do right, and it’s not just one or two bits of advice.

If you’re interested then just email me with the subject “MyCoach waitlist” (email is in my profile).

If possible, I would highly recommend going part-time. I wasn’t close to burn-out, but my mental health and stress levels are much better since I made the switch. Worth it for that alone, even if it wasn’t the best move for my career. In any case, I’d also recommend cutting down on unnecessary screentime and spending more time in real life – walking outside, talking to people, doing hobbies, and so on!

At the moment I’m trying to remove any source of “artifical” dopamine: no tv, no youtube, no music, no news, no podcasts, no reddit, no social media during the week and minimal over the weekend. I’ve just started a week ago and it works pretty well, my mind is a lot calmer. Silence is gold.

I constantly feel like nothing I do is ever going to work out. Even if I built something in the best way possible, the best that exists, it’s not going to be enough to succeed. But even though I know 100% deep in my soul that everything I do is going to fail, I can’t stop myself from trying. It does take a toll though. What helps me is to let off steam by complaining non-stop. I complain to my family members and strangers online. Unfortunately, my condition means that I can’t see friends regularly because it’s difficult for me to NOT complain for even 1 hour straight and most fellow westerners just can’t handle that. Every deep conversation I have devolves into some horror story about the ills of society and how everything is rigged.

I feel the same way. I have managed to cut down on doomerism and actually start cultivating friendships again.

I got a lot better at life when I started studying deep and ancient history in detail and figured out that there’s been multiple worlds before this one. Many systems have been exercised and they all have a life cycle and eventually collapse.

Much like living beings, societies are born, mature and wither. It is inevitable that ours will collapse eventually. It isn’t good or bad. It just is.

I’ve since embraced the roll of researching these life cycles.

Don’t tie your success to social media, SEO etc is another avenue

I only work on my side project on rainy days, never when the suns out

Are you actually money driven? I’m not, I’m passion driven, so I work on passion projects. Money is just a part of the picture, it’s not the main driver.

Work less hours if you can too, if your finances allow it

I also struggle with this. Not social media, per se, but overstimulation which leaved me unable to unwind and prevents me from sleeping well.

This is probably one of those things like weight loss where you know the “simple” answer (burn more calories than you eat, reduce stimulation and practice good sleep hygiene) but the actual problem is lack of will to do these things, which can be reinforced by the apparent problem itself, leading to a spiral.

The trick, I assume, is to put what energy you have into setting up structures (ideally involving other people) that make it easier to do the things you know you need to do.

The metaphor I use to think about burnout is imagining your energy as a lithium ion battery. You can occasionally charge it to 100% and run it down to 0% without any real degradation, but if you start doing that every day it won’t hold a useful charge after a while. Keep your charge between 20% and 80% if you can.

Also helps to maintain pretty firm limits on work time and not-work time, or even just having a small window of your waking day where you’re on Do Not Disturb.

In my experience, it’s best to accept these things come in waves.

For most of us, it’s not realistic to maintain maximum creative energy for an extended period of time, just as it’s not realistic to maintain maximum happiness for an extended period of time. Sometimes you’ll feel sad, sometimes you’ll feel tired, and, every now and then, you’ll feel like you can take on the world.

For now, embrace the pain, let it wash over you, and trust that your energy will return again one day soon.

There’s ways to manage it in the short run (increasing caffeine intake for me) but it’s not a good idea to ignore the signs too often. If you need to take a rest, take it. No matter what others say, you know your mind/body best. You’ll be surprised how little people around you care that you’re not releasing features as fast.

I do my best to avoid going into something too much.

The main things I’ve found that burn me out is boring work, working too long and no end to the work. Usually it’s enough to just leave or stop after my normal hours and do something else.

Being able to choose to do other things (even if it’s stare at a wall) helped me a lot

Every individual is different. I recently learned about the DISC personality model. It basically says that there are four basic personality traits. Your personality is dominated by one of the four types or a mixture of them.
Each personality type thrives with different working styles and working conditions.

It helped me a lot to know what type I am. Now I know what my strength and weaknesses are. It’s surprising how accurate this simple theory seems to be in my case.

Apart from that

– I have clear priorities (family first, health second, work third)

– I always have something that I look forward to. If nothing is on my schedule, I schedule an activity that I can look forward to.

I have many other interests/hobbies that are unrelated to work. I do my 8 to 5 and almost never think about work outside of it. Having a healthy workplace that encourages this helps a lot, I realize it might not be possible for everyone.

Do you have an outlet for your expectations? Is that outlet also the people who are adjacent to your burnout? Are you sure your model of what is asked of you is not excessive compared to what they were asking? Is there a way you can negotiate a better prioritization of efforts?

I did burn out. One day I decided I had enough, I lost my temper at the douchebag CTO, I had a “talk” with the CEO and laid myself off after. Spent six months unemployed, and I don’t give a shit. Honestly quitting was the best decision I ever made. Life is to precious to waste on idiots.

I quit my job due to burnout over a year ago, and now I’m bumbling around Europe, living hand-to-mouth off small bits of freelance work. This life is infinitely better than the one I was wasting behind a desk 8 hours a day.

I don’t see the point making $150k a year if I’m literally exchanging my life for that money.

“Unemployment” is a dirty word, I think by design to keep people producing for the economy. It’s impressive how much of a stronghold this concept holds over people. How many people who already have more than enough, who could live out the rest of their lives literally doing whatever they want, instead continue to remain employed in a job they don’t like due to an irrational fear of unemployment?

Time management – I allocate some time to work, some time to research, and the remainder to my hobbies and pleasures i.e working on my Rust side project or going out for biking. You need “fun times” to recharge from the “boring” times.

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