10 ms·

I've been noticing that I'm more tired and need more downtime in days where I make, (or forced to make), critical decisions. If I start the day by knowing what

by laydn 9y ago

I've been noticing that I'm more tired and need more downtime in days where I make, (or forced to make), critical decisions. If I start the day by knowing what to do, then I don't really feel the burnout. For example, if I'm designing either a piece of hardware or firmware, and I know how to tackle the problem and it is just the matter of implementing it, I can code/design for 10 hours straight and when the workday ends, I still feel full of energy. However, if the day is full of "decisions" (engineering or managerial), at the end of the day, I feel exhausted (and irritable, according to my family)

arketyp 9y ago
I think the somatic marker hypothesis is relevant to what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis These managerial decisions have, by their very functional nature, a heavier body load.
deepGem 9y ago
This has been my experience as well. What I've found helpful is to just take a decision real fast and move on. Sure, it might be a bad decision but it's a done deal nonetheless. I tend to feel less burned out even if the decisions turned out to be bad, vs spending an inordinate amount of time debating decisions. And I have gotten myself stuck in some real holier than thou decision wormholes, for instance, which programming language to learn now.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  I seem to only be able to do this when I have a severe time constraint. I wish I could do it other times because it feels great to just decide and move on.
  - maneesh 9y ago
    Set more non-cheatable time constraints.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      Just In Time Procrastination.
    - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
      If I set them, I'll cheat. Can you elaborate a bit?
DelightOne 9y ago
In the case where you do not have to make decisions you probably have peace of mind. No worry so to speak. „You know what the right thing to do is. Possibly due to experiene in the task and ecpected outcomes.“
- su30mki117 9y ago
  Found the German (sorry for OT, but I had to say this).
atas 9y ago
I have the heuristic that I leave decisions for the end of the day, based on what I have done. In fact, this is one of my goals per day, when things are unclear.
arvinsim 9y ago
Yup. If I have a clear goal when I start the day, it is easy to get in the flow. But if I start the day with meetings, I become less productive.
- NTripleOne 9y ago
  And then you leave the meeting room, thinking "Well at least that killed a good amount of time" and you see you were actually only in there for 20 minutes.
epalmer 9y ago
Some days I have a lot of different tasks to accomplish and support items come at me usually at the wrong time (before vacation, at 5PM,...). For the last month I've been using kanban to manage my work (trello) with these columns backlog on deck doing waiting impeded done This has reduced my stress and gives me a place to put things to do as they come up. I read Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry first. I found the book a bit overdone in explaining and justifying why. But maybe that is just me. I'm a scrum coach with 11 years experience as a scrum coach and 2 years as a product owner so I get the backlog, planned, doing, done thing.
ivanhoe 9y ago
I've noticed this especially for inconclusive situations, when you need to make a call and you're not 100% (or even 90%) sure what's the right choice. These drain my energy more than anything. Combination of a need for prolonged high mental alertness and hight stress levels caused by uncertain outcome just burns through you. On the other hand some people, like gamblers, get an ultimate kick out of this.
- jpttsn 9y ago
  I think you're right about that. I wonder if the best ways to avoid burnout, is to work on how you handle specifically these decision situations. In other words, finding a way to deal with low certainty situations might be key, compared to just dealing with huge amounts of rote work.
  - mkmk 9y ago
    This is a really interesting point. How would you approach this?
    - pasta 9y ago
      There is a very rich man (forgot the name) who is making big decisions like this: * make a list of pros and cons * give each item an importance score from 0 to 10 * if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons: do it I believe you can do this for small decisions as well, without creating a list. Because most of the time you have a sense about the pros being twice as valuable as the cons. Edit: Sorry, this comment is a little unrelated because the parent talked about making a choice. My comment is more about 'should I progress'.
      - riku_iki 9y ago
        > if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons This is very obvious situation. But what if sum is not twice larger? Or if you are not confident in your importance score? This is where game becomes harder.
    - 9y ago
hcoura 9y ago
Besides what you said of knowing what to do and the decisions part of the work there is one other thing, that at least for me, is(was) the culprit of most of my tiredness and irritability over the last year. Changing contexts fast whilst taking decisions on these different contexts. I was the only tech guy in this startup and I would handle basically everything on the tech side, working daily in three different languages and various "services". After a while as long as I had planned what I had to do for the day/week things were fine, but somedays I might be tackling this hard backend problem and I get asked to fix a frontend bug right now, I fix the bug, deploy it and go back to the backend stuff, couple hours later, I get a technical support call, again I must stop what I am doing to fix whatever needs to be fixed. So, this thing of going back and forth between the areas in which I was responsible for would really take it's toll on my work, not necessarily in my productivity/hour, but in the amount of hours really worked, amount of sleep needed(which I found quite curious) and the chance of having some small anxiety crisis(which is something I kinda have to coupe with).
maxxxxx 9y ago
That's why decisive leadership is so important. It's really hard to work towards a goal while the people in charge keep changing their minds.
- tsunamifury 9y ago
  It's hard when the newest executive fad is not making any decisions at all. "I'm just here to ask the right questions". You ain't getting paid 2 million to ask the right questions. You're here to find the answer. I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions.
  - Cpoll 9y ago
    > I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions. I doubt that. "Asking the right question" really means being able to identify which problems exist. From the anecdotes I read on HN about dysfunctional companies, this is sorely lacking.
    - tsunamifury 9y ago
      Actually I find with products consumers use every day, they are able to ask the right questions fairly readily.
ABCLAW 9y ago
One former colleague of mine would explain to clients that "Hard thinking is hard work, and hard problems need hard thinking before we put pen to paper" when explaining our pre-drafting billing.
aantix 9y ago
It's analogous to code readability.. - No code reads easier than linear code. - Linear reads easier than branched code. - Branched reads easier than polymorphic code.
tapanjk 9y ago
This. After being in a managerial position in engineering for a long time, I am (at 50) reconsidering transitioning back to an individual contributor role. Ever since I picked up a "leadership" role a couple of decades ago, I have been less approachable (per my family and friends) and need the weekends to just recuperate from a hectic week, rather than using this time to do fun things. And no, this is not because I am getting older. I have had a few stretches of downtime when I found myself doing fun things for days at end, and these were physically taxing activicites but were not "tiring."

by laydn 9y ago

arketyp 9y ago

I think the somatic marker hypothesis is relevant to what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis These managerial decisions have, by their very functional nature, a heavier body load.

deepGem 9y ago

This has been my experience as well. What I've found helpful is to just take a decision real fast and move on. Sure, it might be a bad decision but it's a done deal nonetheless. I tend to feel less burned out even if the decisions turned out to be bad, vs spending an inordinate amount of time debating decisions. And I have gotten myself stuck in some real holier than thou decision wormholes, for instance, which programming language to learn now.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
I seem to only be able to do this when I have a severe time constraint. I wish I could do it other times because it feels great to just decide and move on.
- maneesh 9y ago
  Set more non-cheatable time constraints.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Just In Time Procrastination.
  - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    If I set them, I'll cheat. Can you elaborate a bit?

DelightOne 9y ago

In the case where you do not have to make decisions you probably have peace of mind. No worry so to speak. „You know what the right thing to do is. Possibly due to experiene in the task and ecpected outcomes.“

su30mki117 9y ago
Found the German (sorry for OT, but I had to say this).

atas 9y ago

I have the heuristic that I leave decisions for the end of the day, based on what I have done. In fact, this is one of my goals per day, when things are unclear.

arvinsim 9y ago

Yup. If I have a clear goal when I start the day, it is easy to get in the flow. But if I start the day with meetings, I become less productive.

NTripleOne 9y ago
And then you leave the meeting room, thinking "Well at least that killed a good amount of time" and you see you were actually only in there for 20 minutes.

epalmer 9y ago

Some days I have a lot of different tasks to accomplish and support items come at me usually at the wrong time (before vacation, at 5PM,...). For the last month I've been using kanban to manage my work (trello) with these columns backlog on deck doing waiting impeded done This has reduced my stress and gives me a place to put things to do as they come up. I read Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry first. I found the book a bit overdone in explaining and justifying why. But maybe that is just me. I'm a scrum coach with 11 years experience as a scrum coach and 2 years as a product owner so I get the backlog, planned, doing, done thing.

ivanhoe 9y ago

I've noticed this especially for inconclusive situations, when you need to make a call and you're not 100% (or even 90%) sure what's the right choice. These drain my energy more than anything. Combination of a need for prolonged high mental alertness and hight stress levels caused by uncertain outcome just burns through you. On the other hand some people, like gamblers, get an ultimate kick out of this.

jpttsn 9y ago
I think you're right about that. I wonder if the best ways to avoid burnout, is to work on how you handle specifically these decision situations. In other words, finding a way to deal with low certainty situations might be key, compared to just dealing with huge amounts of rote work.
- mkmk 9y ago
  This is a really interesting point. How would you approach this?
  - pasta 9y ago
    There is a very rich man (forgot the name) who is making big decisions like this: * make a list of pros and cons * give each item an importance score from 0 to 10 * if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons: do it I believe you can do this for small decisions as well, without creating a list. Because most of the time you have a sense about the pros being twice as valuable as the cons. Edit: Sorry, this comment is a little unrelated because the parent talked about making a choice. My comment is more about 'should I progress'.
    - riku_iki 9y ago
      > if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons This is very obvious situation. But what if sum is not twice larger? Or if you are not confident in your importance score? This is where game becomes harder.
  - 9y ago

hcoura 9y ago

Besides what you said of knowing what to do and the decisions part of the work there is one other thing, that at least for me, is(was) the culprit of most of my tiredness and irritability over the last year. Changing contexts fast whilst taking decisions on these different contexts. I was the only tech guy in this startup and I would handle basically everything on the tech side, working daily in three different languages and various "services". After a while as long as I had planned what I had to do for the day/week things were fine, but somedays I might be tackling this hard backend problem and I get asked to fix a frontend bug right now, I fix the bug, deploy it and go back to the backend stuff, couple hours later, I get a technical support call, again I must stop what I am doing to fix whatever needs to be fixed. So, this thing of going back and forth between the areas in which I was responsible for would really take it's toll on my work, not necessarily in my productivity/hour, but in the amount of hours really worked, amount of sleep needed(which I found quite curious) and the chance of having some small anxiety crisis(which is something I kinda have to coupe with).

maxxxxx 9y ago

That's why decisive leadership is so important. It's really hard to work towards a goal while the people in charge keep changing their minds.

tsunamifury 9y ago
It's hard when the newest executive fad is not making any decisions at all. "I'm just here to ask the right questions". You ain't getting paid 2 million to ask the right questions. You're here to find the answer. I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions.
- Cpoll 9y ago
  > I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions. I doubt that. "Asking the right question" really means being able to identify which problems exist. From the anecdotes I read on HN about dysfunctional companies, this is sorely lacking.
  - tsunamifury 9y ago
    Actually I find with products consumers use every day, they are able to ask the right questions fairly readily.

ABCLAW 9y ago

One former colleague of mine would explain to clients that "Hard thinking is hard work, and hard problems need hard thinking before we put pen to paper" when explaining our pre-drafting billing.

aantix 9y ago

It's analogous to code readability.. - No code reads easier than linear code. - Linear reads easier than branched code. - Branched reads easier than polymorphic code.

tapanjk 9y ago

This. After being in a managerial position in engineering for a long time, I am (at 50) reconsidering transitioning back to an individual contributor role. Ever since I picked up a "leadership" role a couple of decades ago, I have been less approachable (per my family and friends) and need the weekends to just recuperate from a hectic week, rather than using this time to do fun things. And no, this is not because I am getting older. I have had a few stretches of downtime when I found myself doing fun things for days at end, and these were physically taxing activicites but were not "tiring."