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Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way,

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

ttoinou 4y ago
Any example of a smart KPI ?
- groffee 4y ago
  "Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely" Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/smart-goal/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...
  - lobocinza 4y ago
    It sure sounds smart, just isn't. Another example of a mechanistic approach in a field were humans are the major factor. Goals at best are arbitrary targets reached via consensus.
    - sinenomine 4y ago
      In my honest opinion one of the largest meta-problems ever amounts to decent mechanistic routes of helping each other being not taken in favor of more feel-good decent sounding verbal coping. Virtue signaling should be banned.
- disembiggen 4y ago
  it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is: Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month
- sinenomine 4y ago
  Some examples of directly measurable KPIs: 1. Mood diary 2. Time spent on social media, negative 3. Hours of sleep 4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt 5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/ https://openpsychometrics.org/ 6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02208/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220... 7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence 8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biological-age/ https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi... You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once. SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.
  - adriand 4y ago
    I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction. My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe. I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.
    - sinenomine 4y ago
      I too would like if my life were nice by default, but it is not. When faced with a hard problem we have to resort to hard measurements of progress, because otherwise we tend to go in circles in high-dimensional parameter space. Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice. > If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. And that's a big if.
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore. If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen. This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways. Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it. I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto": https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chaos-engineering-for-teams/ https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...
dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
I like to define burnout as expending effort without makng perceived progress. If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout. If not, it might be depression or something else. In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.
lobocinza 4y ago
Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).
Dudeman112 4y ago
>In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?
- sinenomine 4y ago
  I don't find KPIs terribly useful in the software development at the level of an IC (which is btw my own level), unless we talk about performance & latency of large services where it is very useful and helps save millions. Software IC is special because motivation-wise it is almost self-sustaining, which is evident from massive open-source participation and pet projects. On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth. It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.

ttoinou 4y ago

Any example of a smart KPI ?

groffee 4y ago
"Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely" Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/smart-goal/ https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...
- lobocinza 4y ago
  It sure sounds smart, just isn't. Another example of a mechanistic approach in a field were humans are the major factor. Goals at best are arbitrary targets reached via consensus.
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    In my honest opinion one of the largest meta-problems ever amounts to decent mechanistic routes of helping each other being not taken in favor of more feel-good decent sounding verbal coping. Virtue signaling should be banned.
disembiggen 4y ago
it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is: Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month
sinenomine 4y ago
Some examples of directly measurable KPIs: 1. Mood diary 2. Time spent on social media, negative 3. Hours of sleep 4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt 5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/ https://openpsychometrics.org/ 6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02208/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220... 7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence 8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biological-age/ https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi... You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once. SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.
- adriand 4y ago
  I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction. My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe. I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.
  - sinenomine 4y ago
    I too would like if my life were nice by default, but it is not. When faced with a hard problem we have to resort to hard measurements of progress, because otherwise we tend to go in circles in high-dimensional parameter space. Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice. > If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low. And that's a big if.
jordanbeiber 4y ago
Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore. If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen. This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways. Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it. I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto": https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chaos-engineering-for-teams/ https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...

dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago

I like to define burnout as expending effort without makng perceived progress. If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout. If not, it might be depression or something else. In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.

lobocinza 4y ago

Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).

Dudeman112 4y ago

>In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?

sinenomine 4y ago
I don't find KPIs terribly useful in the software development at the level of an IC (which is btw my own level), unless we talk about performance & latency of large services where it is very useful and helps save millions. Software IC is special because motivation-wise it is almost self-sustaining, which is evident from massive open-source participation and pet projects. On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth. It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.