3 ms·

I think there's one fallacy there... you can easily burn out while still engaged in your work. Or rather, you can be fully engaged in your work, happy about it,

by swombat 17y ago

I think there's one fallacy there... you can easily burn out while still engaged in your work. Or rather, you can be fully engaged in your work, happy about it, feeling great and on top of everything, and yet still get to a point where your body and mind just can't take anymore, and then you crash and burn for a few days (or longer, depending on the way your mind works), where you feel totally disengaged and don't do anything productive. By the time you realise that you're not engaged in your work anymore, imho, you've already crashed.

ptn 17y ago
That wouldn't be burn out (the mind has a full tank, but can't start it's engine), that would be stress or fatigue (the mind is out of fuel).
megaduck 17y ago
Absolutely true. I hit that point earlier this year. For a while, I was filling every waking moment with something "productive". Going to class during the day, working on the startup at night, listening to economics and political podcasts during my commute, and filling any spare minutes with writing or learning the guitar. After a while, I just couldn't get anything done. My language learning slowed to a crawl, my coding output dropped, and I developed a wicked case of writer's block. My brain just... stopped. Thank God my wife's a patient woman, because I understand I became rather difficult to live with. The painful part was that I didn't feel "burned out". I loved everything I was doing, but I became frustrated because I just couldn't get things accomplished. Sanity was regained only after I cut back. I canceled almost all my podcast subscriptions, reduced my startup work, and actively took some time off. "Noprocrast" helped too. :) After a while, productivity eventually came back. Since then, I've been careful about tackling too much at once. I think the brain has a buffer that deals with all the stimulus that you deal with in your daily life. If you take on too much, the buffer gets full and performance drops to a crawl. Taking time to occasionally "clear the buffer" is critical to maintaining a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.
nostrademons 17y ago
That's burnout? I just take that as a normal work routine - I'll work really hard on something for a week or two, then do nothing for a couple days while I recharge. I figure it's more productive than an arbitrary 5-days-on-2-days-off schedule, and it lets me make better use of the downtime, since I'm more inclined to try something completely different when I really don't feel like doing anything productive than when I'd rather be working. My cofounder was the same way, and our downtimes never seemed to be synchronized, which was a good thing because it meant there was always someone going full steam ahead.
- swombat 17y ago
  It's burn-out if you don't realise that you need to sit back and relax for a few days to recharge, and keep ploughing on regardless. Once you learn how to manage this burnout cycle, it becomes a feature rather than a bug, as you describe. If you try to keep going, though, a couple of days of downtime can easily turn into weeks of morose can't-be-arsed-to-do-anything-ness.

by swombat 17y ago

ptn 17y ago

That wouldn't be burn out (the mind has a full tank, but can't start it's engine), that would be stress or fatigue (the mind is out of fuel).

megaduck 17y ago

Absolutely true. I hit that point earlier this year. For a while, I was filling every waking moment with something "productive". Going to class during the day, working on the startup at night, listening to economics and political podcasts during my commute, and filling any spare minutes with writing or learning the guitar. After a while, I just couldn't get anything done. My language learning slowed to a crawl, my coding output dropped, and I developed a wicked case of writer's block. My brain just... stopped. Thank God my wife's a patient woman, because I understand I became rather difficult to live with. The painful part was that I didn't feel "burned out". I loved everything I was doing, but I became frustrated because I just couldn't get things accomplished. Sanity was regained only after I cut back. I canceled almost all my podcast subscriptions, reduced my startup work, and actively took some time off. "Noprocrast" helped too. :) After a while, productivity eventually came back. Since then, I've been careful about tackling too much at once. I think the brain has a buffer that deals with all the stimulus that you deal with in your daily life. If you take on too much, the buffer gets full and performance drops to a crawl. Taking time to occasionally "clear the buffer" is critical to maintaining a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

nostrademons 17y ago

That's burnout? I just take that as a normal work routine - I'll work really hard on something for a week or two, then do nothing for a couple days while I recharge. I figure it's more productive than an arbitrary 5-days-on-2-days-off schedule, and it lets me make better use of the downtime, since I'm more inclined to try something completely different when I really don't feel like doing anything productive than when I'd rather be working. My cofounder was the same way, and our downtimes never seemed to be synchronized, which was a good thing because it meant there was always someone going full steam ahead.

swombat 17y ago
It's burn-out if you don't realise that you need to sit back and relax for a few days to recharge, and keep ploughing on regardless. Once you learn how to manage this burnout cycle, it becomes a feature rather than a bug, as you describe. If you try to keep going, though, a couple of days of downtime can easily turn into weeks of morose can't-be-arsed-to-do-anything-ness.