How I Reduced Burnout By Reducing Everything

In this article, I talk about my experience with burn out and how I'm making it not a thing for me anymore (I think, I hope).

I aim to be as practical as possible with my explanations and proposed solutions but at the end of the day, your mileage may vary.

⚠️ Disclaimer: Mental health is a sensitive topic. If you need help, seek help. This article is half me ranting, and the other half me sharing my limited experience with burnout.

The Deadly Cycle

I've been a developer for ~5 years. I've been in a professional environment for 3 of those years.

I've found lately that I'm in a constant cycle of high-energy, high-output, partial or complete burnout, regret, rest, then high-energy again and the cycle repeats.

Here's another visualization that'll help me get the point across:

And then it just repeats like this:

This constant change between HOT 🔥 and cold 🧊 is the best way to completely ruin someone's happiness and motivation. Whenever I'm feeling highly motivated, I remember that I'm going to eventually burn out any way so what's the point.

Likewise, when I'm feeling burnt out, I just think to myself that there's no need for any real change in my life as this too will pass and I'll get my motivation back anyway.

I'd gotten so stressed about this that I eventually got completely crippled and became unable to do anything at all. I literally just stared at my monitors.

This is not the way.

The Nitty Gritty (What's Actually Happening)

What do I do in a day? What makes me feel burnt out? Why do I seem not to learn my lesson?

A typical week for me would start with defining some goals for the week. Usually overly optimistic and without consideration to how much spare time or motivation I actually have after company work. You know, the usual stuff.

Naturally, I would spend every day in this week working for my company, constantly interrupted by notifications from my phone, emails, slack, other random bullshit, etc. which would make me work longer than usual in an attempt to get some work done before calling it a day.

This would tire me out completely by the evening and, at that point, nothing short of a high-dose energy supplement would get my energy back up, but that's only pushing my already depleted motivation.

I would reach the end of the week having achieved little or none of what I'd set out to do, stressed about company work since that's also not going as swimmingly as I'd like.
Sometimes, I would be extra motivated for a given day and maybe I'd get a decent amount of my personal goals achieved. A rare occasion though.

I'm happy to say I've put almost all of that completely behind me. I've found something close to a balance.

How? By dumbing it down so my primitive ape brain can wrap itself around it.

Towards a Solution

The end goal is to flatten the mental state wave:

I'm not an expert at this topic, so I won't pretend to be one. All I did was do a little self retrospection.

At the end of the day, my conclusion was that I've got a severe mis-allocation of mental resources and an unhealthy attachment to everyone else's happiness and what others think is right.

The following are the culprits:

Your Attention Span

So, good news, there's this thing called attention a.k.a your ability to focus. Bad news, you have not that much of it.

According to wikipedia, the average adult has 5 hours a day of attention.

As a developer, it's one of your most important resources.

You might think that ~5 hours is actually pretty good, but don't forget to take into account the many interruptions you encounter, and the fact that each interruption means you need 23 minutes to get back into your flow (according to this random link I found on the internet which I totally trust).

So I made it a goal to maximize the amount of uninterrupted attention I have in a day.

This started relatively tame with me placing my phone out of my sight and out of arms reach while working.

Social Media

I've never considered myself a social media user. "I just use reddit", I'd say to myself. Whatever you classify it as, it became a natural reflex for me to open up reddit on my phone within 5 milliseconds of touching my phone. It was terrifying, and it was time and attention consuming. It had to go.

So I quit. Cold turkey. Just like that. I'm never going back. I'm all the happier for it. If the world burns, I'll know it when I see the flames from my window. If it's the second coming of jesus christ, I'll listen to the angels singing outside or something. Basically, important news will make its way to me somehow.

There's nothing that reddit adds to my life that could cancel out the negativity I get from it. That's that.

For those interested, before quitting cold-turkey, I tried app timers. But those can be turned off so it's not very useful to me. I needed to put more friction between me and the app, so I just removed it.

Notifications

Notifications are a crime against humanity. I'm pretty sure everyone has some form of mild PTSD from being subjected to the constant stream of beeps, boops, ring-a-ding-a-lings and buzzes.

So I muted everything 🔇. Not my phone, laptop, tablet, watch, or anything can demand my attention with a notification. If it's important, then I'll probably be called about it. Otherwise, I'll read it on MY time.

To balance things out, I made it a habit to take a look at my notifications whenever I've completed a "session" of work which has a measurable end.

I used to think that good communication meant answering on time and giving your time to people so they feel heard. Screw that.

Good communication should happen when it's time for it, not when you're in the middle of something. Respect your time, and respect the fact that you're expensive for your company. Being interrupted and having to start over better be damn worth it.

As a bonus, I made it a habit to permanently mute any sort of notification that adds nothing to my life. Unsubscribing from marketing emails, hiding shopping apps notifications, etc..

They really add up, so I recommend muting them as soon as you spot them. Eventually, you'll have a feed which only includes things you actually care about.

Simplifying My Workspace

I went down from three monitors to one, sometimes two.

I used to be the kind of guy to dream about when I'd be able to make a setup where I'd be able to have 5 or 6 monitors at the same time (I still kinda do…)

But then I asked myself, "dude, I'm a freaking web developer. WHY do I even need more than 2 monitors, ever?!". And the answer for me is, of course, netflix or spotify. pure distraction.

I'm strictly talking about MY own reasons right now, so if you're enjoying better productivity with your own setup then good for you.

Now I use one monitor when possible, and add another when building a hot-reloadable thing and I don't want to have to mess around with my windows.

Boom. instant wins. I don't know why, but I don't miss my older setup at all. I might even just go down to one monitor permanently. It enables me to focus only on what's on my current monitor and that's all.

Another simplification I did was to change my editor. I really hated how much moving around between the mouse and keyboard I had to do all day, so I learned vim over the last month or so and I'm a happier coder for it. I make it sound simple but it was a painful process honestly. Though it paid out very well in the end.

Final Thoughts

Our poor brains have way too much to filter through nowadays. Give yourself a break.

If you're unable to do the things that you want to do, then there's a good reason for it and you're not the problem, but you need to find a way to adapt your environment to yourself to make the most out of your unique mind.

It's not just about what you do during work. It's about what you do throughout your day that consumes your attention.

If you find yourself constantly in a position where you have to seriously strain yourself to achieve your goals, you need to lighten the load somewhere else in your life, or suffer the very real consequences.

Thank you for reading my article.