On Burnout
On Burnout
For most of the people I know in the tech industry, and to be honest in real life that are above 20 burnout is not an unknow word. However, I haven’t found that many sharing personal experinces. As always, fear to be judged, and others are legit reasons not to share one’s story, but I’ve been there, and reading other people’s stories is what helped me most.
What is burnout?
[Find definitions]
There are thee main keys that I get way from this definitions: is subjective, is work realed and is a trasionary state.
What happened to me?
[Came back from PTO, It was more than two months of fighting fires, hours shifted with no prospection of changing, felt more and more that we were being treated as cheap labor, no trust in managemet or direction -> Working felt pointless]
What did I do?
I left. And I must say that I’ve never felt so priviledged before.
What do I still do?
I try to keep myself in an ecomnomical position that no matter what happens at work I know I can survive a year. That is incredibly hard, but it gives you an enourmus advatange in this type of situations: IT BUYs YOU TIME.
I have a version of mood tracking. There are meny reasons why you should really consider tracking what you do [ASK B PERMISSION TO INCLUDE HER ARTICLE HERE](As my former collegue and friend Beatrice points out here) but besides for a purely profesional prespective, you should do it for yourself to. [PETER ATIA]
You don’t need to have a very complex system here, mine requires a pen or pencil, a notebook and a prompt:
If this week was going to be repeated all over again for the next 10 years, would you be happy? Why?
Bonus point is to force yourself to write it in few lines: like max 10. Then you have a sumary of you week. If you are sad
Resources
If you want to read more about the this topic I leave some resources that were useful to me: