How I’ve learned to manage my programming burnout.

The expression goes:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” — Confucius.

But what if you love what you do and there comes a time when that love seems to have gone?

Burnout in many aspects of my life, is always something I’ve struggled with, whether it be in my professional life, programming burnout or in my personal life where I started to feel like some people where just too much effort to keep around.

I will be focussing on programming burnout in the below points, but many of the points apply to many different forms of burnout.

Below will be my framework for how I work on projects and minimise any chance of burnout.

1. Starting a new project.

One thing I am very grateful for is to have a great team around me, which makes for an overall creativilty free work environment.

Solutions are explored without prejudice or preconcieved ideas which makes room for your creativity to be explored and challenged in a healthy way.

Expressing yourself creativitly is not often feasible for many developers or software engineers as you are working towards requirements or user stories which don’t lend themselves often to creative solutions or discussions, but I have found that exploring and expressing this creativity is a big part of feeling satisfied with the direction a project will be heading in, the worst thing for motiviation in a new project is to have ideas and not even be listened to and ignored.

2. During a project.

During a project, this may come to many people as normal, but it took me a long time to properly implement and understand how to do effectivly.

This is to take breaks from the project. I would often take breaks to get coffee or just to get water. But this wasn’t taking a break for the sake of taking a break it was taking a break for a specific reason, often these breaks didn’t feel like a break from the project and I would often forget I even left my desk to do them.

Taking consious and specific breaks for the sake of actually taking a break and giving your head time to recollect thoughts and give it a rest is paramount in not burning out, as your brain is a muscle so just as any other muscle in your body needs rest, as does your brain.

3. Having healthy accountability

Having accountability for aspects of the project, whether that be for a specific requirement or a part of the project is healthy in itself, as this gives you incentive to deliver and therefore pushes you to stay focused.

This accountability can also be negative if it just someone constantly asking why its not done yet, or how long its going to take.

Having healthy accountability in my eyes, is where you are able to sit down and explain to someone why something you are doing is not done yet, these are blockers and discussing how these blockers can be removed or minimised.

I hope this sheds a little bit of light into how I deal with burnout from a programming perspective.