Three reasons your work feels exhausting (when it shouldn’t be)

Activities (writing, coding, running a company) can feel energizing or draining. There are three common reasons that can make any activity feel exhausting, because they drain your energy while you’re trying to get stuff done:

Decision fatigue

It happens when you’re burning your willpower trying to decide whether or not to do something. You may have noticed that just getting started with some activity feels excruciatingly difficult, but once you get going things get fun and easy.

To get rid of it, learn to recognize it for what it is, and once you do — get into a habit of decisively snapping into action without thinking. Don’t stand around on the edge of a cold pool trying to figure out how cold it will be, just jump in.

Another thing that helps is breaking down your goals into small clear challenges, and starting with a tiny action you know you can accomplish. Many programmers end their workday leaving one small easy bug unfixed, so that the next day they could easily get back to work — knowing exactly what to do makes taking the first step very easy.

Persona Fatigue

Persona fatigue comes from caring too much about “how you look”, what other people will think about your work.

To avoid it, learn to value doing your thing more than you value other people’s opinions, learn to focus on the process and not be dependent on the outcome. Remember that the only thing you can directly control is taking action. People’s opinions depend on the quality of your work, which is a side effect of your skill, which is a result of the time you’ve spent working and practicing your craft. You can’t magically force yourself to do work that’s above your skill level, but you can decide to put more time and practice into your skillset. Focus on achieving your goal, taking action, making progress, developing skill — these are the things you can control.

Don’t try to pander to your audience or pretend to be something you’re not. Be at peace with just being who you are, doing your work the best way you can, and let chips fall where they may. When you’re being authentic, you don’t have to burn your energy trying to adjust people’s perception of you.

Self-judgement Fatigue

Self-judgement fatigue means letting results of your work to define your sense of self worth. It causes the fear of failure, because you think that if the result is not as great as you’ve imagined it to be, it will damage your sense of self esteem.

The key to solving it is changing your criteria for success. Your sense of accomplishment should come from successfully putting in the work, taking the right steps, and following the right process, not it’s outcome.

Optimize behaviors, not outcomes. You can directly control the actions you take, but not the results they lead to. Reward yourself for taking the right action, use outcomes as analytics to learn from.

Don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t change. Don’t burn your mental energy on things outside of your circle of control, instead — try to spend all of it on taking actionable steps. Your work should be an expression of your self esteem, not a test of it.