03 | A little about burning out

My experience and how I overcome it.

12th September 2013
We were sitting and drinking tea. I was explaining with a passion that I have a new promising client and this new project will change my carrier.

- This is this one. I promise you, after finishing I will get amazing clients and finally will stop working on those boring ones!
- Yeah… You know… You know that you actually say that about every project? This will be the one, this will be the game changer. But… It is a year since I hear it but this big break is not coming…You work so hard, every day, no weekends, no vacations. When was the last time when you took a full weekend off?

I was trying to remind myself but actually, maybe that would be Christmas two years ago?

Pushing too hard

As you probably know, that ‘exciting’ project didn’t change anything. It also didn’t change my working style. I was crossing the line and working as before — no vacation, no weekends, too busy to have time for anything. I treated every project as an opportunity and taking every job no matter how much I would get paid. Trying to meet monthly budget and struggling to become a successful and appreciated visual designer. To get to a place with more money, with the freedom to choose interesting projects and working fewer hours.

But it is not always working like that. All of our startup’s ideas that we had with my friends crashed. We were too young, immature and we didn’t have enough luck. Looking at successful friends around started to make me feel miserable. Also, my full-time job stopped give me a joy. I started to lose faith that I will ever have a chance to do something big. I was always on a side track with no chance to work on something that will make my dream come true.

The symptoms

I think the first time when I noticed the burnout was when I shift to 1/2 on my full-time job to focus more on my freelance work and work more from home. I had more time but getting to the office desk that was 2 meters from me took me hours. After fifteen minutes of working, I had to take a break. I was really slow and every mistake that I made on a screen made me furious.

Most importantly I lost excitement. I lost the fun. I lost involvement. Nowadays, I m trying to not look so much at the work that I was doing back then. I lost some clients because of the quality of the work. I also lost energy to push other clients to execute things correctly and follow my advice. I think I was miserable and so in the loop that I didn’t understand what and why it was happening.

The reaction

I only knew that things are not good, I am not happy and need to change something. I realized that I actually have to change a lot, otherwise I will not be able to do things that I really enjoyed and gave me a lot of pleasure before.

Long story short — I moved to Sweden, I started to study Interaction Design in a great school, met amazing people and get opportunities that I could only dream about before. Time in Sweden was also intense, I was working a lot too, sometimes maybe even more than before but somehow I managed to fight with my symptoms and fade out the burnout.

Of course, it didn’t happen in one day. I think the whole process took me a little more than a year. It wasn’t easy neither. But returning to a state where I get the pleasure from the things I am working on was priceless and helped me to continue to grow.

Advice to my younger self

I decided to collect pieces of advice that I would give to myself 5 years ago that helped me to manage the burnout and they are also currently working as my guidelines to avoid it coming back. Those bits of advice are probably more aiming freelancers but I think they can be also adapted to regular office work too.

1. Establish some rules. In the past, I always tried to satisfy my clients with crazy deadlines. It was really easy to influence me because I didn’t establish some rules for myself. Having them always in mind or even writing them on a piece of paper and putting next to your desk will help to follow them. Some of the rules that I follow currently: I don’t do night working, I have a big nono to work during weekends or taking work home.
2. Meet people and get a hobby. I was so focused on working and following a dream that I basically lost the contact with the people around me. I had to cancel too many meetings because of deadlines or to stop my hobbies. Currently, my life has more balance and space for meetings with friends and maybe I am still looking for one passion but I explored a lot of things that I wanted to try or come back to (plastic models ❤).
3. Focus on one thing. During my most intense time, I was doing visual branding, design for print materials, UI for screens — everything that I could put my fingers on. Now I think that was a mistake. I should focus on one aspect of design, try to become an expert in that field and just stop working on other types of projects. Currently, my job is more defined and as I have an understanding of visual communication I am mainly focusing on Interaction Design and treat it as my main thing.
4. Manage time wisely. I didn’t have any structure to my days and work. Often I have been starting work at 1 pm and finishing it really late. I also made other mistakes. I haven’t done to-do lists, I have been losing energy on checking and answering on emails all day long. Lack of time management caused lack of time that I could use on spending time with my friends, exploring hobbies or other things that I found interesting. To change that I started to read more about time management. The book that really helped me was Getting things done by David Allen. I also started to use a to-do list app that helps me to follow the advice from the book.
5. Work on 90% mode. Usually, when I am in the flow I have a tendency to work really fast — the keyboard and mouse are on fire! Unfortunately, it was draining my energy levels much faster. It is tricky to explain but I keep in mind to work like ‘a 10% slower’. It doesn’t really affect my schedule but after a day of intense work, I don’t feel that my brain is fried and I can still do something after work.

Definitely, there are more things that we can do to recover from a burnout but I hope you will find some of it useful. I am also really curious about your experiences with a burnout and what helped you to overcome it.

A disclaimer. It was really important to share my experiences with a burnout. I am aware that burnout can be a serious issue and that in some cases my advice will be not enough to help. In that cases, I highly recommend contacting a specialist.