Burn Out!

I can remember when it got bad. I can look back and see all the signs, the decisions and the times of indecision, and where I was when it bubbled over. It wasn’t good and it also wasn’t the first time that it had happened to me. I was getting burned out and I needed to do something about it.

The work

At the time, work was pretty hot and heavy. We have reviews twice a year so during the time that the burn out really came to the forefront, it was during that time that the seasoned veterans know, its that heavy lifting time in order to get various projects across the finish line. You know you are no where near done, but there is a lot of grind during months 4-5 of a 6 month review cycle. The work looked something like this. I was managing 7 people, hiring my 8th. Working on creating 4 new positions so everything from job descriptions, question banks, career pathing, and how we would review these people once the positions were hired. Two of the positions were for the pilot that I was co-leading of a group of developers focused on fixing some of our tooling. Oh, did I mention that some of the work we were introducing a brand new, completely foreign hardware platform that we were quickly taking over more and more work to help support. Throw on a last minute intern program that needed to be spun up which looked a LOT like creating a new role at the 11th hour. Oh…and COVID and trying to manage both the site, the home life, and help be counselor to my team and make sure my wife wasn’t going to go nuts as winter was most definitely coming in the Midwest.

In short, that’s a lot of fucking work and stress.

The Signs

How were the signs showing up. Well, for one I was getting short on bullshit and often getting frustrated quickly or even snapping at people. Little things were adding up. Something as simple as taking extra training would set me off.

Another sign, the inability to get things done. You’d think that with the amount of work that was on my plate, I’d have to get stuff done and get it done quickly. While I was able to get a bunch of stuff done over the half. There were times during the nights that I’d need to get something done, and just couldn’t get started. Or make any sort of progress.

##TODO- Talk about lack of sleep

Remedy

I know I don’t have the answers of what will work for you. I can only speak to what has worked for me. I needed time off for one so I took a week off. Another thing that I needed to do was build something. Make something with my hands. #TODO more here