Burnout

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while and I think its only fitting the starting off the new year and looking at getting “back into work” that we start thinking about our next time off.

What?

Yes, you are working to live, not living to work! Remember that.

Part of the problem

Admittedly, I’m terrible at taking time off. As in, horrible at it. There are several reasons for this. I’m a workaholic and its something I’m trying to get better at. But also, there is a part of me, that has a child that can throw some health issue wrenches your way at the drop of a hat and put you in the hospital. Having a “bank” of days to rely on, even when the company would bend over backwards to make it work with sick days and family sick days, and every other internet company benefit you can think of… I’m from a broken system in my early years and its hard to get out of that mental thought process. I’m part of the problem here!

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.