I Burned Out

#career #productivity #mentalhealth #beginners

It’s been a few months since I last published anything on Beginner.dev. My goal with this newsletter has always been to help developers reach that next step in their career, and giving an honest look into what it takes to build a successful career is part of that goal. The reason I haven’t been publishing new posts lately is because I’ve been dealing with severe burnout at my day job and I had to step away for a bit. I’m hoping by talking about it publicly will help others that may be going through something similar.

Burnout can happen to anyone, at any time. I’ve been programming professionally for 15 years and I wasn’t able to notice the signs of burnout until it was too late. The amount of work and pressure I’ve been dealing with on my projects eventually caught up to me, and it impacted my output and efficiency significantly.

It’s taken some time away from work and some self-reflection to identify what went wrong, when things went wrong, and why things went wrong. I may write another post someday going into more detail about it, but for now I’m still focused on getting back to my normal work so I just want to talk about what has helped me so far.

It’s not easy to recover from burnout. It’ll take some time for things to settle down, but there are some things you can do to reduce the stress and help get yourself back to a good spot.

Step 1: Recognize you’re burned out

In a way, recognizing that you’re burned out is the hardest thing to do because it’s probably too late by the time you do realize what’s happening. The important thing is that you’re able to recognize the burnout, because then you can do something about it. If you don’t know you’re burned out, it’s much harder to take any steps to recover from it.

How do you know you’re burned out?

Feeling angry when something doesn’t go the way you want it to.
Feeling jaded or unmotivated about the projects you’re working on.
Feeling jaded or annoyed when working together with other developers.
General lack of motivation to do some or all parts of your job.

Everyone’s situation will be different, and you may react differently than others would in situations if you’re burned out, but the important thing is to reflect on yourself and your behavior and understand when you’re not being yourself.

Step 2: Ask for help

If people don’t know that you’re struggling, they won’t know that you need help. It can be difficult to open up and be honest with people, especially your coworkers who you have a professional relationship with. If possible, set up some time to talk to your manager and let them know that you’ve been feeling burned out. Just be honest with them and tell them what you’ve been dealing with and why you’re feeling burned out. It might be hard to open up, but it’s the best thing you can do when suffering from burnout.

Your manager is there to help you succeed, and they should hopefully work with you to get you back to a productive state. They can help in different ways, such as reducing your workload, bringing in additional help on your projects, or moving you on to other projects that are less stressful or have less urgent deadlines. If they know you’re going through a tough time and not able to work at peak productivity, they should do what they can to help reduce your workload and take some of the stress off your plate.

Step 3: Lighten your workload

It’s hard to give specific advice for this step because everyone’s circumstances will be different. Your situation will be entirely dependent on your manager, your company, and the severity of your burnout. While your manager can definitely help reduce your workload, it’s ultimately up to you to determine and dictate how much work you can take on at once.

Things you can talk to your manager about that would help reduce your workload:

Bringing other people onto your project to help out
Moving you to a different project
Moving to a four day work week temporarily
Taking some time off of work

Even if your manager does help out by giving you a lighter workload, there may be other people reaching out directly to you to ask questions, ask for favors, and ask for help with certain things. It’s up to you to learn how to say “no” to people asking things from you in these side channels. The important thing is to stay focused on the tasks and projects that are planned and are on the roadmap, because those are the projects that upper management have visibility into. If you’re spending time on side tasks and not on your planned work, it will look like you’re making slow progress on your projects on the roadmap, which could lead to increased pressure from upper management to get them done sooner.

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