What I Actually Do When I'm Burned Out

Eleven posts into this series, and I still don't have burnout solved. What I have is a short, unglamorous list of things I notice about myself, and a shorter list of things I do about them once I notice. Neither list is complete. Both keep changing depending on the year. That's the honest version of this closing post, before I get into the specifics.

What it looks like

The signs are boring, which is probably why I ignored them for years. I open a project I care about, stare at the file list for a few seconds, and close it again without touching anything. I snap at something trivial, a slow page load, a badly worded error message, like it did something to me on purpose. A system I was excited about a week earlier just goes flat, with no single bad day I can point to and blame. From the outside it mostly looks like me being a bit off. That's exactly the problem with it.

None of these signs are new to me anymore, but noticing them in the moment is still hit or miss. I can describe the pattern perfectly a week after the fact and still walk straight past it while it's happening. Recognizing it earlier hasn't gotten dramatically easier with practice. That's gotten a little more reliable, which is a different and smaller claim.

What I do about it

The first thing is picking one specific project and stepping away from it for a set stretch, a week, sometimes two, instead of telling myself I'll take it easy in general terms. A vague break turns into guilt by day three. A dated one I can hold onto without negotiating with myself every morning about whether today counts as rest or as slacking.

The second has nothing to do with screens: cooking something that needs real chopping, or fixing something physical that's been sitting broken for months. None of it has to produce anything useful. My hands need a task my brain can't quietly turn into a project with milestones and a deadline.

The third is lowering what I expect from myself instead of pushing through. On a normal week I might finish five things I care about. On a rough one I tell myself the number is one, and I say it out loud before the week starts, not after I've already missed the five and feel bad about it. Pushing through has never worked for me, not once that I can remember. It just moves the same tiredness two weeks out and adds guilt on top of it.

None of this is a system, and none of it is advice for anyone else. These are reflexes built from getting it wrong for a long time first. I sat on the closed-tab thing for probably two years before I connected it to anything real. Some rough patches I catch on day three now. Others I still don't catch until week three, after all this. The practice keeps moving under me, and some months I'm clearly worse at it than others.

Writing twelve posts about this, on a blog people mostly read for code, felt strange for the first two or three entries. It got easier once I stopped trying to make each one land on a tidy resolution. Some were harder to publish than any technical post I've written here. The writing itself wasn't the hard part. Hitting publish with less to hide behind was.

I don't know if any of it was useful to whoever read it. I know it made me pay closer attention to my own patterns than I had in years, mostly because putting them into sentences forced specifics instead of vague gestures at feeling off. That part held up on its own, regardless of anything else the series did.

Twelve is a good number to stop at, and the topic isn't closed. The rest of this year's posts need to be about something else for a while.