11 Emails are also responsible

In my opinion, the emails we exchange every day with clients and colleagues are incredibly stressing.
Emails are too fast. The sender usually expects you to answer in the 10 minutes after you receive the message. The emails you receive all day long are like small notes in your head telling you have something to do… That is incredibly stressing for me.
To avoid that, I shut down my mail client when I have to focus on a task. Then, handling emails becomes a task that happens only once or twice in my day.

posted at 02:20 pm on May 26, 2009 by Franckg

13 Thank you!

Thank you for this very well written article. It certainly was worth the years wait. As I’m suffering through my own burnout issues and working towards solutions, it’s comforting to know that others have been there.

posted at 02:50 pm on May 26, 2009 by fildawg

14 Not so much history

I think this article is valuable and presents a lot of great information. The one thing I’ll quibble with is the idea that “the 9 to 5 workday is dead.” While stated as a given a few times, I think that this attitude is also one of the frequent causes of burnout. In tough economic times, we are encouraged to work longer hours, often for no increased reward. So keep that in mind and push back on employers or clients: If you want me to work more than eight hours a day, you’ll have to pay me more for the privilege!

(I’ll also note that many of those asking us to work longer hours balk at working those longer hours themselves!)

posted at 04:26 pm on May 26, 2009 by theJBRU

15 MY WEAK POINT; CREATE A DAILY ROUTINE

Your article really spoke to me. I think the key point for me is “creating a daily routine.” It makes such a difference for me when I shut off the interruptions, even the ones that seem critically important, and set aside blocks of time to get work done. I think that’s one reason that working in the evening or on the weekend is so tempting. Fewer people are around, it’s nice and quiet and you can just go for it on a project. Meanwhile, your family sits in another part of the house, wondering if you’ll ever return….

posted at 04:43 pm on May 26, 2009 by caryswood

16 Thanks for the article!

Wow! This is a great article. This is very helpful especially to my wife who had been working till the wee hours just to cope with her client. She had been into freelancing and works at home. It is really true that most of the time she forgets to set boundaries/limits with the number of hours she have to work. And lately i always hear her whining about being so stress out with her work. She even lacks time to play with our son which is very unlikely her. This article would really help her return to her “life”. Thanks a lot Scott!

posted at 04:48 pm on May 26, 2009 by tom-carpal-nicholson

17 I SHOULD ADD: SO IMPORTANT TO BE VIGILANT

I went through burnout last year after some stressful events. Your article is so important for a number of reasons, but one is that is serves as a reminder to be vigilant. Think of it: we find a career/community/lifework/passion all wrapped up together. It’s wonderful. Then, not being vigilant about the things you discuss in your article, we risk losing all that we had or losing our love for it, at any rate. Thanks, too, for your honesty, Scott. Great article.

posted at 05:24 pm on May 26, 2009 by caryswood

18 I don't buy it...

I’ve read an interesting article (in a magazine on the left of the political spectrum) about the rise in reported ‘burnout’ cases. The article claimed that many of the burnout cases are not due to exhaustion from overwork, dedication and stress from involvement at the workplace, but due to incompetence and personal inequadecies related to work, the conflict between your self-image and reality, and other factors.

Horrible auto translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http://dasmagazin.ch/index.php/wo-brennts-denn/&sl=de&tl=en&history;_state0=&swap=1

Half of the burnout patients I know are people stuck in a job they hate, where they idle on facebook (or reddit) all day…

Instead of looking at the root problem, the inner causes, people blame the outside (work, your girlfriend etc.).

I think it’s the imbalance between what you want to be, fuelled by society’s illusions, (you are yourself, you are famous, you are important, you can achieve whatever you want, drink a coke and sail towards the sun at the end of the horizon) and the reality of modern life, namely that the largest part of your own destiny is determined by outside influences and that you are indeed, pretty helpless about this thing called life.

posted at 06:16 pm on May 26, 2009 by kitsune

19

First of all, Scott, thanks for writing this article, I think it will resonate a lot with business owners and freelancers alike.

Next, I just want to comment on kitsune’s final paragraph, which I think is patently untrue. According to The Atlantic , quoting The How of Happiness, they cite “that temperamental ‘set points’ for happiness—a predisposition to stay at a certain level of happiness—account for a large, but not overwhelming, percentage of our well-being. (Fifty percent, says Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control.).”

So only 10%, barring faulty genetics, of your happiness is based on circumstance you cannot control.

Meanwhile, I do agree that self-awareness is a very important and healthy part of recognizing burnout and some of the internal causes. You need to be self aware to take advantage of that 40%.

Now, a question for those who are trying to be proactive about burnout: how do you plan for a vacation as a freelancer? How far ahead do you plan and notify your clients, and how do you maneuver projects around the dates you want to take vacation?

posted at 07:21 pm on May 26, 2009 by Lea Alcantara

20 Sorry Scott, "burnout" goes way back in history to

Your article is interesting.

Probably you describe real experience in work. Others have written about what you describe but they didn’t use the term “Burnout”.

The human behavior which your term describe was not invented by programmers and is not a dis-ease invented by computer cultures after Brainiac.

In earlier days it was probably called “the disease of the noon-day sun”; it was or is about people stuck working in the middle of the day where there are no shadows, no energy, it is too hot to eat lunch or do anything else, there is no refreshment.

In general, trying hard to work in the middle of the metaphorical day was put in the too hard, unrewarding pile. In short it was a human vice.

In Cathlolic lingo it was a vice called “Acedia”

I know it is not trendy to reference theological termonology or Catholic lingo; nevertheless it is an interesting point of reference that says people knew about this long ago and far away.

My main point: programmers aren’t experiencing a new dis-ease, but they are a part of the larger human condition. If who you are is what you do, and you stop doing, you have a big deal on your hands. The mens group I belong to calls this simply: work addiction. Many people have tried it with a wide variety of outcomes.

To my taste work addiction seems like a more functional description of what is going on than either “Burnout” or “Acedia”. It suggests not just the individual case but also a work culture that promotes or at least tolerates all the behaviors you describe. A solution might be created by the bosses too not just the afflicted worker bees.

c.f wikipedia:
(Latin, acedia) is apathetic listlessness; depression without joy. It is similar to melancholy, although acedia describes the behaviour, while melancholy suggests the emotion producing it. In early Christian thought, the lack of joy was regarded as a wilful refusal to enjoy the goodness of God and the world God created; by contrast, the apathy was regarded as a spiritual affliction that discouraged people from their religious work.

When Thomas Aquinas described acedia in his interpretation of the list, he described it as an uneasiness of the mind, being a progenitor for lesser sins such as restlessness and instability. Dante refined this definition further, describing acedia as the failure to love God with all one’s heart, all one’s mind and all one’s soul; to him it was the middle sin, the only one characterised by an absence or insufficiency of love.

posted at 07:27 pm on May 26, 2009 by stevehar