Ways To Avoid Technology Burnout

 1. Do Consistently Meaningful Work

In The Power of Full Engagement, authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz explain the responsibility of leaders to articulate a clear purpose for the work of their organization to inspire positive energy in their employees:

However, it’s not enough to have a noble, eloquent mission statement or a list of values taped to the wall. To keep your team engaged, you must ensure that the day-to-day work is consistently aligned with the stated values of the company.

If your company’s mission is to cure cancer, but you one day ask your engineers to exploit the customer data to build a product recommendation system, you can expect to lose some of the initial enthusiasm of your employees. Similarly, if your company’s success relies on running misleading ads or sending spammy Facebook notifications, can you expect your employees to remain committed over time?

Doing work purely for money with no morally redeeming quality can easily erode a person’s sense of purpose and lead to burnout. Unfortunately, many tech companies fall into this category.                                                                             

2. Make Time For Physical Renewal

It’s time for a confession: I spent a significant part of my early engineering career as a stereotypically unhealthy software engineer. I ate junk food, I stayed up way too late chugging Red Bulls, and I loathed exercising of any sort.

Through all of this, I did well professionally by traditional measures, so one might be tempted to use my story to argue that healthy living doesn’t matter to achieving success in tech.

However, I was failing in one important area that most measures of success overlook: happiness. I was tired and stressed out all the time. I didn’t have energy for any activities outside of work other than playing video games or watching TV. I was perpetually on the verge of burnout.

A lot has changed over the years — I’m now vegan, I run marathons, I do yoga daily, and I must say, I’m the furthest from burnout I’ve ever been.

As software engineers, we primarily use our minds in our work, and it’s easy to forget our bodies. But, in truth, they have a huge impact on our mental capacity.                                                                                                            3. Cultivate a Growth Mindset

Burnout is often the result of accumulated stress. A clear solution to performance-related stress is to cultivate a growth mindset. Stress often results when reality falls short of expectations. Someone wasn’t able to execute fast enough. Someone wasn’t successful in making a project pitch.

The key is to recognize that reality is mutable. The fixed mindset says that these are the skills and abilities I have as an individual or we have as a team, and they’re just not good enough. The growth mindset instead sees the opportunity for improvement in every situation. If your team keeps missing deadlines, don’t resign yourself to complaining that things are never going to change. Instead, experiment with new techniques to see if you can improve productivity.

If your meetings feel ineffective, they could just remain the running office joke — “Oh great, another meeting. I guess I won’t be getting any work done today.” On the other hand, you could advocate for change. Remove useless meetings. Improve the structure of required meetings. Experiment, iterate, and ultimately, improve. This is the point of agile retrospectives. If you’re not doing them, maybe it’s time to start.

Similarly, if you keep receiving critical code reviews, you could just decide that you’re not a good programmer and stress out about that, and maybe give up. The alternative? Take a course online or attend a workshop. This doesn’t need to be a demand in your leisure time — talk to your manager about spending a couple of hours a week on it, with the promise of improved code and productivity.

4. Focus

A sustained focus on meaningful work is a great way to prevent burnout. If we could spend all day coding useful pieces of software, perhaps we’d be a lot happier. We’d stay permanently in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” state.

Unfortunately, our jobs are full of other obligations and distractions, some of which have a strong negative impact on our emotions. Distraction alone is enough to make us feel bad. Winifred Gallagher explains:

“When you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right”

Sometimes the exact nature of the distraction makes matters even worse. Consider email, which often pulls at our attention throughout the day.                                                                                                                5. Cultivate Compassion for Others and Yourself

Sometimes you’re going to feel stress or negative emotions at work. What’s important is how you respond to these emotions

If one of your coworkers is being difficult, for example, try to approach the situation with compassion. Recognize the suffering your coworker is going through. Is she tired? Stressed? Could she be suffering from private concerns you have no idea about? Even just imagining the possible suffering your coworker might be experiencing can help you to be more patient and understanding.                                                                                        

Have self-compassion. When you are feeling stressed, recognize that you’re going through a tough time and that it’s a normal part of life. Consider what activities might bring you joy at the moment. Be patient with yourself.

You’re less likely to send yourself to burnout if you take the time to be mindful of your feelings and perform any self-care activities you need to improve them. Do you need a day off for mental health reasons? Do you need to work from home today so you can take a relaxing bath at lunch? Find ways to take care of yourself.

Managers, be flexible to your employee’s self-care requirements. You’re going to get better work from happier people. And you’re not going to get any work from people who are so burnt out they’re forced to leave the industry.