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First, be very careful about burning out. It can happen faster than you think if you have to force yourself to do the work every day. Second, maybe you should find a different job - or at least change something about your current job. Remote work is not the best option for everyone - and it can be even worse if you work from home. Or maybe there's something wrong with your project, the technologies you use or the people you work with. Changing any of these might improve your situation. Start experimenting - you don't necessarily have to quit your job right now. Try working from different places (coworking space, university library, coffee shop, your friend's couch, ...). Speak with your manager about other projects, learning and growth opportunities and other things you might do that you would enjoy. And if this is something you can't bring up with your current manager, start looking for a new manager. I was in a similar situation several years ago. I worked remotely (from home) for a small startup-like* company and in the end, I had to use the pomodoro technique and similar tricks every day just to make myself spend time really working. Even though I liked my team as people and we had a great CTO, it wasn't that great on the engineering side. Using ASP.net WebForms and Visual Studio 2008 (no management support for an upgrade) didn't help either. Neither did the fact that there was no product or customers to care about and relate with. In the end, I felt really burned out and kept trying things just to keep working - working from the company office helped a bit, but it was really noisy there. Similar for my university lab (I was a student at that time), but it wasn't a long term solution. In the end, I got an internship at a research team at Google and started enjoying work again almost immediately. I even stayed there as a full-timer and I've never looked back. Even after four years I still look forward to going to work every single day because of the awesome people I work with and all the exciting projects we work on. There are annoying things like open-space offices, but the people and the projects more than compensate for it. I've changed a lot of things at once to be 100% sure what made the biggest difference for me, but my bet is still on the people on the team and projects (no more asp.net and business plans changing every week). But I believe that even the change of work environment played its role. * When I joined, the company existed for at least five years. But otherwise, it was very much like a startup - we had a product in development, but there were almost no customers and even the vision changed a lot - during one fruitful week, we went from an app generator to a social network for some demographic group, a government information system and back to apps. I guess it changed with the article the CEO read during lunch on a particular day. Interestingly, the management always convinced our investor to give us more money - maybe they held a child of the investor hostage or something like that. |