[Terr_]

From my own experience, burnout is primarily emotional. Time spent is a side-effect.

It's not how many hours you work, it's how much of your experience involves despair, frustration, and resentment. That might either be towards your employer ("stupid schedules, I'm not valued"), towards yourself ("this should be easy but I'm failing"), or towards the universe for simply not being the way it "should" be.

[dstick]

Amen. Working on my own products has never caused any kind of fatigue. It’s energizing :)

[codewithcheese]

I find there is inevitably still tough days working for yourself on a project that takes more than a month. Overworking can lead to losing sight of your goals which can lead to burn out.

[dstick]

Fair enough! Breaks and structure remain important.

I wake up every morning at 5:00, do some excersises, write down my goals, do pushups until I can’t any more and then process all emails from the past 24 hours. Once that’s done I set a todo list for that day and push things forward that aren’t a priority.

So far, this ensures I’m able to stay on top, don’t lose track, can work 10 to 12 hours a day easily and not feel tired or unproductive.

There’s still plenty of time left for “life” as well. Just have to be in bed at 22:30 at the very latest.

Setting goals, cooking every day and adhering to that routine works wonders to be honest, I highly recommend it :)

[codewithcheese]

Ok I can see why you don't get burnt out much. I don't exercise and go to sleep at 4am lol

[mpolsz]

I feel the same. From my own experience, I've done both 9h-10h of productive work for few weeks in challenging projects and 8h ass-in-seat in crappy and bad managed ones.

[hartator]

It’s both. You can be fine doing somehing you hate for a couple of hours. But 12h and more.

[evansj]

Beautifully put.