| imo there are often several components to burn out... - going at it too hard, for too long
- letting your health and body deteriorate
- having your goals change without noticing
- bureaucracy taking too much % of your time
- creativity going out of the work
- too much stress for too long My past experience with burn out is that it is a health issue first and foremost. You can't run your brain & energy systems flat out forever. Stuff starts to break down. Effect gets worse when you get older. When you are young, you can probably get away with it for a lot longer. The stress you putting on yourself to "deliver results for others" means you walk around filled with anxiety and tension at all times. In programming roles with regular stand-ups and tickets, the feeling of being monitored constantly for productivity (by management and peers) means you are carrying anxiety 24/7. In my opinion, some of the "well intentioned" group productivity methods such as regular meetings to check on deliverables tend to escalate stress levels. Starts to feel like micro-management. This rapidly can turn into feeling like "weekly / daily public humiliation" exercises if you are not able to maintain the cadence of results. The anxiety you might be feeling is actually a looming sense of dread of being micromanaged to deliverables in a public setting. IF your projects have no program management, rational control of deliverables...pretty soon you just feel bad all the time. More anxiety, less motivation, more burn out. The daily stand-ups devolve into: "Lets see how much you have failed everyone today." That is a punishment, not a reward. Once your work becomes a regular habitual exercise in punishment, then of course you are going to back off and not want to do it anymore. It is one of the same reasons why it is so important to keep a healthy mental frame around exercise and diet (reward, not punishment). Humans are animals. Animals like rewards and hate / avoid punishments. So suspect your job has been turned into ritual humiliation / punishment and that is the root cause. Other factors might be at play, but that is my guess. Need to find a way to restructure work so that it is rewarding and not flagellating. That might mean systematically dropping some deliverables, pushing things out and renegotiating deliverables. Having been a developer who also got stuck with project management - nothing is more stressful than having to both do the work and do the "client facing / management facing" negotiation. You may find you don't want to be management and would prefer to be a pure specialist. Smartest guy I ever met once told me: "The first thing I do when taking a new job is tell them I never want to be promoted. If you want to be promoted, they can make you do things." :) |