Ask HN: I burned out but I don't want to let my team down
I generally will hit burnout about twice a year. I guess most folks in these comments don&#x27;t struggle with it all that often, which I&#x27;m happy to see. When I hit burnout here&#x27;s some things I do (and some things to keep in mind to avoid burnout):<p>- I train other engineers. It takes up a lot of time, it&#x27;s fairly monotonous, and low risk. It has the added benefit of opening up the opportunity to spread load some of your work, which could be adding to your burnout.<p>- I take time off. I do this twice a year in two week blocks, generally in spring and fall. Those times are perfect because there&#x27;s already a lot of people out in December and January, so I have one red-hot period in the middle of the year where the bulk of my work is done.<p>- Stop coding. This may be personal to me; enterprise software has really ruined the passion I have for software. When I&#x27;m off, I don&#x27;t code. I go hangout with my girlfriend and play video games.<p>- Limit time spent doing work things. In software, we let companies leak into our lives in many ways. Shut these signals down completely with good boundaries: don&#x27;t let your phone ring at night unless you&#x27;re being paid to answer it, don&#x27;t buy into company &quot;hackathon&quot; events whereby a company gets free IP by removing the constraints of the backlog, etc...<p>- Don&#x27;t intermingle &quot;work friends&quot; and real friends. Work friends like to talk shop, that&#x27;s great over a beer after a stressful day, but if I&#x27;m trying to relax on the regular I limit my time spent with work friends. By virtue of our shared employment they will likely never know me beyond git clone --depth 1 until they leave the company or I do.<p>Hope this helps.