How to avoid burnout?

How to avoid burnout?

I find this particularly important nowadays when a lot of us work from home.

#1 Keep the work-life balance

My personal number one on the list. I think it's much more important than anything. While we work from home then our satisfaction is higher and we do more of the work. It also makes it harder to disconnect from the work.. It puts additional stress on us. I don't have a separate room to work from, but I don't sit at the same desk I sit on working. On top of that, I always hide my company's notebook, so I prevent my unconscious from thinking about tasks. Instead of the notebook, I place there everything that has nothing in common with programming.

#2 Find a hobby which won't you remind of the job

I was making a side project before Covid-2019. It lasted for about 3 months and was really exhausting on days when I had tons of work. I won't say to don't make side projects, because it's a great way to learn new things. But I would pay more caution to don't become overworked. For me, it's the Japanese language. The best part of the language learning is the moment when you can just watch movies or read books as doing language acquisition - even though Japanese sentences may look something like fluent api (f.e like in c# linq)

#3 Get enough sleep and do exercises

I'm sure you heard of that, but sleep may improve everything. It's a time when your brain reinforces what you did for the whole day and regenerates energy for the upcoming day. The same goes with exercises - it's also a great opportunity to train discipline and train your brain to be able to push ahead. I have started calisthenic (bodyweight training) as a replacement for walking to the office. Before that, I was thinking that exercises (especially weight training) are easy. That, I just can spend a few minutes moving my body while thinking about anything else. It quickly comes to me that, like in meditation, I have to put a lot of attention to my mind-to-body connection and to resit to thinking "Ok. I'm tired. Let's end" after 10 minutes from the start.

#4 Go slowly and have fun

Don't forget that we don't have to achieve our goals in one year. Sometimes it's better to go slowly and with less amount of stress, most goals can be reached by consistency. We work to live, not the opposite.

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