Dealing with burnout

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I occasionally deal with burnout, since I work too much, so I could relate to this comment:

The first thing I’ve learned is that I can’t accurately judge my limits. Even if I feel okay and on top of the world… things start to slide. Suddenly I’m writing code so bad, I’m committing code that doesn’t even work, but thinking it does, because my brain is in outright rebellion.

Both times, I couldn’t code for six months. The first time, I just tried to hide it. I quit my job, and took another. I wrote almost no code in those six months and was paranoid I’d be found out and fired. I wasn’t, thankfully.

The second time, I took a few months off work, and requested a change of job for a period of time, so that I didn’t have to do any coding. The second time was really bad, I started having panic attacks just looking at code on a screen. I’d start sweating, heart racing. It was horrible.
What I ended up doing for most of those six months at home, was building little plastic robot models. No computer use. Just quiet, methodical, brainless work.

Recently I’ve been working a long contract that is very boring. The effect of boring work is very similar to real burnout — it becomes very hard to concentrate. The contract ends soon and I can hardly express how excited I will be to work on my own projects again.