Using the word “symptoms” is quicker to grasp, but these three things are better termed responses. This is what your body and mind start doing as you begin suffering burnout. I can tell you from personal experience there’s truth to all three, but this information also comes to us via Christina Maslach, leading researcher in a space with 30 years of history.
Keep in mind these responses are three distinct axes, meaning any one of them may be more or less prevalent for any given individual. The absence of one response does not mean the absence of burnout.
Overwhelming exhaustion
Yep, I felt this. When I was in a period of burnout as a videogame developer I recall never feeling rested. Not after the rare full night of sleep. Not on a weekday. Not on a weekend. It took months of recovery in a non stressful environment for me to remember what truly being rested felt like, and it was an incredible difference. Waking up with energy was like an absolute super power.
Cynicism and detachment from the job
It went on for months and months of work on a quarter-of-a-billion dollar project. I was unable to generate a sincere feeling of optimism. Every day, if someone said hi in the hallway or asked me how I was doing, I’d reply with a smile that only involved moving my mouth. Never my eyes. They’d get a “I’m here” response, if I said anything at all. I’d go through the motions of asking my direct reports the same thing. Got the same tiredness.
It was awful.
Sense of ineffectiveness
When you’re working on a project as large as Call of Duty, and you’re crawling toward being able to launch the game, the bug reports never end. There’s so much tech debt on something that big. You’ve been pushed for so many months to just make it work. Bandaid every injury, never set the bone. And that has a very predictable outcome once the QA folks start really testing the game.
For the final months you come in every day to another bunch of several hundred bug reports generated since yesterday. You know your team will only be able to tackle a few dozen before the next several hundred show up tomorrow. It’s like trying to sweep all the water back into the ocean. “Sense of ineffectiveness” just barely describes it.
That About Sums It Up
Those three responses were all present to some degree in my own experience. Your body isn’t doing what it should. Your mind certainly isn’t. It’s like trying to see through fog. Like trying to walk through syrup. And possibly the worst part is that you don’t recognize it’s happening because you gradually got there over such a long period of time. At least, I didn’t recognize it. I was always irritable, always tired, and didn’t realize that’s what my life had become. How do you fix it if you don’t know it’s happened?
I can’t say there’s a silver bullet, but I’ll share my thoughts on “OK, Keith, now what do we do about it” soon.
image courtesy of Stefano Pollio and Unsplash