Avoiding (Or Recovering From) Burnout

A lot of software developers that are passionate about their craft spend a lot of time on it. They spend a lot of time reading interesting blogs, reading books about development, coding on some hobby projects, or maybe even contributing to open source projects or writing interesting blog posts of their own. Hell, just trying to stay up to date with all the new stuff that continually comes out can be one hell of a challenge in its own right. And a lot of this effort is typically spent outside of our normal working hours.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it is extremely important to remember to take some time off, not just occasionally, but frequently. Software development can be very interesting and a lot of fun, but you really need to make sure that you find some kind of a healthy balance in your life. If you spend too much time on this, odds are pretty high that eventually you'll start to lose your passion for it, and even worse, that you really don't feel like spending any time on it at all anymore.

I reached that point somewhere at the end of May this year. I completely lost my motivation for both my job as well as the whole blogging thing. I didn't really care about writing code anymore, i couldn't be bothered to catch up with the RSS feeds that i subscribe too, and i could hardly fake interest whenever technical discussions came up. The fact that i was going through some personal stuff certainly didn't help either. But the biggest reason was probably the fact that i was just trying to do too much in the months before that.

And then i simply stopped caring about it. I still tried to do my job to somewhat satisfactory levels but my heart certainly wasn't in it anymore. After work, i didn't write any code, nor did i read about it anymore. I just started doing other things. Whatever i felt like doing basically, as long as it wasn't related to software development. I did write a couple of posts during this period, but none of them were actually any good.

Somewhere in the middle of July, my interest in software development was slowly coming back, but it was still more of a sporadic thing instead of the passion that it used to be. The most important thing that i learned at that time was that i simply shouldn't force myself to spend time on something if i don't feel like spending time on it at that time. I occasionally spent some time writing code or doing a bit of reading, but i was alternating between the geek stuff and the normal stuff more than i used to.

That turned out to be the key to my 'recovery'. And for the past couple of weeks, i've felt kinda reinvigorated. I care about software development again. I love spending time on it again and my motivation is as high as it used to be.

So now you're probably wondering why on earth i'm posting this? For one, it feels good to get this off of my chest. And secondly, because i'm willing to bet that there are a ton of developers who feel the same way. Take it from someone who's been through it: as much as you love software development, make sure that you don't spend too much time on it. When you feel like spending time on it, then by all means, do so. But never, ever spend time on it outside of your working hours if you're not really in the mood for it, or when you feel like you have to, or when you'd rather be doing something else. You're already spending 8 hours a day on this stuff, so you should only spend extra time on it when you really want to. If you ignore this advice, you might end up not wanting to spend any more time on it at all, and that is a situation you really want to avoid.