Thanks for this post, Luise! I’ve been meaning to write up some of my own burnout-type experiences but probably don’t want to make a full post about it, so instead I’ll just comment the most important thing from it here, which is:
Burnout does not always take the form of reluctance to work or lacking energy. In my case, it was a much more active resentment of my work — work that I had deeply enjoyed even a month or two earlier — and a general souring of my attitude towards basically all projects I was working on or considering. While I was sometimes still, like, medium-productive, it was very bad for several additional reasons:
Having this kind of emotional relationship to work made it very hard to get excited about any future project, which massively reduced my ambitiousness. Concretely, this meant:
I wasn’t investigating new projects.
I wasn’t talking to people doing the kind of work I wanted to do (despite, in one case, being in Berkeley at the time, which was a unique opportunity to do so).
I wasn’t able to think clearly about the impact stories for the projects I was working on. Instead, I was broadly pessimistic about everything, which meant that I was probably missing important ways of making my projects a lot more impactful.
I was harder to work with and to be around, making those around me less productive and increasing the chances that they burned out and had similar effects to the rest of this list or to your post (or other bad things). I think for community-building work where you’re more directly interacting with people outside your team this would be an even bigger deal.
I did delay a lot of my most aversive tasks quite a bit, and some of these were pretty costly delays.
Especially the first time, when I wasn’t in Berkeley and had less of an EA support network, I was really miserable. I felt like I wanted to stop doing anything like the work I was doing, and I felt misanthropic and bitter in a way that undermined my motivation to do good in the first place. Luckily, I was able to — as your post recommends — do a vacation-ish thing at just the right time, so I didn’t come too close to dropping everything, but there was a non-trivial risk of doing so, and I want to make sure that never happens again.
I endorse the recommendation to take time off when you’re feeling burnout-type feelings, but at least in my experience, time off has diminishing returns and a high decay rate. In other words, instead of taking a week off every 3 months, I’m hoping to just build in more time off in my typical week (i.e., making social plans on at least one weekend afternoon, noticing when I’m getting tired at night and stopping work then). If anything, I’ve found that it’s hard to get back into the swing of things after long vacations. But YMMV.
Other things that seem important, for me going forward, include:
Being deliberate about what periods will be high-intensity and low-intensity. After the fall 2022 semester, I had been working the hardest I’d ever worked (maybe except junior year of high school?) from January to early December; I was very proud that Thanksgiving (24th November) was my first full day off, i.e. less than an hour of work, since July 10. I arrived in Berkeley for EAGx + winter break, and I think I was subconsciously expecting that it would be a pretty chill few weeks. It was not. We as a team, and I individually, bit off way more than we could chew. I think if I had been more emotionally prepared for it to be a really intense few weeks, I would’ve had a lot less of a burnout issue. Conversely, I had about 6 weeks from March to April that were pretty low-key. I think this wound up being good for me, but I was expecting to get a ton of stuff done during them, so I felt guilty and anxious that I wasn’t achieving these goals, and this somewhat worsened the restorative effects of the less-intense period.
Relatedly, I think the concept of OODA loops can be very valuable here. Consciously designating the coming weeks or months as “observe,” “orient,” “decide,” and “act” periods is good practice for many reasons, but one is that these different stages are differently affected by workload. Namely, I think observation and action periods can absorb lots of hours, but orientation and decision periods are more dependent on key insights and clear-headed, high-morale thinking.
Being honest with yourself about whether a project is likely to make you miserable and what features of projects/teams will make you more and less excited.
Possibly trying therapy and medication if the above strategies don’t work very well.
Having non-work things going on that I’m excited about. For me, this is likely to include playing music in a group.
Actually doing the CFAR stuff (lots of which is, and I say this non-derogatorily, repackaged cognitive behavioral therapy) instead of abstractly recognizing that it sounds like a good idea.
Thanks for this post, Luise! I’ve been meaning to write up some of my own burnout-type experiences but probably don’t want to make a full post about it, so instead I’ll just comment the most important thing from it here, which is:
Burnout does not always take the form of reluctance to work or lacking energy. In my case, it was a much more active resentment of my work — work that I had deeply enjoyed even a month or two earlier — and a general souring of my attitude towards basically all projects I was working on or considering. While I was sometimes still, like, medium-productive, it was very bad for several additional reasons:
Having this kind of emotional relationship to work made it very hard to get excited about any future project, which massively reduced my ambitiousness. Concretely, this meant:
I wasn’t investigating new projects.
I wasn’t talking to people doing the kind of work I wanted to do (despite, in one case, being in Berkeley at the time, which was a unique opportunity to do so).
I wasn’t able to think clearly about the impact stories for the projects I was working on. Instead, I was broadly pessimistic about everything, which meant that I was probably missing important ways of making my projects a lot more impactful.
I was harder to work with and to be around, making those around me less productive and increasing the chances that they burned out and had similar effects to the rest of this list or to your post (or other bad things). I think for community-building work where you’re more directly interacting with people outside your team this would be an even bigger deal.
I did delay a lot of my most aversive tasks quite a bit, and some of these were pretty costly delays.
Especially the first time, when I wasn’t in Berkeley and had less of an EA support network, I was really miserable. I felt like I wanted to stop doing anything like the work I was doing, and I felt misanthropic and bitter in a way that undermined my motivation to do good in the first place. Luckily, I was able to — as your post recommends — do a vacation-ish thing at just the right time, so I didn’t come too close to dropping everything, but there was a non-trivial risk of doing so, and I want to make sure that never happens again.
I endorse the recommendation to take time off when you’re feeling burnout-type feelings, but at least in my experience, time off has diminishing returns and a high decay rate. In other words, instead of taking a week off every 3 months, I’m hoping to just build in more time off in my typical week (i.e., making social plans on at least one weekend afternoon, noticing when I’m getting tired at night and stopping work then). If anything, I’ve found that it’s hard to get back into the swing of things after long vacations. But YMMV.
Other things that seem important, for me going forward, include:
Being deliberate about what periods will be high-intensity and low-intensity. After the fall 2022 semester, I had been working the hardest I’d ever worked (maybe except junior year of high school?) from January to early December; I was very proud that Thanksgiving (24th November) was my first full day off, i.e. less than an hour of work, since July 10. I arrived in Berkeley for EAGx + winter break, and I think I was subconsciously expecting that it would be a pretty chill few weeks. It was not. We as a team, and I individually, bit off way more than we could chew. I think if I had been more emotionally prepared for it to be a really intense few weeks, I would’ve had a lot less of a burnout issue. Conversely, I had about 6 weeks from March to April that were pretty low-key. I think this wound up being good for me, but I was expecting to get a ton of stuff done during them, so I felt guilty and anxious that I wasn’t achieving these goals, and this somewhat worsened the restorative effects of the less-intense period.
Relatedly, I think the concept of OODA loops can be very valuable here. Consciously designating the coming weeks or months as “observe,” “orient,” “decide,” and “act” periods is good practice for many reasons, but one is that these different stages are differently affected by workload. Namely, I think observation and action periods can absorb lots of hours, but orientation and decision periods are more dependent on key insights and clear-headed, high-morale thinking.
Being honest with yourself about whether a project is likely to make you miserable and what features of projects/teams will make you more and less excited.
Possibly trying therapy and medication if the above strategies don’t work very well.
Having non-work things going on that I’m excited about. For me, this is likely to include playing music in a group.
Actually doing the CFAR stuff (lots of which is, and I say this non-derogatorily, repackaged cognitive behavioral therapy) instead of abstractly recognizing that it sounds like a good idea.
Thanks a lot, I think it’s really valuable to have your experience written up!