It was Turkey day in the US last week and as I'm in Canada I was the only one that was working. After a long day of work I got lots of hard projects done that had been hanging around for a while and at the end of the day I still felt energized to continue to dig into the work on hand. I only stopped because it was shortly after my regular stopping time, not because I was out of energy.
The Cost of Interruptions
For me this highlighted the cost of interruptions in my day. Usually Slack is around and at least mildly active, we're only 3 people so it can't be crazy ever. I get questions about customer support that may have a technical nature, or may be a bug on our sites. I answer random other questions about technical features for sales...there are about a dozen messages every day that cause me to break my focus so I can address what was asked in Slack.
Often these interruptions start with some variation of asking me to take a quick look at something, but I don't think there is such thing as a quick look. No matter what the question is I need to take the time to understand the question and then overlay it on what our technology stack is and our future plans to be able to give a solid answer. Often my answers have links to referenced tickets, or other online documentation that backs up my position in the answer.
At the end of many days I'm lucky to get through one or two minor issues and I feel absolutely spent. In fact lately I've been feeling so spent that I've been looking at burnout.
The Cause of Burnout
What is the cause of burnout? Some say it's having too many things to do, but this video says that burnout has more to do with the impact you're having with the tasks you're doing. Do you feel that what you're doing is providing value? Is it making an impact at your job, with your customers?
If so, then the suggestion is that even when you're busy, you feel energised and burnout isn't happening.
After coming back this week, I feel that this jives with my experience. Last week, while everyone was off, I focused hard on problems that took deep technical understanding and if I broke anything while doing this, I would take down our entire infrastructure.
This week I tried to update WordPress to 6.4.1 and get an idea of what's up with our PHP 8.2 support. I felt exhausted at the end of every day and didn't get either of those two things done. I did however, diagnose login issues for a customer, write 1000 words of responses about sales questions, give an opinion on a new direction for our platform, and launch a website.
Stuff got done, but I rarely had a few hours to focus on the tasks I wanted to get done in the day.
My best option is likely to turn off Slack for a few hours every day, but I do need to be around to answer questions and sometimes deal with issues that customers are having.
How does your experience with tasks that are meaningful and burnout check out against this idea?