I have an issue

Staying focused on my job became so hard that I started exploring what is happening with me. What are the signs of my strange condition? Every few minutes I feel an inresistible urge to get up my chair ang go somewhere. Unfortunately, since I’m working from home, the “somewhere” means “to the fridge” so I’m constantly eating. Not good.

It looks like my level of stress or boredom is so high that all my mental systems nead a break and have to engage in something different. So I get up. Eat or drink. Clean the toilet. Set up the washing machine. And finally, chased by my conscience (whispering: “what the hell are you doing?”) I come back and sit at my desk, defeated, unmotivated, guilty. Not good.

Should I just go for a walk?

A colleague of mine said yesterday “I have a headache and need to go for a 30 min walk”. It was both shocking to me and enlightening at the same time. Is it allowed…? The same day he also said an obvious truth that you are not productive when you have a headache. But going for a walk? I just could not undertand that people can go for a walk in the middle of the working day. I remember that even going out for a lunch (long time ago, when I was working in the office) was always accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling that I somehow “cheat” my employer by not doing the work. I became obsessed with tracking time and verifying how much I spend on non-work related activities, so that I can stay longer if spent too much time on the lunch break.

…I don’t think I should…

Today I still hold this belief that I’m not allowed to do anything what is not work-related in my working hours. Even if I have a headache. Even if I cannot stand the stress. To be honest - I do not follow the strictness of my own belief and do other things anyway just to releave the stress. But there are better ways than eating and doing chores. I know that. I’ve read so many articles about stress management and focus. It is time to put it to action.

The problem

Evidently I cannot properly focus on my job. So there are two issues:

• the job is not very interesting, I cannot jump into the “flow” state (no interesting problems to solve?)
• I’m unwell, sick, in pain, with brainfog, umotivated (infection? hormones? what is causing that?)
• I have some trouble with falling asleep when I wake up in the middle of the night (too much coffee? premenopause? stress?)
• nothing seem to be cool and interesting (this is very strange because I usually had a very long list of stuff I wanted to learn about or try out) Are those connected? Is there a cause-effect relationship? I’m not sure…

What can I do

Let’s think what can I do about it.

• In a short term I will do a 5 min meditation session or mindfulness exercise
• In a long term, I should take care of my own health and prevent… well, burnout (is this burnout?)

Short term action I can take are:

• a glass of water every hour to stay hydrated
• stacked with a habit of conscious breathing
• write work journal as a means to clean up thoughts
• go for a walk even in the middle of the working day

Long term actions:

• check what you need to do/know to became ready for a new job opportunity (gcp? k8s? docker? contenerization?) - just in case
• algorithms
• training on leetcode
• Rust / golang
• work on portfolio projects (check)
• identify what area(s) could be interesting to me? - focus on that (alerting, monitoring, logging? jvm performance? build systems?)
• note to self: remember, nobody pays for drawing flowers and patterns using yet another go/rust/js library…

What if nothing helps

• read about burnout
• slow down
• consider therapy

Put yourself together

Well, I need to put myself together. I have 20 more years to go (until I get retired)! So, I’d better start fixing myself.

Ebook - Stop The Burnout

Update A few days passed. I have studied, read and came up with AI-generated book about burnout. Let AI give me some advice :) Do you want to read it as well? Here it is:

StopTheBurnout

Wish me good luck.