Weeknotes #21
The warning signs one
Weeknotes 📝
Longform
These past few weeks i’ve been mostly aware of my early indicators of burnout. We all have them, but many of us don’t always pay enough attention until it’s too late.
My benchmark for burnout is an office move project back in 2013/14. The company informed my team of their intent to move sites. We, the Systems/Network admin team, asked for 6 months headway, but we actually got 3 weeks.
Cue 14+ hour days, multiple days in a row, commuting every day, all of us ill by the end of it and not a whisper of acknowledgement from anyone. The office network hacked together routed through a raspberry pi, we delivered the impossible. My whole career has been spent on the side of thankless enablement work, but that particular period really was a piss take. Only after me kicking up a considerable stink did we each receive a token gesture of a bottle of Prosecco and it was back to business as usual.
Burnout began before the project that was simply the cherry on the icing on the cake.
Jump to the present day when I can't seem to compartmentalise my day, I’ve abandoned established routines and rituals that I know are beneficial to me, I read but don't always respond to messages from friends, I can't find the energy to do the things I would usually enjoy, and I'm irritable and emotional about things and taking them personally rather than rationally?
It's a good time to be taking a break, so I'm off to eat my body weight in souvlaki.
Pretzels 🥨
Sometimes things invisible to the human eye can still cause a shadow
Observing how people's love languages can show up in their work environments too
Listening to 🎧
Reading 📚
Eating 🍕
