Image credit goes to Tengyart.
One of the things that most if we don’t say all the developers have experienced is burnout. In this short post, we will see what is it, reasons behind and the solution.
Burnout happens when the programmer feels exhausted continuously, this feeling takes away the desire for working or learning new things and the person experiencing this will not even be able to look at his own computer. Burnout could be happen to freelancers, workers at companies or even beginners when they just started learning.
We have understood what is burnout, lets explore the reasons behind it:
1- You don’t organize your time: not organizing time produces randomness, you work 1 hour today and 8 hours tomorrow, this will affect you badly in the short and long term, especially when you have a lot of things to do, you will be confused about what to start with and what to delay.
2- Bad habits: some programmers focus only on working or learning and neglect the other life sides like praying, sport, eating and some times sleeping also, this last one is very dangerous as much as the others, the body must get his needed sleeping hours to recover his energy after long hours of working. Taking care of our mental and physical health is an obligation, after all, we live only once.
3- High hopes: one of the reasons that lead to the burnout is high hopes, especially the illogical ones, for example you think that you are invincible and you have an imaginary powers that give you the ability to do any project under any circumstances, this is totally wrong. In the end we are just humans and we should not force ourselves more than their limits.
4- Not making goals: this is a very important one, when we fall down and become depressed, one of the few things that give us hope is our goals that we have defined and the place that we dream to reach. Goals should be considered for short and long term, short goals are our days todo lists, a todo list is just a set of tasks that we want to do in the short term for example tomorrow’s tasks. Todo list seems skippable but actually it is not, it has a lot of benefits that you will discover when you start making it. Long term goals are what we wish to be in the future, for example you may want to be a machine learning engineer or a mobile developer or anything you have passion for and you want to be.
5- Following people/trends: most of the beginners now try to compare between programming languages or between CS fields, that is totally wrong and you should not listen to them, every field is demanded and complete another filed, also, every programming language has its uses. I will give you a golden advice here, try to remember it very well: frameworks and programming languages are just tools you use not something to get attached to, you should always focus on concepts not tools because concepts remain and tools will not.
6- Deadline: it can be harmful if you always think about it, in the beginning, you should extend the deadline according to your conditions if you have the chance to decide, make a space for you, but it is okay if the word is not yours, you should just focus on working and you will be able to deliver before the deadline.
7- Comparing yourself to others: read this one carefully, you should not compare yourself to others, I repeat, you should not compare yourself to others, everyone has its own conditions and circumstances. There is always a better developer, the only thing you should do is discovering your weaknesses and try fix them and compare yourself only with your previous year version.
8- Not taking breaks: breaks are important, they are the only way to recover energy and mind refreshing. To avoid feeling overwhelmed, you should take small breaks when you are working, there is a technique you can use, it is called the Pomodoro technique, search for it.
Now you know the reasons behind the burnout, if you have focused on reading those points, I think you don’t need to read this part, because I provided the solution in every point, but, at least let me conclude my post by some advice. I would say that you should take care of every side of your life, don’t get deep into work and forget to spend some time with friends and family, take care of your body, do sports, eat well and sleep good. Take a break from time to time and reward yourself after finishing something, it will make the difference believe me. If you got to this point then you have completed reading this short post, I hope you have enjoyed. Thank you.
By Younes Belouche on August 16, 2021.