Burnout
I was reading Dan Mall’s blog post on Income Transparency a while back and my attention was caught by a particular section on burnout.
In his post, he quotes Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who coined the term “burnout” in 1975 and defined it as:
- Emotional exhaustion: the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long
- Depersonalization: the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion
- Decreased sense of accomplishment: an unconquerable sense of futility or feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.
It reminded me of a period near the end of my time with Shopify in which I experienced burnout. To be fair, that burnout wasn’t entirely Shopify’s fault but rather spread over multiple issues for which I cared about for too much for too long in both my personal and professional life. That fatigue led to a depletion of empathy and fuelled anger that definitely spilled into work. I was and still am embarrassed by my behaviour.
To add onto that was definitely the decreased sense of accomplishment. I felt like I was solving the same problems over and over again. Every app is just feeds, index, and detail views. Title bar at the top. Collapsible navigation on the left. Detail views with main content and sidebar columns. Let’s throw in some modals. And all the buttons. Most front-end work doesn’t feel like it’s pushing any boundaries and probably importantly, that’s a good thing. Does an app need to be conceptual art? Absolutely not. People want predictability.
What could be important for managers (and employees alike) to recognize is that burnout might not come from a single source: work. It can be a culmination of many things and while work might seem like the culprit, it’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back. For me, this became more evident as I went from job to job and still felt myself dealing with the symptoms of burnout. It’s only been through dealing with my personal shit—yay therapy and self reflection—have I been able to spark my creativity and be productive again.