Burnout & Me

Why I've been off my game in 2024 and my writing data since 2021

I realized yesterday, after a stressful few business days at work that put me behind on all the work I’m supposed to be getting done (at work), that I’ve been through a wild few years with highs and lows as numerous as the asteroids between Earth and Jupiter. So, I decided to write about this year’s valley (like a good writer should!)

Then, I went and read my opening article here and this piece stood out to me as something I’ve been aiming in this public space:

“I write because at the end of the day one truth shines bright: Everyone has something of value to bring to this world. I believe sharing what I have written is what I can bring of value. I hope you will join me on this journey of sharing what I write and I am confident that when you do, something I write will stand out and bring value to your life.”

With this in mind, it is time I share something from this past year that’ll make me uncomfortable. The short of it is: I suffered burnout.

Why I Got Burned Out

The burnout didn’t come from writing exactly, but it played a role. I was behind for my writing goals when November 2023 came around. My plan was to push for Novel November to produce 2,000+ words a day to write a sequel draft manuscript for my WIP I’ve been working on in 2024. I had the ideas to put on paper, I had the 2ish hours it’d take, so why not? Come November, things at my day job started going sideways. I’m in the tech sector, and layoffs, stretch goals, unreasonable asks, and working on justifying need for my role going into 2024 were all on my mind whilst writing away.

In the end, I accomplished all that I needed to. But at what cost? I doubled the amount of caffeine I was taking in and sleeping half as much as I ought to. Not the healthiest solution to accomplish goals, but, a solution nonetheless.

December was my recovery month and things were looking better. Then, in January and February I was back. My trial diet was awesome, I learned a lot about the food I ate and how it reacted with my body. I had all the energy I could ever ask for. Life was good…until it happened. I was pulled into an escalation at work that needed to be done for all the stuffy stuffs known to man and it needed done last week (I’m sure you know how those things go goes). The ask would break every process and guideline my team used, developed, and maintained with the operations folks doing the physical day-to-day work.

I cannot go into details, but it was frustrating, stressful, and adding extra work for over a month to get things in a workable state and signed off on. Then the operations folks encountered a plethora of issues that added more stress, frustration, and headaches for us to sort out. When all was said and done there was a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. I have to admit, I took some of my negativity out on our partner teams as well. First time in years I had done anything like that.

It made me think real hard about the work I was doing. It was no longer a fun challenge; it was sucking the happiness and joy out of my day job and all my personal endeavors. To compound this, my team was falling apart. I love my coworkers, but for any number of reasons we just stopped communicating and being a proper team. I won’t go into any reasons since I’m not sure I could name them all with accuracy, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one suffering from the ridiculous asks and overworking without any recognition (it felt like the opposite was our reward in fact). The end result was more soul sucking problems, and a few good people left the company as a result.

By the time March came around I moved off my diet and found the change to be more cumbersome than I expected. Most of which was my fault, but that’s just a symptom of the overall problem. My stress at work resulted in me not eating enough calories to sustain throughout the day and I was attempting to get caught up on my writing after doing short poems for the first two months of 2024.

Sometime in Q2 2024, what was borderline burnout had finally tipped over the edge. It wasn’t because of the work I had to do or the work I desired to do though. The burnout stemmed from everywhere and coalesced in meeting after meeting that added to frustration after frustration for numerous reasons (focus on only the negatives, reporting was never good enough, never got to speak because of more important discussions to name a few). It was here that I made good on my rhetoric and used all my vacation time, taking as much of July off as I could. All I had to do was get from April to July…

While I waited, I brushed up my resume and I started looking and submitting at any and all other options. The job market in my field is tough, and with companies looking for ways to reduce overhead I had my work cut out for me. However, I had to do something, anything, to get through June. Searching for a way to get away from all the negative and stressful things was what I sought.

Escalating burnout over the first half of the year pushed me away from writing fiction this year. I even struggled to get poetry to digital processing paper. Which sucked. A lot. I’m not a fan of short poetry without a larger purpose, but that was all I had to offer.

My Attempt to Recover

My plan to take July off was a good attempt. Do some housekeeping and deep cleaning at home, go for a road trip to get some research done and visit friends along the way, and spend the rest of the time without a schedule or commitments other than the above. It was a good plan, these things energized me and I felt much better by the end of the month… but the time away wasn’t long enough. I needed more time to work through the past and make it history so I could in turn live in the present and look into the future.

My manager changed roles the last day of my vacation and rumors on who would be replacing him were mixed. My hope was that when I came back I’d be able to work on different things for the rest of the year. I made it clear there were a few projects I wished to pursue and certain work I wanted to drop because of little value to the business in June. When I returned, I found none of that made it through the chain and due to keeping the lights on being deemed more important with all the leadership shuffles while we figure out what our team would be moving towards in 2025.

Additionally, I confirmed my desire to move back to Ohio where my family is, specifically the nieces and nephews that barely know me. This move wasn’t possible, which was one of the reasons I started a job search. My June job search ended without any promising leads and I wanted to think about it throughout July before continuing the search. With new leadership on the team, I ended up waiting to see what would happen before submitting more applications.

I Failed to Recover, but Good Things Happened

I knew the leader coming in as he was the one who hired me to the company in 2016, and while I submitted applications for other places to work, I was hoping things would change. There was a short time before my new manager returned and started leading the team where things weren’t looking up.

His work was cut out for him, and he saw all the issues we were dealing with in less than a week. Instead of running, instead of getting rid of us and hiring others who would be easier to work with, he displayed all the best forms of leadership. He confronted the problem and took quick and deliberate action. Some of the things he did that come to mind were:

1. He was open and honest about the situation when confronting it.

2. He called a team summit to get everyone together, ran mini workshops to help us understand where we were (burnout) and find the root causes so we could work to resolve them, together… as a team.

3. He wasn’t shy about saying “if you’re not in on my vision, let’s find you another place to work.” This wasn’t a “you’re fired” but a “I know you’re good at something, let’s find out what that is and get you there”.

4. He rocked the boat, making changes in a few weeks that people fought months to get and were told “no”. Our leadership and our team described his return as “lightning striking”.

5. He coached with purpose towards his agenda and the career goals of individual team members. (This was what I was hoping for the most and I’m glad I waited to see how he handled the situation).

My new leader suffered from many of the same complaints we had, which is why he left the company for a while, and he came to the team with advice we all needed to hear. Some of it I’ve synthesized below:

• Burnout isn’t something you recover from; you find a way to live life differently.

• Burnout isn’t limited to being overworked, but rather anything and everything that sucks the joy out of doing the work.

• You need more than a month (at least 3) to fully decompress from burnout. A month to forget about everything, a month to learn to live happy again, and a month to think about what you want to do with your life going forward.

• Team communication and being open and honest about the work, the challenges, and being able to ask “dumb questions” is critical to building a support network that will defend, aide, and work with you towards positive outcomes in times of need, ensuring burnout can be caught and handled before it drags the whole team down.

Feel free to comment some of the advice and wisdom you’ve learned so everyone reading this can benefit from your experience!

Why I’m Writing This

All that much needed advice and wisdom came in August and September.

My new leader is a polarizing person in a professional setting for a variety of reasons. Some of my team didn’t know what to expect. As far as I can tell, the holdouts have come around to appreciating his polarizing visions and that he might be difficult to work with—especially when he led a different team—but he will stand by his people no matter what, even going out of his way to do so when necessary.

With September, we had the opportunity to rebuild the ship with the new vision and even incorporate our own ideas. This was a lot of extra work for us on top of the normal operations, but with new leadership and new organizational approaches to meetings, this work wasn’t a negative. The extra work was more work which can be stressful, still is in fact, but there is a silver-lining, the light at the end of the tunnel. It was good stress, a challenge to have us involved in the future of the team.

On Friday (Sept. 27^th 2024) I received a request that was essentially the same as the request that sent me down the burnout path earlier in the year. With 12 business hours left before their deadline they wanted a miracle I harkened to Moses (God) parting the Red Sea from the Bible. Monday came and the other team did all the wrong things prompting a meeting with leadership. We told them “no” for a host of reasons. Tuesday came and somehow that “no” became a “it’s possible we just don’t want to do it” in the minds of the other team over night.

Instead of getting the work done I wanted (and needed) to, I was dealing with the escalation instead. As I said, it reminded me of what happened before and they weren’t taking no for an answer. Without going into details, they had 4 years to solve and reported to the business at the start of September they would be done by the end of the month. Somewhere along the lines, they dropped the ball and asked, last minute, for a miracle short-term solution that would take as long as the long-term solution they dropped the ball on to figure out.

My leadership supported me and held the line, while also helping pull information and better explanations for why the ask was not realistic in any sense. I wasn’t sure they would from historical perspective. Part of that was perception that grew over time and part of that was loss of faith in the company/leadership. However, they did what I would expect from good leaders. And they shared their appreciation for getting them involved before things spiraled further.

That, that right there, is a hole that I didn’t even know I had been longing to be filled. It’s one of the reasons I’m writing this article.

To Sum it Up

Burnout sucks. It happens and it sucks. It gets in the way of doing what brings you joy and personal happiness. It can lead to downstream effects that’ll ruin every facet of one’s life if they aren’t careful. Just last night, after wrapping up the escalation at work (and it being unwrapped up and rewrapped up today), I was full of snarky comments that were let loose on my friends at a time of fellowship. They rebuked me, and told me my excuse was not a reason for it. They were right. I despise excuses, and I’m glad they called me out when I was being a hypocrite. It’s how we learn and grow.

I accepted months ago that I wouldn’t make any of my writing goals this year. I lowered them, changed them, and accepted that I’d miss those revised goals too. As annoying as it is and how much I want to work more to make up for it, I need to find a way to live in peace with all the chaos from this year. And yes, it’s okay to take time to focus on that. Even if those misses nag at the corners of my mind, I know it’s better to learn to live in the present so that my creativity will come back in full force. So that’s what I’ve been doing and why I’ve produced less than I hoped this year for Written Works.

As I said to my (now) girlfriend (and she made it into a lovely image):

Oh, I Have Data to Share Too!

I’ve not been shy about telling folks IRL that I have checklists for writing and hobbies. They’re something I’ve been maintaining since the start of 2021 as a way to ensure I keep my promises to myself when it comes to writing. I had several methods before 2021 to track writing, but a word document to track word counts in multiple manuscripts and poetry each day wasn’t the answer. I needed a spreadsheet. So, I spent Q4 of 2020 sorting out what and how I’d track things in my life in a systematic manner.

For writing. The result was an input table and graphs that showed progress. These were crucial to my success in building the habit of writing after my long hiatus. Additionally, I’m able to see when I’m slacking/slipping throughout the year and identify root causes.

Let’s look at the graphs and goals!

Report Cards

In 2021, I averaged 1,150 words per day against a goal of 1,000 words per day and didn’t write for 62 days.

Graphs from 2021:

This was my first year attempting to write every day in a systematic way. It was the best thing I’d ever done. You can see the line go up for the addictive gamification aspect of it, but it also shows where I was consistent and where I wasn’t. Early in the year I was building the habit with steady progress. Writing and reworking Emergence Fall of the West was consistent July-September once the ideas flowed. Novel November was consistent. Those big spikes where I’d go past 2,000 words like the one in May with 7,000+ words ended up hurting more than helping in the next days (off days). I found my limits and worked within the bounds the rest of the year.

In 2022, I averaged 1,161 words per day against a goal of 1,150 words per day and didn’t write for 10 days against a goal of 10 days.

Graphs of 2022:

I added the goal to reduce the amount of missed days because I knew I could write more often after Novel November 2021 and the summer months. Felt it'd be a good challenge to keep the habit strong and healthy.

As we can see, my writing wasn’t as steady as often as 2021, with lots of spikes, but these weren’t as big a detriment. I was finding a balance of extra words on putting ideas down some days and getting less words by editing and reviewing/thinking about what was there. I obviously made my goal of repeating the same word count as 2021 and it was done (dare I say) healthier than 2021.

In 2023, I averaged 1,000 words per day against a goal of 1,250 words per day and didn’t write for 2 days against a goal of 5 days.

Graphs of 2023:

In 2023 I was trying to balance poem drops, podcasts, work, fiction writing, and getting back into poetry. I didn’t make the ambitious goal of 1,250 words per day, but I nailed my write every day goal. While getting back into poetry, I needed to focus on fewer words on those days I wrote poetry. That’s why we see such a variation here until Novel November. You can see the drop off and rebound in December but, as stated in this article, that was indicative of pushing too far in November.

In 2024, I am averaging 413 words per day against a revised goal of 1,000 words per day (originally 1,250) and haven’t written for 47 days against a goal of 5 days.

Graphs of 2024 (so far):

Clearly something happened. In January, I focused on poetry with a few short stories here and there and in February/March things were a whirlwind until April when I finally admitted I couldn’t keep up. I decided to focus on poetry and only writing when I felt up to it. In July I took a break which is why those numbers low too. Obviously after returning to work I’ve not had as much time as I’d have liked to get back into things, but day job (unfortunately) and personal health (always) come before writing. It’s a good day when writing aides personal healthy, but that isn’t always the case.

I am thinking of doing an end of year summary for Written Works to provide visibility and context on what’s going on, what’s working, what’s not working, and what I’m planning to do about it all. It’s also a place for wins, and making a place to celebrate wins as a community (team) is something burnout has taught me. It can’t all be “here’s what I got” and “I didn’t get to do all these things I wanted and promised”.

Lastly, for those that made it all the way through… Thank you! It means a lot and I hope you don’t have to go through what I’ve been struggling with this year. If we work together, we can focus on the good, not the bad as individuals, as a community, and as a world.