How To Avoid Tech/Coding Burnout

Key Takeaways

[Music] so as we all know the tech industry is extremely competitive and it's moving very quickly it feels like every day there's a new language framework or technology that you're expected to know and of course this can lead you to feeling burned out in fact it's a pretty common theme that people work really hard land a job at something like google or tesla or facebook or whatever it may be and then a few months later collapse because of the work the pressure and the stress that they're putting on themselves so in this video i want to share with you some things that work for me to avoid burnout and some things that you may want to consider if you're starting to feel a little bit depressed starting to feel down and you're losing some of that productivity and motivation that you once had when you were learning tech now this is not gonna work for everybody these are just things that i know work for me and when i'm starting to feel burned out i'm starting to get tired i like to remind myself of these list of points and usually this helps me get back on track and actually you know avoid the burnout that's kind of inevitable and coming if i continue down the same path that i'm on so hopefully these five tips help you avoid burning out but one thing you definitely should not avoid is the sponsor of this video before we get started i need to thank api layer for sponsoring this video api layer is a hassle-free api marketplace that lets you boost your app's capabilities without worrying about scalability and stability the api layer api marketplace aims to make data and service apis easy to implement and accessible to everyone access to data and service apis enables developers like yourself to build scalable applications and implement api functionality in as little as 10 minutes the api layer marketplace offers both free and paid solutions and categories such as natural language processing machine learning security geolocation text processing finance and more the best part is all of api layers apis have a free plan and don't require a credit card to use meaning you can get started today for free by clicking the link in the description now in addition you can get 25 off any plan for three consecutive months by using the code techwithtim25 thanks again to api layer for sponsoring this video so let's move on here to tip number one which is to not compare yourself to other people now this is a recurring theme this is something i see all of the time when i'm talking to people about burnout and that's that they're feeling depressed or demotivated because someone that they know or someone that they watch or look up to is better than they are or they feel like they're not at the same level or moving as quickly as someone that they may be idolized they look to as a role model or something along those lines now this always is just a negative thing to do to look at someone else that you really don't know very much about especially if they're an internet personality like me there's like so much stuff you guys wouldn't know about me uh just by watching my youtube videos right and to make a direct comparison and say you know me at 16 years old i'm not as good as this guy who's almost 22 has been programming for 10 11 12 years it's just not a fair comparison it's always going to have a negative effect on you and you really have to avoid doing that because the only real fair comparison is yourself right you can compare yourself to how good you were yesterday or six months ago or a year ago that's a fair comparison but to a complete stranger or someone else that you look up to especially if they're in kind of the top of a field uh it's just really not fair and it's not going to be doing you any benefit now another comparison a lot of people like to make is kind of the amount of work that other other people do versus the amount of work that they do right you may have someone look at me for example obviously i pride myself in working hard and posting a ton of videos you know putting in a lot of hours per day but that's not for everybody not everybody can do that and if you look at me and say oh you know tim works eight hours a day or ten hours a day and i only work six i feel bad about myself again that's not doing you any benefit and you don't know the side effects that may have on me you don't know why i'm able to do that maybe your lifestyle doesn't work for that it's just not a fair comparison and you really should not do that so i won't keep going on and on about this point i think you guys get the general idea here usually comparing yourself to other people especially again when they're kind of the top of the field or internet personalities or something like that is not going to be doing you any benefits the only person you should be comparing yourself to is yourself either last week or the day before or a month before etc and that's how you should be tracking your progress not based on how other people are learning stuff how quickly they're moving everybody's different everybody learns at a different pace the only fair comparison is with yourself alright so now we'll move on to tip number two which i'm going to summarize by saying taking a break can be productive now i know this seems obvious this is kind of a cliche thing that everyone says you know take breaks take breaks take breaks but what i want to emphasize here is that if you're someone who's hard on yourself constantly pushing yourself to do more work to kind of move forward and progress sometimes you forget about this point right that really the best thing you may be doing in a day or two days is just taking a break oftentimes i'm tired i don't want to work but my mind is kind of pushing me to do more and oftentimes when that happens i'm getting poor quality of work done i'm not being as productive or efficient as i can and i'm really just sitting at the computer kind of miserable wishing that i wasn't here but doing it because i feel like i have to in those scenarios i have to remind myself that sometimes it's really legitimate to take a break to lie in bed all day to go watch tv for a few hours to go hang out with friends to go outside whatever it is that you want to do sometimes that is legitimate and it can actually be very productive especially if you take that day break regenerate and then be ready the next day to work you know as hard as you want to to be as productive as you want to etc so that's really what i mean by this point is that you have to give yourself some leeway you have to give yourself a bit of forgiveness and realize that you know what it might be the best thing you can do today to just lay in bed to just relax to just take a break and then tomorrow get up and do all of the tasks that you wanted to complete i know for me that works really well when i'm feeling burned out i remind myself of this point i usually take a day or two off or i take at least an afternoon or something like that to do something fun and then i wake up the next day feeling much better i'm ready to work i'm no longer demotivated or depressed or whatever it may be and i'm happy that i took that day off and you know i don't really blame myself for not getting any work done in that day now the last thing i will say here is that you do have to be a little bit careful with this because you don't want to make this an excuse for not getting work done that you have to do right it can be really easy to take this to the extreme where every other day you're saying oh i need a break or every day you're saying i need to sleep in of course that's not what i'm talking about here it's really more of allowing yourself some forgiveness giving yourself some leeway and remembering at the end of the day that you are human and you're not able to work 24 7 sometimes you just need a break alright so moving on here to tip number three i have setting manageable goals now again i know a lot of this stuff seems obvious but i think sometimes you need to remind yourself of it and hear kind of in an articulated way why this is actually important to do so setting manageable goals one of the biggest issues i have with myself and that i see with other people is that when they get into programming or they want to learn something or finish something they kind of have this all or nothing approach where it's i'm going to program every day for eight hours or i'm not gonna program at all or in a different field i'm gonna get up every morning at seven a.m and work out or i'm not going to do any workout at all this is really bad really negative and pretty well impossible to maintain right even if you're really good and really dedicated it's very very difficult to do this all or nothing approach and oftentimes it just leads to a lot more negatives than if you were to have a manageable goal something that is a lot easier to obtain and that you can kind of build on once you hit these smaller goals that you're setting for yourself so to put this in the context of programming and give you some examples here i often times work on like large programming projects and i set the goal to finish it tonight or to finish it tomorrow or to do an entire feature or kind of sub system of the project very very quickly now usually i am capable of completing that but it gets to the point where i'm rushing i'm pushing myself i'm really exhausted and i'm grinding through and i'm getting kind of into this burnout state because i'm setting just ridiculous goals for myself that don't really need to be set and that could be a lot more manageable so often times i do this for a few days i have this all or nothing approach and then i need to take an entire day off i need to take two days off or i'm just really demotivated i'm exhausted i don't want to work as opposed to when i give myself a goal of okay i'm gonna code for three hours each day or i'm gonna finish kind of a smaller feature each day and then i'm gonna build upon these goals as i go through usually by setting these smaller more manageable goals i'm able to work for a longer period of time in terms of multiple days in a row i'm actually able to get more done and the quality of my work is usually better than when i tell myself i need to finish the entire thing tonight really if i'm going to summarize here i think the art of goal setting is setting manageable goals that let you get some momentum let you build up and kind of achieve all of these things and then once you have that momentum once you're already achieving what it is that you want to do you can slowly move those goals further and further and further and continue to build that momentum until eventually you get to a point where you're being extremely productive you're getting a ton of stuff done and you're not suffering from you know kind of the symptoms of burnout so that's what i recommend set small goals slowly move them forward as you start achieving them and then you're gonna figure out really quickly kind of what the sweet spot is for you what you can actually accomplish and when you're pushing it too far and you need to kind of dial it back a bit so moving on here to tip number four i have to work on fun projects now this is something that i think is completely underrated i don't actually hear a lot of people talk about this or mention it online and oftentimes i see especially younger programmers maybe guys coming out of university or coming out of high school going into first or second year are just constantly grinding the most brutal boring and difficult computer science topics people just do you know 10 000 leak code questions or they're mastering data structures and algorithms or they're just going through these quite frankly pretty brutal topics without ever working on something fun without ever doing something that they actually enjoy and really by the time they get through all of this content and they've landed a job at facebook or google or whatever they're now burned out they're tired they're exhausted and they're asking themselves what was the point of me doing all of this work when i absolutely hate what i'm doing here and no matter how much money you're gonna pay me it's not gonna make me feel any better right that is a really common theme in the software engineering space now i always say this but the reason i got into programming the reason i think i'm as good as i am today is because when i was younger i didn't do this because i wanted a job i didn't write code because i wanted to show off to friends or i wanted to go work at facebook or google i did it because i genuinely loved it i enjoyed it and i looked forward to coming home from school every night to work on a side project that i had these projects are things that i've never mentioned to you i'm never going to put on my resume i'm not going to show anyone or kind of claim i'm being productive or efficient they're just things that i wanted to do that i liked and usually in those projects i ended up learning a ton more than from other projects that i was kind of forced to do because i actually enjoyed it i liked it and i wanted to make it as good as it could possibly be so please keep this in mind it is totally valid and fine to work on fun stuff maybe this weekend you want to forget about the data structures and algorithms and go and work on some fun project that you're not going to put on your resume you're not going to show anybody but that you wanted to work on and that you found was enjoyable and fun because after all what is the point of grinding through all these topics making this money getting this job etc if you just hate what you do and you're not happy and looking forward to actually writing code and you know being passionate about the field that you've kind of chosen to go into all right so moving on here to tip number five i probably have my most actionable piece of advice here and this is gonna be to do low effort tasks when you're not feeling good or when you're tired or when you don't feel like kind of diving into a huge code base or something along those lines so for me personally i have a bunch of stuff on the run here i'm doing all kinds of different stuff and i always have tasks that are high effort and that are low effort and maybe some that are kind of in between right a lower for task for example may be answering emails it may be watching a video reviewing kind of what my editors have done for a video that's a pretty low effort task but i have a lot of kind of grunt work for example where it doesn't require a ton of thinking it may be time consuming but again i don't have to think a ton and i can do it kind of very casually right i can throw on some music while i do this task as opposed to the very high effort task which is like designing a system right or writing a complicated algorithm or filming a video is a pretty high effort task for me so what i try to do is when i'm feeling tired when i don't want to get out of bed i think of all of the stuff that i can do that's very easy that's very low effort and i try to take all of those off my list now this does a few things obviously you're getting these tasks done but the point of this is that you are feeling more productive right when you're able to get a few things done in a day you have a few tasks under your belt usually you feel better you feel more productive and that usually translates into the rest of your day and allows you to start working on some more complicated tasks and to continue to keep working for me personally all i really need to do to have a productive day is get up fairly early work on a few different tasks then by the time i've done something i'm feeling good about myself i'm not feeling depressed or motivated and i can kind of continue and have a good productive day however when i wake up at noon or i sleep in or i'm being lazy in the morning or i spend an hour playing video games that usually ruins my day and i find it very difficult to recover and get into even low effort tasks after i've done that so what i would say is kind of keep your low effort task for times when you're tired when you're not very motivated and then that allows you again to kind of build into those more high effort tasks and then of course do your high effort task when you're feeling great when you wake up you have a ton of motivation you're feeling good don't go answer emails don't go do something you can do at any point in time do the most difficult thing that you can think of do the most challenging tasks that you've been putting off and try to kind of structure uh your work time in those different modes right if i'm tired i'm doing low effort if i'm high energy i'm doing high effort obviously this isn't always possible but that's what i try to do and hopefully this tip is going to be helpful and something you can think about when you're kind of structuring the different tasks that you need to do so with that said i think i will wrap up the video here but i am curious what you guys think do you agree with these tips do you have other tips you want to share with us leave a comment down below let me know how you're feeling when you're burned out and how you kind of avoid that or overcome that feeling with that said if you guys enjoyed as always make sure to leave a like subscribe to the channel and i will see you in another one [Music]