When you feel like you're losing motivation

Key Takeaways

hi there and welcome to my podcast General musings my name is Kevin and this podcast is an audio version of the introductions to my weekly Sunday newsletter this week we'll be talking about losing motivation getting stuck in a bit of a rut or the worst case burnout it's so easy to get stuck in a rut or lose motivation there are 101 reasons why this can happen from having a project that isn't motivating to outside stresses and often a combination of different factors it's front of mind for me right now because I'm feeling it a little as I write this script I recently launched a course Beyond CSS which is always a lot of work and then immediately went back into full YouTube mode for the last two weeks or so I've been going really hard on YouTube content to build up a backlog so that I can refocus on the final module of Beyond CSS it's been a lot of work and it's starting to wear on me a little like anything content creation can sometimes become a bit of a slog this isn't the first time that this has happened and I know myself well enough to know that it means I need to take a bit of a deep breath I'm in a very priv red position in that I set my own schedule so when I feel like I need to slow down I'm able to do a bit less work either for a day or two or longer if needed um though it is a lot easier to say I should slow down than to actually slow down I know that it's important to do though because if I don't slow down a little my productivity takes a huge nose dive I'm much better off taking a moment for myself and refocusing of course the worst that can happen is burnout from the stress of work and the other stresses in life burnout is all too common and seems to be very common within the dev industry where there are often unrealistic expectations when it comes to productivity like I mentioned above the most important thing is to be self-aware enough to see some of the early signs and also to be humble enough to realize that burnout can happen to anyone including yourself I'm well aware that it can happen and I'm taking a little bit of a breath right now and actually writing this newsletter is a very nice change of pace for me it's still content creation but the entire thing is so different from everything else that I do during the week week that it is a type of break and it's always something I look forward to spending a morning working on and just in case you're curious it tends to take me about 3 hours to put together from writing the first draft to getting to the final version but back on topic there's another thing I love to do when I'm feeling a little lack of motivation which is to go onto code pen or dribble or sometimes a site like front-end Mentor or iode this and look around until I find something that looks cool and importantly not too challenging to create I don't want to give myself a hard challenge I just want something that will come together relatively quickly where I can go through the steps and make something come together I don't do it to make a video or tutorial I make it for the fun of making it and it's surprising how refreshing that can be now that's what I like to do for you if coding day in and day out is the grind the idea of writing more code probably isn't going to sound refreshing the reason this works for me I think is because my grind doesn't revolve around writing code but it's everything else that goes into content creation the ideation and planning that goes into a tutorial can become a grind which is why just making something for myself for an hour or three can be very nice and it also helps remind me of why I enjoy all of this so much um you might have other things that'll work for you but the most important thing is if you are feeling tired or demotivated that you realize it and find a way to distress and help refocus because it's easy for that to take the next step toward burnout and that's a lot harder to pull out of and that's it for this week if you enjoyed this please do consider adding it to your podcast feed and if you'd prefer the written version it's linked in the description along with all my socials if you want to follow me anywhere else until next week