Categories
life Reflections travel

How Do We Recharge?

I feel like I’ve spent much of this pandemic digging out of a case of burnout, watching people burn out around me, trying to get ahead of things, trying to inch up from zero but never really feeling like I make it that far. I think it’s understandable that people are burning out, left, right […]

Categories
life

Pandemic Burnout; Now What?

I return to the topic of burnout often, and when I do, it’s always in the context of the Maslach burnout inventory (there’s a book [Amazon] but I think a good summary is sufficient). Most interesting to me are the five causes of burnout that are not overwork, which I think are key to understanding […]

Categories
art

12 Days of Creativity

Something that I was struggling with as 2020 came to a close was that I was leaving the year the same way I started it – feeling burnt out. Whilst things had improved – I had managed to get a better baseline, address life debt, change the situations that had caused me to be burnt […]

Categories
Career management

Interview: Cate Huston of DuckDuckGo on building a high-aspiring career without burnout

I did an interview a while ago (all delays my fault) with Yerbo who created the Burnout Index, talking about burnout, kindness, good friends and self care. Read the article

Categories
Books

Books about Therapy

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Amazon) was one of the most impactful books I read in 2019. It was extremely readable and super insightful. Reading this book fundamentally changed my approach to therapy, helped me accelerate my progress, and ultimately finish* (*at least for now) therapy. Therapy is such a personal thing and it’s […]

Categories
Career management

The Cost of Fixing Things

In September, I disappeared in Seoul and caused everyone who cares about me to think I was having some kind of breakdown. I deactivated my Twitter account, and refused to engage with anyone other than my closest friends. I got to the point where I felt I had to drop everything, and then I came […]

Categories
Books women in computer science

Book: The Truth About Burnout

I found the Truth About Burnout (Amazon) from this article, which I think gives the main takeaways from the book far more succinctly. I did find the book interesting and I’m glad I read it, but I wouldn’t necessarily encourage other people to. It’s a little dated in places (it was published in 2000), and […]

Categories
Career life Presentation

NSConf: Jamie Newbury – Design Skills that Saved My Life

My notes from @jaimeejaimee‘s fantastic talk at @NSConf. We’re going to talk about burnout. Before graduated college was dishwasher, waitress, heavy equipment washer, pilot car driver, sign painter, production assistant, bank teller, park ranger, metal sculpture (that was degree). After graduated realised need to figure out what to do for a living. Decided to be […]

Categories
Career life Organization

The Burnout Equation

I wrote about burning out, and the aftermath, and my post-burnout-phase. But the other day a friend and I were talking about burnout in general terms, and seeing other people burn out, why that is, what it looks like. It’s interesting, because we know it when we see it, but we don’t talk about what it […]

Categories
Career life Relocating women in computer science

Life After Burnout

I’m currently in what I would describe as a post-burnout-phase. The memory of being burnt out is vivid, and I fear going back there, but I’m doing OK and even cautiously optimistic about the future. Sometimes I resent the cost, and sometimes I just feel so grateful to be in this better place.. and usually, […]