Many people tell me how fortunate I am to be passionate about what I do for a living. I say it’s a mixed blessing. There is no doubt that it makes me better at my job, but it also means that my brain is constantly spinning with work related clutter. I find it extremely difficult to pack up work related thoughts, even if I’ve had a good day (sometimes especially if I’ve had a good day), and leave them at the office. This has always been an issue for me, but I’ve typically made it work. Even when things got hectic, I was able to dial it back just the smallest bit, catch my breath, and dive back in. This year the most amazing, wonderful thing happened. I became a father, and my world tilted on it’s axis.

Before, when the pressure was on, I could steal a bit from myself (or my wife), and invest it at work or in a personal project. We’d get through whatever was going on, or achieve whatever goal we were trying to achieve, and I’d level out again. I could do this while still maintaining a decent amount of sleep and eating well (or at least reasonably so). To pull that off now would mean stealing from my son, something I refuse to do. Because he gets first crack, when my tech life heats up I end up cutting into things like sleep, the gym, and spending time in the kitchen. To put this in financial terms, I used to temporarily dip into emergency savings, but now I’m dipping in while also taking a pay cut.

Let’s be clear. My workplace isn’t asking me for this. In fact, my boss regularly emphasizes how important a healthy work-life balance is. This is a direct result of my desire to make things better. This blog is called Desperately Seeking DevOps for a reason, and being passionate about improving can make unplugging that much harder. If I’m not pushing hard, learning new things, and following up on my ideas, I become restless or even unhappy. I imagine that this is how artists must feel when they just have to drop everything and paint something. I’m not saying that I’m an IT operations artist, but I do have ideas that seem to demand immediate execution.

After hitting the wall and having minor stress headaches on and off for a week, it’s become obvious that I need to approach this in a different way. Scott Hanselman wrote an interesting blog post about operating in cycles where he relays some solid advice:

This is vital. Life is cyclical. You aren’t required or expected to be ON 130 hours a week your entire working life. It’s unreasonable to expect that of yourself. Many of you have emailed me about this in the past. “How do you do _____, Scott?” How do you deal with balance, hang with your kids, do your work, do videos, etc.

I don’t.

Sometimes I just chill. Sometimes I play video games. Last week I was in bed before 10pm two nights. I totally didn’t answer email that night either. Balls were dropped and the world kept spinning.

The thrust of the post is that you need to give yourself permission to back off and recharge. I’ve come to realize that while backing down is something I’ve done unconsciously in the past, I now need to make a conscious effort to adjust the degree to which I dial back to account for my new responsibilities. Obvious? Sure. Sometimes though, you need to get permission to take care of yourself from someone that isn’t your spouse. Learing that someone like Scott Hanselman who is known for community contributions also has to stop and dial back is heartening.

Burnout is a major issue in our industry, and I want to make sure that I take care of myself so I don’t end up there. For me, I think the real answer is as simple as not feeling guilty about putting down a technical book in favor of an awesome sci-fi novel, and giving myself permission to temporarily halt all extracurricular tech activity if it interferes with things that impact my long term health and happiness.

While I do strongly believe that if you want to be truly successful in this industry, you need to spend some time on proactive self-improvement, I need to remember to take the long view and look at things like going to the gym and getting enough sleep as enablers of, not competition for my tech passion. If that means backing down for a week or two once in a while, so be it.

I’d love to hear about any strategies you have to avoiding long term burnout and achieving work-life balance in the comments below.

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