Coping with Burnout
Eric talks about burnout on
this blog post, and I hope to see quite a few more comments about it. No doubt, burnout hits each and every developer at one point or another. Its tough to deal with. We all do so much reading, writing, typing, reviewing, discussing etc that its easy to get burned out on it. Being a developer is very hard on a person's mental state over a period of time, it you have to get away from it. I would love to see some more comments on how people deal with avoiding and recovering from burnout. I've only had to seriously recover once, and it involved dropping an ongoing contract of 3 years, and lots of alcohol. This, my friends, is not the way to recover from burnout. How do I avoid it these days? I play with my daughter, I play my guitars, and I play
Enemy Territory online with my friends. You'll notice the word
play in each of those. Do something you enjoy every day that doesn't involve work. I enjoy my work, yes, but you have to do other things you enjoy too. Make time for the other things that make you who you are.