Preventing Burnout

Community Thoughts on Preventing Burnout...

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   This is what work-life balance looks like at a company with 100% retention of moms by Jenny Anderson via Quartz “For 33 years Patagonia has had an on-site child care center that bears little resemblance to what anyone might imagine corporate on-site child care looks like. It is run by teachers, some of whom are bilingual and trained in child development. Learning takes place outdoors as much as in. Parents often eat lunch with their kids, take them to the farmer’s market or pick vegetables with them in the “secret” garden. Patagonia buses school-aged kids back to the company’s headquarters, allowing parents to connect with them after school over chocolate milk.”

2. 2.

   Confessions of a Professional Burnout by Mat Marquis via Super Yes More “By reducing myself to my output—by thinking I could game the system by just being more productive than everyone else, above all else—I wasn’t just doing myself a disservice. Burning myself for fuel was a luxury afforded me by immense privilege. It was selfishness under the guise of selflessness. My actions were a tacit vote for an industry standard where people could be weeded out of an interview process for not sufficiently neglecting their responsibilities, their families, their lives, their time—by not having the requisite nights-and-weekends “passion projects.””

3. 3.

   Only You Can Prevent Tech Burnout by April Wensel via Medium “As employees, we stay in unhealthy climates because we’re attached to our paycheck, or we’re afraid of those ineffective but challenging technical interviews guarding the gates to other companies, or maybe we think it’s just not better anywhere else — this is just how Silicon Valley works. We commit code at 2AM because we know our manager will thank us for it and maybe even promote us one day. If we’re in an underrepresented group in tech, we may feel even more pressure to stay late just to prove that we really do deserve to be there.”

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   How to Avoid UX Burnout by Benjamin Earl Evans via Boxes and Arrows “The burnout I experienced after such a high intensity design sprint was exhausting at the time, but it was ultimately a blessing. Through the roller coaster ride of UX design, I’ve identified six types of UX burnout you’ll probably also encounter, along with research-backed methods to get through them.”

5. 5.

   Rethinking the Work-Life Equation by Susan Dominus via New York Times “By asking managers to acknowledge openly the demands outside work, Moen and Kelly were subverting certain conventions of office culture. For years, an image of professionalism was closely tied, perhaps especially for women, to a strict respect for boundaries — to the presentation of the self, at the office, as someone wholly unencumbered by the messiness of home life. Those boundaries, Moen and Kelly’s work suggested, were possibly counterproductive.”