The Edge of Burnout

I imagine that many people take a sabbatical or other extended break from work in an effort to avoid (or recover from) burnout.

But obviously that’s not the way I fly. Clearly my game’s a bit different.

My project to move Three Rings servers, which I’d written about once or twice before I completed it on Wednesday, has weighed heavily in my mind my many moths, and has almost-completely occupied it since the start of my sabbatical. Even before that, the project was “owned” by a different volunteer at Three Rings from whom I took over after their progress stalled (their life got in the way – life has a habit of doing that – and it’s perhaps only because I expected to spend several months away from my “day job” that I felt confident to take over from where he left off), and I’ve had a peripheral involvement in it since… well, a long while ago.

And it turns out it’s been hard.

The work… is impactful: it paves the way for the next generation of Three Rings‘ ability to grow and support more tools, more volunteers, and more voluntary organisations… as well as making a clean break with some architectural baggage we’d picked up over our last, y’know, twenty-two fucking years of providing this service. That impact might not be felt on day one (although I’m already hearing good thing about real-world performance gains), but it supports the long-term growth and stability of this wonderful system: it’ll pay off in time.

But the weight of the problem didn’t just come from the eventual benefit it’d one-day provide… it came from the risk of failing. I’m a developer first and a devops person second, and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in getting to the point where I’m at long last as comfortable with the latter as I am with the former. But the cost of a mistake today is orders of magnitude more that what it would have been, say, one and a half to two decades ago. Three Rings isn’t just “some tool that supports volunteering”, any more: it’s become a critical part of charity infrastructure supporting multiple volunteer-years of effort every single day. There are organisations who’ve never known any other way of working, who absolutely depend upon it.

If Three Rings completely fails today then (for a hopefully-short period while they adapt to the change): soup kitchens and food banks struggle to run, suicide helplines can’t get enough counsellors onto calls, community libraries can’t coordinate their volunteers and fail to open their doors when they should, motorcyclists don’t get told which hospitals to deliver vital blood donations to… oh, and that one volunteer-run pole-dancing class that uses the system doesn’t schedule a lesson this week, I guess?

My point is: if I fucked-up the specification of a server, of the strategy for a low-downtime data transfer, or broke the DNS configuration mid-flight… and didn’t catch my mistake in time… then it’s not inconceivable that somebody could die.

Which is a strange feeling when you’re doing voluntary work on a computer system that you invented mostly to prove to yourself that you could, on a lazy weekend when you were barely into your twenties. It seems that somewhere along the journey, the stakes can change.

It turns out that the pressure was getting to me for a while there. That may have been evidenced to others by the huge sigh of relief that I’m sure my fellow volunteers on our “launch party” Zoom call heard when the servers were moved and (almost) everything worked perfectly first time. But for me, the realisation came a little over a day later.

A thing came up. The specifics aren’t important, but the thing that came up – shortly after everything went so wonderfully well and the new Three Rings server architecture was deployed – fell firmly within the categories of (a) “family/home life” and (b) “this thing needs somebody to champion it for a few weeks and make sure it gets sorted out”. And as the rusty gears of project management started to turn within my brain started I began thinking about what it’d take to be the one to pick-up-and-run with this new piece of work… and I realised that I simply didn’t have enough spoons.

Even thinking about what to do next was exhausting. I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it.

That’s when I realised, yesterday afternoon, that I’d allowed myself to stray perilously close to burnout.

My mistake these last few weeks has been to focus on time, and the superfluity of it with which I imagined myself to have.

Being on my sabbatical, I figured that I’d temporarily gained up-to-40 hours a week for “free”, and reasoned that I could just bolt some significant portion of that on top of the up-to-10 hours a week I was already giving to Three Rings. But while time works like that, it’s not the only resource that you “spend” when you’re giving your entire focus to a deep, detailed, and complicated project. In fact, focussing on time is incredibly deceptive, because it tricks you into completely sidestepping any consideration for the mental effort your mind’s engaged in. An effort that takes place even in your “downtime”.

A critical project with high stakes and which stokes your passion can quickly grow into something that occupies your thoughts when you’re trying to unwind… and when you’re trying to socialise… and when you’re trying to sleep. I’d been burning hard at my server move project for months without letting my brain take a break, and it took until the job was complete before I stopped and thought for even a moment that “hey, that was fucking exhausting wasn’t it?”

So yeah. I’mma thinking I’ll take a few days off of doing “projects”. Quick wins, tasks that take less than a day and can be put down at any time… those are fine. But anything that can’t be set aside and forgotten about probably doesn’t belong in my head until at least next week.

Tomorrow Later today, but after I’ve slept… I’m going to try to have a day in which I do very little: some childwrangling, of course, some fun activities, some socialising with friends in the evening. And then see if I can carry on that vibe throughout the weekend. For once in my life, to stop picking up new things, and just coast for a while with the things I’m already carrying.

I’ve learned the hard way that trying to power-on through this particular kind of tiredness is a recipe for disaster. I’m proud that I’ve (at long last!) gained a level of self-awareness to spot that I was on a path to burnout without actually reaching that place of total uselessness. So now it’s time to stop, recharge, and then start moving again.

Nice work, me.

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