It wasn’t until I made time for myself to get out into the countryside near my home and take the dog for a walk that I realised how much stress I’d been putting myself under during my team meetup, this week.
Istanbul was enjoyable and fascinating, and I love my team, but I always forget until after the fact how much a few days worth of city crowds can make me feel anxious and trapped.
It’s good to get a mile or two from the nearest other human and decompress!
If the most-important lesson I learned from my sabbatical was about boundaries and my work/life balance, then the second most-important was about burnout.
If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.
Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!
When I got back to work2, I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this” experiences:
The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too long, without compassion for yourself and your needs
I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!
1 Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely surprising.
2 Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.
The week before last, Katie shared with me that article from last month, Who killed Google Reader? I’d read it before so I didn’t bother clicking through again, but we did end up chatting about RSS a bit1.
Katie “abandoned feeds a few years ago” because they were “regularly ending up with 200+ unread items that felt overwhelming”.
Conversely: I think that dropping your feed reader because there’s too much to read is… solving the wrong problem.
Dave Rupert last week wrote about his feed reader’s “unread” count having grown to a mammoth 2,000+ items, and his plan to reduce that.
I think that he, like Katie, might be looking at his reader in a different way than I do mine.
I’ve been in the position that Katie and David describe: of feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unread items. And I know others have, too. So let me share something I’ve learned sooner:
There’s nothing special about reaching Inbox Zero in your feed reader.
It’s not noble nor enlightened to get to the bottom of your “unread” list.
Your 👏 feed 👏 reader 👏 is 👏 not 👏 an 👏 email 👏 client. 👏
The idea of Inbox Zero as applied to your email inbox is about productivity. Any message in your email might be something that requires urgent action, and you won’t know until you filter through and categorise .
But your RSS reader doesn’t (shouldn’t?) be there to add to your to-do list. Your RSS reader is a list of things you might like to read. In an ideal world, reaching “RSS Zero” would mean that you’ve seen everything on the Internet that you might enjoy. That’s not enlightened; that’s sad!
My RSS reader is a place of joy, never of stress. I’ve tried to boil down the principles that makes it so, and here they are:
And if you’d like to put those tips in your RSS reader to digest later or at your own pace, you can: 
here’s an
RSS feed containing (only) these RSS tips!
1 You’d be forgiven for thinking that RSS was my favourite topic, given that so-far-this-year I’ve written about improving WordPress’s feeds, about mathematical quirks in FreshRSS, on using XPath scraping as an RSS alternative (twice), and the joy of getting notified when a vlog channel is ressurected (thanks to RSS). I swear I have other interests.
2 If your feed reader doesn’t support any kind of grouping, get a better reader.
3 If your feed reader doesn’t support any kind of marking/favouriting/tagging of articles, get a better reader.
4 If your feed reader doesn’t support customisable expiry times… well that’s not too unusual, but you might want to consider getting a better reader.
5 FreshRSS calls the feature that fetches actual post content from the resulting page “Article CSS selector on original website”, which is a bit of a mouthful, but you can see what it’s doing. If your feed reader doesn’t support fetching full content… well, it’s probably not that big a deal, but it’s a good nice-to-have if you’re shopping around for a reader, in my opinion.
6 There’s so much choice in feed readers, and migrating between them is (usually) very easy, so everybody can find the best choice for them. Feedly, Inoreader, and The Old Reader are popular, free, and easy-to-use if you’re looking to get started. I prefer a selfhosted tool so I use the amazing FreshRSS (having migrated from Tiny Tiny RSS). Here’s some more tips on getting started. You might prefer a desktop or mobile tool, or even something exotic: part of the beauty of RSS feeds is they’re open and interoperable, so if for example you love using Slack, you can use Slack to push feed updates to you and get almost all the features you need to do everything in my list, including grouping (using channels) and saving for later (using Slackbot/”remind me about this”). Slack’s a perfectly acceptable feed reader for some people!
After my stressy-rant the other day, Claire, Kit and Paul started tidying up Claire and my flat. My suspicions – that they were doing this to try to make my life a little less stressful – were confirmed by Claire one evening.
They mean well, but I can’t help but feel that instead of having lots of things to do and little motivation, I now have somewhat fewer things to do and little motivation. I’m not sure whether that’s an improvement or not. I guess it is. More prominently, for awhile I felt guilty: like by my blog entry I’d, like, emotionally blackmailed them into doing it. I mean: tidying my flat? I don’t know.
Claire’s not feeling well and has taken an early night, but I can’t sleep again.
I do feel a lot better though. I guess my friends’ efforts really have helped. It makes me happy to have friends who care. It makes the corners of my eyes twitch and my stomach try to swallow my heart, all by themselves. I guess this is what friends are for.
I’m going to check if Claire’s asleep and take her some more painkillers if she’s not. Then I think I’ll take a walk, then try to get some sleep.
To friendship.
Things that are causing me excess stress and reduced sleep:
WORK
HOME
But, above it all – the killer:
End of rant.
Good progress at work today, easily catching up on the things I didn’t get done yesterday on account of having been at the Royal Welsh Show.
AbNib is proving itself popular, but I’m still not happy with it: there are a load of really cool features I’d like to add, yet. But that’s a job for another day. I’ll be up in Lancashire this weekend for Andy‘s party and to visit my folks, so I can’t do it then, either.
Claire’s gotten herself temporarily sterilized with a fantastic hyperdermic full of progesterone and with the aid of the nice people at Aberystwyth Family Planning Clinic. Woo and indeed hoo. She’s (theoretically) a lot less likely to forget to have an injection every three months than she is to forget to take the pill: something she’s demonstrated herself to be very proficient at.
I’ve been excessivley stressed for the last 48 or so hours. I think it’s mostly a result of having no money and my paycheque still being a week away, and having to live off my credit card in the meantime (which I don’t like doing). Also that my crisp-wound in my mouth from the other day has developed into a spot which would probably heal faster and hurt less if I could stop playing with it, but I can’t. And that I’m not making nearly as much coding progress on Three Rings as I should be.
I have a strange urge to go for a long walk in the rain this evening. I hope it rains.