 Okay, cool. All right. Welcome to redefining burnout, redefining productivity during burnout. All right, let's get this started here. I'm going to kick it off with a little story time. Once upon a time, there was a good little dog who built websites and loved solving problems. She was a hard worker and loved her job. But after working so hard and so long, things begin to change. When she woke up in the morning, her heart would race and her mind would race through all of the things she had to do. And she did not want to get out of bed. Every morning, she would go for a run around the neighborhood. But she found that she couldn't breathe before she even started. When she spent time with friends, she had trouble focusing and being present in the moment. And dogs are known for living in the moment, right? At work, she started finding it difficult to think or solve problems. And as I said, problem solving was her thing, like her superpower. It was like trying to work in another language. She thought, something is wrong with my brain. Maybe a brain boosting supplement will fix my brain. A very illogical thought for a very logical puppy. Then one day, she sat at her desk. She was a lead developer estimating, creating tickets, doing backend development on three projects. Project A had one front-end developer every other week for four hours, and the client just asked for a new feature with a quick turnaround. Project B had a team of developers, but an endless cycle of new complex features and quick deadlines. And Project C had one other back-end developer, but there was a fixed, impossible deadline. She was also three weeks away from Drupal Camp-Bashville, where she was lead organizer. Our poor puppy was frozen with so many competing priorities. She didn't know what to do. She had to drop some of the balls she had been juggling, and she felt like such a failure. But in the words of Barack Obama, you can't let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you. Our puppy didn't fail alone. It wasn't all her fault. She wasn't set up for success, but she did say yes to too many things, and she wasn't managing her stress. Yes, the puppy is me. Hi, my name is April Sides. I am a senior developer at Lullabot, and I'm also the lead organizer of Drupal Camp-Bashville. And today I'm here to talk about burnout. So what is burnout? There's a great resource at helpguide.org where I fold a lot of the basic information about burnout. So you should check that out. The help guide page states burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. And I want to emphasize excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. So what does it feel like? There are physical signs and symptoms. Like feeling tired and drained most of the time. Lowered immunity. Frequent illness. Frequent headaches or muscle pains. I have what I call like stress neck or my head gets all tense back here and I'm moving my neck around. My jaw pops. My jaw is all tight. Change in appetite or sleep habits. You know, I have a tendency to eat to avoid work or I have trouble going to sleep at night and then waking up in the morning. And I added a couple here too. Shaky hands and eye twitches. Like I'll be, if I'm like doing too much at one time, my hands will physically start shaking. I'm sure everybody's at some point felt the whole eye twitching thing. That's a really weird thing. And then this feeling like you can't breathe, right? You start doing these big sighs. You're like, he just, he's all day. You're just dying. You just can't breathe. And there's emotional signs and symptoms. You have a sense of failure and self doubt. You feel like you're not good enough. You can't cut it. Everyone else can do it, but I can't, right? Feeling helpless, trapped and defeated, you know, like you don't have control or there's no end in sight. There's not enough time for all the things. And detachment feeling alone in the world. Loss of motivation. You know, if I'm really stressed out, I had times where I just do not want to sit at the computer. I'll do anything to not sit at the computer. Increasingly cynical and the negative outlook. You know, there's nothing I can do about this. Decrease satisfaction and sense of accomplishment. In lack, I've added this lack of emotion or emotional regulation. So your emotions can be very flat where you just kind of like don't feel anything. Or you're an emotional roller coaster, like everything sets you off or makes you sad or mad or whatever. Just the lack of emotional control. And then there are behavioral signs and symptoms. To be withdrawing from responsibilities. And this could even mean like withdrawing from your home responsibilities of like keeping a clean house or that sort of thing. Isolating yourself from others. Procrastinating, taking longer to get things done. You know, I have times when I can't focus, think and solve problems and my brain feels broken. So it takes longer to do things. Using food, drugs or alcohol to cope. You know, this could be relying on stimulants to be productive or relying on the presence to go to sleep at night. Taking out your frustrations on others. You know, this could come from a lowered emotional intelligence and that emotional regulation. And skipping work or coming in late or leaving early, you know, just avoiding the stress and avoiding the environment where you are stressed. I often tell people when I'm burning out or sort of trending toward burning out that I'm treading water. Right. So I'm going to go into a little bit deeper here with you and say we're treading water in the middle of the ocean with nothing in sight. And it feels like you're sinking. That's what burnout feels like for me. And definitely being in the ocean and feeling like you're sinking is very you can't breathe so that kind of associates it with I can't really breathe in this moment. So who is a risk, perfectionistic people, right, a person who refuses to accept any standard short of perfect. Someone who is pessimistic, you know, thinks negatively, or even has negative self talk. You know, controlling or you need to be in control or you have this need to do it yourself. High achievers are hardworking and successful give 110% no pain no gain, right. And then I added a couple here, people pleasers, you know, they want to make and keep others happy. And selfless and caring people, you know, people who put others before themselves, or they take one for the team, right. And all these characteristics are not horrible in and of themselves right and you may have one or two or you're like me and you have them all and that's okay right. Because you're predisposed not predetermined right just because all you have some of these characteristics doesn't mean that you're destined to burnout you're just more likely than someone who doesn't have these characteristics. So what are the causes. You know, feeling like you have little or no control of your work. Lack of recognition or reward for good work. Unclear or overly demanding job expectations, you know, I find that when I work remotely I have a hard time knowing if I'm doing too much, or if I'm not doing enough and trying to get that kind of gauge as well. I'm working in a chaotic or high pressure environment, and there are lifestyle causes. Working too much without enough time for socializing or relaxing. Lack of close supported relationships. Taking on too many responsibilities without enough help from others. And not getting enough sleep. So then there are a few things that have been causes specifically for me, which I call counterproductive productivity. You know, these are things that we think make us more productive, maybe in the short term but actually make us less productive in the long term. Notifications, you know notifications are great in moderation. So our brains have been conditioned to receive a dopamine rush or a or a stress response. Every time we receive a notification, you know, we want to know everything now we want that immediate gratification. But every notification breaks our focus and it takes about 25 minutes to regain our focus after the distraction. Everyone loves a good slack integration, but this is one of the things that really, I think affected me when I was burning out is that we had automated notifications going into slack and slack is a chat app if you're not familiar. We had automated notifications coming in from like when people would create tickets or close tickets and things like that. And they were in the same channel as discussions with the team and so I would spend all day playing slack a mole between my three projects, and it affected my ability to focus. I would get back notifications on my watch and my phone during my morning run I would receive work notifications during your stress response and it was just no good. So we want to manage our notifications right, we want to remove frequent notifications. I've cut back a lot of notifications like email I don't need to know that I just received spam social media I'll only keep like the badge icon. So when I pick up my phone I know I have messages or whatever. I still have calendar notifications on to remind me about cause going to calls and very recently though I turned off the badge notification on my laptop for slack, because I have slack up. And if I don't want to see slack if I want to focus. I don't need to know that I'm getting messages in my doc. I will go and look at slack when I need to know that so that was kind of a cool thing I found recently. I'm used to not disturb mode. So I also use the bedtime setting on my iPhone, which will enable do not disturb mode during my sleep hours that are set. I also have enabled a setting that automatically turns on do not disturb mode when I start a workout, which was the best thing ever to work out and not be triggered by stress right. So when you, when you need to focus disabling notifications is a great place to start. So try website and app blockers you block yourself from websites and apps that you find yourself distracted by or now you can set up limits for different things. I've been playing around with that on my phone. You do it works for you make adjustments as needed. Task switching. Okay, there is no such thing as multitasking. There is no such thing as multitasking. Okay, there's only the illusion of it. Our brains are not designed to multitask. So we task switch right and so even computers tasks which they just do it really really fast. So what do we do when our computer slows slows down or the batteries low, we start closing all our browser tabs, our applications, etc. Right, when that doesn't work we have to repair or replace the computer. So task switching requires energy and causes wear and tear and doing it a lot can cause damage to computers and the human brain. So if we want to think about the, the replacement cycle of technology, you know the smartphones. It's about two and a half years for laptops between three and five years. But the human brain is irreplaceable, you know, don't abuse your brain like a computer or smartphone, because no one can replace you. What are the effects of task switching? Task switching can cause damage to the brain in the region of that is responsible for empathy and emotional control. Just like notifications, it causes interruptions and time is lost and regaining focus. So that's lost productivity. Right. It reduces concentration and focus. The switching causes a dopamine addicted feedback loop. You know, for me, I actually have moments where my eyes start darting, like literally darting from place to place. They can't stay in one place. I can't stay focused. Or I'll have disjointed conversations where I switch topics after every sentence. It's kind of weird. Task switching also lowers your IQ and your emotional intelligence. It causes stress, anxiety, overwhelm, and guess what, burnout. It affects your impulse control and your decision making. It also affects your creativity because creativity requires concentration. So don't freak out yet. We'll talk about how to repair the brain with self care. So I used to think I was most productive in my office with my laptop screen and my second monitor. So much room for so many activities. Right. We think we if we need, we think we need a wall of monitors to be the most productive. But what happens is we'll think I can put slack over here and I can put email over here and this dashboard over here. So then when I'm working, I can keep up with everything. It just creates more distraction. Right. You just set yourself up. You're feeling your screen with distractions. Right. Or we think, well, I can do something on this screen while I'm compiling or building or whatever on this machine. I can do something over here while that's doing that and you feel more productive. But if you keep doing that, you still have to check on it. Like you still have to be aware of it. So multiple monitors can be useful when you do need to maybe compare when you're doing the same task. You're comparing stuff on NQA or you're writing code and you're refreshing over here to see what happens. Things like that are where it's helpful or like being creative and you need more space for drawing and things like that. But when you start to feel yourself task-switching, try to downsize to one screen. It becomes very apparent when you're task-switching and then makes it a lot harder to do so because you actually have to cover up each thing that you're working on. It's not all available to you. So yeah. So how do we avoid burnout? First, self-care is so important. The best self-care comes in the form of good habits. So start by taking an inventory of your current habits, your good, neutral and bad habits. And then focus on one change at a time. You know, don't try to change everything at once. So pick a bad habit to remove or add a new self-care habit. And then I highly recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's an excellent book. In the book, he talks about how to build good habits by making them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. And then breaking bad habits by making them invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying. He also talks about habit stacking. Kind of like an if, this, then that. But it's more like after this existing habit, then do the new habit. And it makes it a little bit easier to start a good habit. All right. So we need to form good habits to take care of our body, right? So we need good sleep habits. Getting enough sleep, adjusting your sleep schedule. You know, right now I'm retraining myself to get up to an alarm and not snooze for an hour. And also not social media scroll before getting up in an effort to get my work day started before noon. It's a process. We also want good nutrition habits. All right. Healthy eating and hydration, the frequency of eating and portion size. When I recovered from my burnout, the story that I told previously, I turned eating two fun size Milky Way bars after lunch every day and to have an afternoon strawberry banana smoothie, because I wanted to add more fruit to my diet and I could take a break from the computer in the afternoon. And right now I am well aware that I need to work on my snacking habits. So we also need good exercise habits. You know, this could be as simple as going for a walk. You could do strength training, yoga, sports, cardio fitness. When I quit my high stress job, I should have the stress in about 10 pounds just after quitting. And I was able to add multiple hills to my run and beat my times. It was amazing how much the stress was holding me back. All right. So we also need to form habits that will take care of our minds, right? Relaxation habits are very important. You know, this could look like an adult coloring book. You know, the new hotness of the adult coloring books, be listening to music, you know, watching a movie, journaling, meditating, whatever relaxes you. And I just want to point out that meditation doesn't really look like this to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but you do what works for you, right? So instead of the perfect sitting posture in the perfect outdoor location, I prefer to lay on my back for better body relaxation. I can meditate my bed and the couch, my office, wherever. I once meditated on an airplane and in an airport. Remember those things? So when I meditate, I imagine this is what it looks like in my head. You know, it's not about having a perfectly clear head and focused mind. It's a workout for your brain, building your focus muscles. Every time a thought pops into your head, stop it or kick it out. That's one repetition, right? So you can meditate for as little as one minute. So I like to not even track the time because time is kind of a stressor for me. So maybe you want to count those repetitions if that's the way you want to go. The key to remember is that when you breathe in through your nose, expand your belly, not your chest. You know, we have a tendency when we're stressed out that we, you know, we want to get a deep breath into our chest. But what actually happens is that you're stimulating the fight or flight response system and it makes your body more tense and increases your stress. But when you breathe into your belly, when you fill your belly, come out with your inhale. It relaxes your muscles, it calms your nerves and helps release endorphins in your body that reduce pain. There are a ton of apps out there like Headspace, that was probably the first one I checked out. Calm Fitbit now has a mindfulness feature. My Apple Watch reminds me to breathe several times a day when I don't dismiss it. So while I don't have a meditation habit right now, this was very helpful for me when I was recovering from task switching and induced burn out. And I do it as needed when I feel unable to focus. Meditation is something that can heal the brain when we were talking about damaging the brain with the task switching. So we also want to incorporate play into our lives. You know, it's a great way to manage stress. I like to play video games or build Lego. You could play board games with friends and family, put together a puzzle, things that have like problem solving, just free play with your kids or pets, you know, whatever sounds fun. And we also want to build connection with the world around us. You know, we want to spend time with people, spend time with pets and animals, be in nature. And if you can't get into nature right now, consider getting some houseplants. And then you can also find spiritual connection and whatever that means for you. So in addition to self care, we can learn to work smarter. And we can start by building caring relationships with the people we work for and with. And this will make it a lot easier to raise flags when something's wrong. You know, I have a tendency to be very shy with people that I don't know very well. So when I started at Lullabot, I made an effort to get to know my manager, because I knew it would be easier for me to speak up and be honest when things weren't okay. Right. But it also makes it easier for others to see when you aren't your normal self, because you don't know your limit until you've reached it. And it's sometimes hard to know that you're burning out when you're in it. So build the caring sport, the caring support you may need to check in on you. Right. I highly recommend. Oh, I didn't hit my buttons there. Highly recommend checking out radical candor. It mostly focuses on the manager perspective, but there's a lot of great stuff in there for everyone. Like realizing you can't be ambitious at work and outside of work. That's another recipe for burnout. So we can also manage our time and energy. So we want to schedule time blocks for work and self care. This will help you avoid test switching and make self care another part of your day. I highly recommend the book, Deep Work. It has great tips on working without distraction. A few of these things came from that. Don't respond immediately to emails and messages. Right. Let your immediate response be the exception, not the rule in times of emergency. At the same time, don't expect others to respond immediately as well. Right. That's a hard one. But I think it creates a culture of humanness and leave work at work. So Deep Work talks about having a shutdown routine that signals the end of your day. Set boundaries and say no. There's a whole chapter in 13 things mentally strong people don't do about how to say no for my fellow people pleasers. I know you're out there. The book says if yes has become your automatic answer, start saying, I'll have to look into that and get back to you. Then take a few minutes to consider what you want to do before you make any promises. Right. So for the record, I struggle a lot with these things because time is the stressor for me, but I'm always working to get better. So we want to manage our product projects too. So this is like a project management perspective, but also like if you are freelancer or you're doing your own project, things to think about. You make sure you have clearly defined deadlines and milestones and that your team is aware of them. Manage the pace of work to ensure that you and your team don't burn out. Consider using agile software development methodology. So agile development is all about iteration. You plan in sprints that are usually about two weeks. You plan the work and then probably most important for preventing team burnout is retrospectives because you can adjust the rules of development as you go and then ways that work best for the team for the project and the team. So it might be that you need to work really hard on one or two sprints to meet a deadline, but you can follow up with one or two easier sprints to give the team a break. So if you're not familiar with agile, there are a ton of resources and certification trainings available on the interwebs. All right. So how do we get out of it or how, you know, for trending toward burnout, treading water, drowning, et cetera, how do we get out of it? Right. The quickest way is to stop everything. Right. It's not always ideal. It's not always an option, but for extreme cases where your health is compromised, you may not have a choice. If you can't stop everything, we want to identify the light at the end of the tunnel for when you can schedule time off. And this may require working with your manager or client. So you can start by reviewing your priorities, find one focused, you know, top priority to focus on and delegate or postpone the other responsibilities. You know, if it happens to be home responsibilities, you know, think about having a house cleaner or dog walker, something like that. If it's work responsibilities, delegate your work to your team or consider paying a contractor. Right. And think about this as being temporary. You know, this is just to get you through to your time off. Also determine what and when is done. So if you have arbitrary deadlines, adjust them, you know, don't kill yourself trying to reach an arbitrary deadline. Deadlines are great, but they can be moved if they're arbitrary. If you need a Band-Aid fix, see if you can take a long weekend. You know, I did that a couple of times this summer because I couldn't take a full week off. So recovery takes time. So the more time you can take off and focus on self-care, the faster the recovery. So when you take time off, take time off. All right. So once you've identified the light at the end of the tunnel and you've identified your top priority, you're going to communicate with the team, right? We need to let the team or our manager or clients know our plans. And ask for help with tasks from their heart. This was actually a recommendation from my project manager this summer when things were getting a little wild. I have a tendency to do it myself, right? But asking for help really is a sign of strength because it allows the problem to be solved faster and cheaper. So you can reach out for help in your work slack. You could use the bad camp slack now if you've joined that. Other community slacks like Drupal Slack. You could also try codementor.com. It provides a network of folks that can help you. And you can request nondisclosure agreements when you work with them. And you can hire them by the hour. So I recently helped someone understand Git and how to set up her development workflow. And it was kind of cool, right? It's also embrace flexibility in your schedule and environment. I'm speaking to managers here as well to allow your teams and employees flexibility when things are rough. For your schedule of work hours, work in the morning or work at night, you know, whenever you feel most productive. And don't spend your wheels solving a problem, right? Take a break, go for a walk and you return with a fresh perspective. That was something that I've learned in the last year and it's great. And for your environment, a lot of folks are probably still working from home. I work remotely so it can be a little bit easier for me to relocate. So you can work from the patio, the kitchen table, the couch, outside of coffee shop, wherever it is that you feel most productive, you want to work there. And you want to practice self care as you're able to. You know, you don't want to take on habit management when you're in burnout. For example, this is not the time to stop smoking, right? Take breaks because time away improves productivity. Do relaxation activities as you're able. So, you know, the meditation we just talked about one minute, three minutes more. This can help with the feeling of not being able to breathe. It also helps with focus. But know that it can be harder to do when you're stressed. You know, consider watching a movie or an episode of a show. You know, this was my go to this summer. It allowed me to relax, put my computer and phone away and just get lost in the Marvel Universe. And most importantly, use positive self-talk. Okay, I often beat myself up over arbitrary standards like getting to work early in the morning. Doing that adds stress and makes things harder. So once I embrace the flexibility, I was able to get things done. So just remember, this is a journey of imperfection. Okay. There are a ton of books, articles, tips and tricks out there. Whatever you do, do what works for you and what helps you be the person you want to be. So I have some resources in the slides. The slides are actually already on the session on the website. If you want to download that, we've got the health guide. There's also this site called Thrive Global. Mariana Huffington of Huffington Post actually experienced burnout. She fainted because of exhaustion and hit her head on her desk, and it was kind of a wake-up call for her. So she started this company and this website to help people not burn out, to help people have better work-life balance and things like that. So it's a really cool resource. And then these are all the books that I mentioned throughout. I don't see anything about them. These are all links in the PDF. And then one of the first books that I read after I burned out was by Sarah Knight, Get Your Stuff Together, or something like that. She has a lot of great books. It's really funny if you're okay with a little bit of saucy language. I highly recommend that. She has some other books that are great as well. And The Myth of Multitasking was a great book. Very concise, so I couldn't summarize it so well. But I highly recommend that. It gives you a lot of the statistics about what multitasking does to you, right? All right. So thank you. And if you have any other questions, I'm here. Let's see, Amy June, are you going to help me with questions? Or there we go. I didn't see any in back scroll. Just lots of comments. Cool. And there's Mike joining the session late, as always. Like, okay. You should get royalties for selling the book. I did not. They are Amazon links, but I did not put affiliate links in there, I promise. I need to get my website. I need to redo my website. You know, the one that's still from like 2005. And I can share all the books and all the resources that I have on there. One day, Sunday. Here's a question. The question is, how do you notice when a relaxation or play habit is being harmful? Procrastination rather than helpful. Right. And like, if my play habit is playing video games, you know, video addiction, video game addiction is a thing as well, right? That's kind of a hard one, right? So at some point you do have to return to your computer and do the work, right? So I have a tendency where I'm like, oh, I'm going to go for a walk and I'm going to solve the problem in my head. And that actually doesn't work. But breaking away from something and thinking about other things and then coming back, actually helps you see things with a fresh perspective and solve the problems. I think you just have to pay attention to like that moderation, right? Everything's great in moderation except moderation. So if you're doing things a lot, like you're playing a video games a lot, then it might be a bad habit at that point. And what sleep schedule works for me? For me? I end up, I can't go to sleep at night and I can't get up in the morning. That's just the gist of it right there. I tried going to bed earlier, but you know, I also have dogs and the dogs like to get up at 4am and the dogs like to go out late at night. So it just kind of happens and it's just something I'm trying to fix. I'm working on it for sure. I did set an alarm at 9.30 every night one time to remind me to let the dogs out and let that be sort of like the shutdown routine. I guess like the, the, okay, it's time to go to bed and get ready for bed. And I set the Amazon. Okay, I don't think I have her in here. I said Alexa and everybody else might hear it. I said Alexa to play who let the dogs out at 9.30 every night to remind me to let the dogs out. It's kind of funny too, but the wife wasn't too happy with that after a while. But yeah, as Tori says, it's a journey of imperfection, right? We can't, you know, I'm such a perfectionist and I beat myself up about it. It's like, if I sleep, I sleep. I do focus on getting sleep because I know that I require it. Nope. This scene looks like I've started playing who let to let the dogs out on Donna's Alexa. What headset do I have? I have the Jabra. What is it? The Jabra's 370. It's a wireless thing. It's wireless and you can plug it in, which is what I like. So if it starts to die, just plug it in and it starts working. Thanks Jordan. I actually had to replace my headset because my cats were chewing on the cord. Darn cats, can't have a ball. I can't sit on a ball in my desk because the cats go with their nails pop it. Yeah, so I think that's all the questions unless anybody has anymore. Can always reach me on the Twitter.