 Hi, everyone. Welcome to Open Source Summit. My name is Jason Hibbins. I'm a senior community architect at Red Hat, and today we're going to talk about Burnout. First, I want to mention that this is my experience. I'm not the expert on this topic. I only know what happened to me during my situation and how I dealt with it. But during today's session, I do want to try to interact with you using the chat functionality. So we'll get there. I encourage you to ask questions and also answer each other's questions if you want to share your own experience. So my story begins in early 2017. I was mentally in a pretty bad spot. It's basically kind of this perfect storm of stress, the kind that no one really asked for. For me, work was piling up to a point where I didn't want to do the things that were expected of me. I was training for some spring half marathons, which should have normally been stress relief, but I was putting some additional pressure on myself to perform at a high level. And on top of the everyday family obligations, we had a surgery in our household that really added to some of the stress I was experiencing. So I finally reached a breaking point and it wasn't just one thing. It was a culmination of things. And it really hit me from the blind side. I was completely caught off guard. I never thought that I would be a victim of burnout. I was aware of burnout. It was on my radar with the communities that I work with, making sure to be on the lookout for other people burning out, not myself. I remember thinking that something was wrong and something was a little off, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. So I distinctly remember the day that I cried and I was in the office having my daily one-on-one or my weekly one-on-one with my manager. And the faucets just wouldn't stop. I just broke. It was a really low point for me. My manager did assure me that we would get through this. Neither of us had gone through this experience before. So he sent me home and basically I kind of took the rest of the day off, kept up, shut the laptop down and started coming up with a plan. So luckily I already had some vacation on the calendar. So that was my short-term target, day by just one day at a time, get to that vacation. And when I did take that vacation, I intentionally didn't pack any technology clothing at all. So if anyone knows my wardrobe and how many conferences I go to and how many tech shirts I have, that was a pretty thin suitcase. When I reflect upon that, I was really just kind of pushing myself to exceed the goals that my team creates. And I really liked the feeling when we accomplished something and meet new and make our goals. But this experience was a little bit different. It wasn't a healthy win for me. It wasn't a healthy win for my team. And I felt like I let everyone's self down, including myself. So when I look back, I was definitely showing the signs of burnout. I didn't have much of an appetite. I was tired all the time. I was sleeping in and it wasn't because of jet lag or travel. I was doing strange things. Like I would fire up my hotspot and work from the back of my car when I was doing the family rounds with the vehicle. Now I was cleaning off my desk. Like I was about to quit my job. But more importantly, like I wasn't motivated to do the things that I normally love to do. I was feeling really blah about work. And I was avoiding people that I would normally hang out with. So what did I do? I scheduled my annual physical. I talked to my doctor about my situation. And they recommended that I see a psychologist. So I sat on the couch a few weeks later, talked it out and was diagnosed with severe anxiety. You know what I mentioned previously are signs of depression and burnout. And that's a lesson that I learned the hard way. Some of the tips that I'm gonna be providing today and solutions may not work for your particular situation. So hopefully you'll be able to find them useful. And before we move on, I wanna say that it's perfectly okay to ask for help. In fact, I would encourage it if you're feeling, if you identify any of these symptoms in your life. So there's a lot of passion from community members in open source and tech in general. We push ourselves to contribute to projects. We sign up for issues to work on. We take on more than we can volunteer for sometimes. And so I did some research and wanted to look at some numbers here. Gallup did a survey in 2018 and 7,500 full-time employees, 23% of them of those workers said they felt burnt out more often than not. An additional 44% reported feeling burned out sometimes. And so those are some pretty staggering numbers. Over 50% people are feeling some sort of stress or anxiety here. And then I wanna talk a little bit about passion. Passion means going above and beyond. And a word of caution is that passion can lead to burnout. I felt like that was partly my situation. I was willing to work the extra hours. I was willing to sign up for extra tasks and help my team push myself to perform. But I still am. But now I have some limitations. I know when I can push hard, I know when I can say no, or when I can defer tasks and objectives. But our work doesn't need to be balanced. It needs to be balanced for three things. And that's recognition, rewards and relaxation. So take your passion for work and make it work for you, but balance it with these three things. And it's important for all of us to know the signs of burnout. So to take measures to prevent burnout and to reduce stress. All right, so let's see lesson number one here. Now let's get going is that you should know the sign is a burnout. Simply put burnout is a form of depression where you are not motivated to perform the things that are expected of you at your job or in your life. It's not the occasional slacking off because the weather's nice. It's a buildup of emotional stress where, as I said, you don't wanna do the things that are asked of you. Sometimes health providers might refer to this as compassion fatigue. So, we talked about how passion could lead to burnout. You work really hard, but there's just so many factors that can lead to burnout. Whether it's too much travel, if we ever get to travel again, unclear expectations, unreasonable deadlines, toxic cultures at work, or maybe it's a work-life imbalance. I remember one thing that was extremely abnormal for me is because I'm so social is that I started to separate myself from my team. As an example, if it was, hey Jason, do you wanna go grab lunch? I would say no, I'm too busy. I was too busy to hang out with people. So, according to the Mayo Clinic, here's a few things I won't do through each of them here, but these are a few things you can ask yourself if you think you're experiencing the signs of burnout. Are you becoming cynical at work? Do you lack energy to do things you normally like to do? Are you using food, drugs, or alcohol to feel better, or to simply not feel at all? And have your sleeping habits changed? Those are just a few, but really good things to analyze here for yourself. So I mentioned a few symptoms above that I was experiencing, but let's get a better picture of the real signs of burnout, or additional signs of burnout, sorry. Now, sometimes people can get really ill, ill, sorry. You might feel a loss of appetite or a loss in interest of things you normally like. As I said, I was feeling separation from my team. I was, quote, too busy to be around them. I wasn't sleeping well. I would stay up late. I would sleep in longer. And ultimately, this, you know, led to my severe anxiety. One thing to note, though, is that it is very difficult to self-diagnose burnout. This is why you and your team should know the signs and hold each other accountable. And another thing I wanna mention here is that you should always listen to your body. If your body's telling you no, then you should take a step back and try to piece together what's happening. Definitely that was my situation where I was not really able to self-diagnose. Number two, a second lesson I wanna share is kind of techniques on how to prevent burnout. First of all, you should take time away from the job, find time to unplug and unwind. This means planning vacations, or probably staycations now, or other just planned time away from work. And I know it could be really hard to unplug like this, but with all the pressures we put on ourselves and obligations we have from work, it's a really healthy for us to do that. So in my experience, you need at least two checkouts a year. Again, I kind of defining checking out as no email, laptops down, make sure you've got work, people to back you up in what you do, things of that nature. I recommend two, but I found myself taking three, unplug and completely escaping over the last few years. I'll tell you that it's a wonderful feeling. I feel like I'm in control and it's working really, really great for me. Number three is not easier said than none, but it's really easy to be connected 24 hours a day, but we've got to unplug. Being connected all the time is not healthy for us. I'm hoping that one thing that humans can learn from this COVID-19 situation we're in is just slow down, take the time and slow down and enjoy the moment. One way to avoid always being on is to share your availability. I find that my work calendar can be really helpful for this. There are special times that you wanna be really specific about your schedule, about what your availability is. And so as an example, if you're out of the office for maybe a conference or if you're on vacation, communicate your time constraints and availability with people in advance. This would be a week ahead of time letting your team or the community work with know that, hey, I'm gonna be out next week. If you don't get something to me by this time, then it's gonna have to wait until I get back. Let people know if you're checking your email, your phone, or chat. And as a reminder, if you're on vacation, the answer is I'm not checking email, phone, or chat. Couple other tips here. Use an autoresponder to set expectations. You can share your schedule there. You can provide other contacts if someone needs assistance. My autoresponder typically will say, I'm out until X date. If you need help with this email this person, living the dream, right? That's my autoresponder. Another example is to, this is a thing that my team did early on earlier this year when COVID started and we started to become more of a distributed team. Is to define how everyone should communicate. So we set clear expectations on how we communicate in real time versus asynchronously. And we also defined how we could better run our meetings. And so my team decided that if we needed a response from someone that email is our definitive answer, not chat. And so that's been working really well for us. All right, number four, impose limits and share them, which can help save you time and help prioritize important things in your life. Now you can set limits around, the amount of time you research an issue or limit the time you spend on checking email. You can block time in your calendar to avoid interruptions. You can turn off chat and email notifications and stop the constant distractions. I was recently setting up a meeting with a coworker and I literally saw on their calendar, it says absolutely no meetings. So that was a clear indicator to me that that was not a good time to meet with that person. Another great example for my personal life is that attending meetups. When we were able to meet in person, we could go to several meetups a day here in the Triangle area of North Carolina. And about the time when my daughter was three and my son was nine, I realized that I wanted to be home more in the evenings to see my kids. And so I didn't want to turn around 10 years later and say, hey, my kids are all grown up and I went to all these great meetups and I missed out on a really important part of their lives. So I decided to set a limit. And my limit was I could attend up to two meetups per week. And so this policy helped me prioritize which meetups were important and ultimately gave me more time with the family. You know, there are a few exceptions throughout the year but for the most part, I stick to that limit. Number five is that having a flexible work schedule can be really key to addressing a lot of the after-hours things that I deal with in my situation. And I know it's not, I know everyone can't have a flexible work schedule so do the best you can here. It's really helpful for someone like me to be able to manage my productivity. Mostly because I'm not much of a morning person. So I reserve my mornings to kind of get up, exercise and then kind of plan the day out ahead of time during that time. So the workouts are great for me, gets the blood flowing, helps me prepare for the day. It's also a really great stress reliever. So when you approach your schedule, I recommend that you kind of define what your core hours are. If something comes up, whether it's work or personal that impacts those core hours, let someone know. You know, as an example, if I were going to a meetup this evening, you know, I might come into the office a little later, let my team know that, hey, you know, gonna be in the office a little later today because I've got a meetup tonight and I don't wanna take all my time away from that. Let's see, there it is, next button, next. You know, also, another example is, you know, if you have a late night code push, adjust your day to start later. So my team typically does code releases in the morning. So when that happens, I just shift my day around. So I'll get up, get up a little earlier than normal, do the QA in production and then I'll either take a break from that or kind of like find the time to do that better. So that could also be like maybe taking a day off earlier or later on in the week. Maybe you take Friday off or something like that. So it's really good to have that balance of schedule if you have something that's gonna be outside of your normal schedule that you have. Okay, number six, easier said than done, but you know, how do you spend your time? You know, I wanna try to use the chat functionality here. You know, just kind of curious, are you trapped in meetings? Are you spending hours answering email? On the chat, on the scale of one to five, one being that you don't know how you spend your time, five being exactly how you spend your time. Just drop that rating into the chat and I'd love to see how much people are aware of how they spend their time or not. So here's a great exercise you can do. If you're a one, two, three, I might recommend that take a week and write down exactly what you do and then take some time to analyze what you do. Figuring this out can help you gain efficiency, identify stressful things in your schedule, try to reduce them, remove them, or to pair them with the stress reliever. So that being, if you know you're gonna have a stressful situation at work, try to put that up against the lunch break or take a walk around the block or whatever you can do to kind of balance that out. So as an example, pre-COVID, I would block out my mornings from 8.30 to 9.30. I would get my daughter on the school bus and then use the rest of the remaining time to do a workout. So I've updated that for COVID and now I block out 9.30. I do a check-in between 9.30 and then I block out 10 to 11 for a workout. So my team knows my schedule and knows my availability there. All right, number seven, one of the worst abusers of how we spend our time is unplanned work. I absolutely hate unplanned work and that there's just so much that's bad about it. So using the chat again, throw in a plus one if you agree that you really dislike unplanned work and maybe you don't agree with it, throw in a negative one for that. I always try to find a way to convert my unplanned work into planned work and try to find out how different ways we can automate things too, that's usually helpful. One of the techniques that I use to move unplanned work into planned work is to use a compound board like Trello. There are many different technology tools out there that are like this. I basically avoid trying to use my email inbox as a to-do list. So I take things out of email and I make them into cards and then I can prioritize them. I also wanna mention here documentation. I think it's really important to document what you do. This way, someone can jump in and be a backup to what you're working on. And also, it's really not job security if you think about it when it's all said and done. All right, number eight, I'm gonna transition here to talk a little about different ways to help manage stress. You should have some sort of stress outlet, whether it's a hobby, a sport or an activity, something that frees your mind from work and from other life demands. If you work on computers all day, I might suggest that your hobby be unplugged and offline. So again, I wanna use the chat here. I'd love to see what some of your interests and hobbies are. It could be things like painting, photography, hiking, breeding, or really anything that you find relaxing. So hopefully, if you wanna share what your hobbies are, maybe you can find someone else in the talk here that you can connect with. One of my go-to stress outlets is exercise. I do a variety of work, whether it's cardio, weightlifting, swimming, running, cycling, surfing. There's a, I have a variety of exercises that keep me stress-relief, that help with my stress. Also here, it might sound a little harsh, but you can't help your team or yourself or your family if you're not in a good spot. And I always think about the airplane analogy here. When we used to fly and travel, in the event or loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will drop down. Put your mask on first before helping others. Again, make time for yourself. I refer to this as me time. That could be meditation, it could be reading, it could be exercise or your favorite hobby. And don't avoid giving up your me time. I think that's, you should protect that time at all costs. All right, number nine, another way to reduce stress is to better manage your time. You get to choose how you spend your time. Is it family, work, self, social? It's up to you. Find ways to work more efficiently, more effectively, and make sure you put yourself first. Again, you can't help others if you're in a bad spot. So here are a few tips on time management. You can use a calendar to manage your time. Again, block off your me time, protect blocks of time to get work done. Analyze how you spend your time so you can gain efficiency there. Default to 30 minute meetings. Use it to-do list, really simple. Start your day by doing the most important things first. Don't waste time waiting, fill in that waiting time with maybe something mindless task or it's time to relax. That's similar things and tasks together to help your brain from having to switch gears. And then learn how to delegate. I know this can be really difficult for some people. So if you need help with delegation, there is a great talk by Deb Nicholson. I won't play the video here, but the link is there. It's called Delegate Like a Boss, really helpful tips from Deb. I encourage you to watch that if you need help with delegation. And number 10, there's a couple articles I'm gonna reference here. The first one is on opensource.com by Chris Short. It's about the art of saying no. Really great read. Spend time doing things that interest you. I know that's not always the case with work. I don't really think the hard part here is that the hard part about saying no is that there's so much opportunity and so many exciting things you can be a part of. But use logic and reason to make those decisions instead of committing to something based off your emotion. There's another article again on opensource.com by Jen Krieger. Give some tips on saying, let's see, let me get it right here. Saying yes in order to get better at saying no. She's got a great set of questions to ask. Is it no or is it not right now? Is it no or is it not the way you asked me to do it? Is it no or can we do a little bit now and a little bit later? So she's got a great set of lists there, a great list of things to go through. And if you do decide to decline an opportunity, say no with grace. Normally I would jump all over this opportunity, but I don't have the time to put the effort in right now. And many times people will appreciate that. All right, so wrapping up here, don't suffer in silence. Whatever you do, if you are approaching burnout, you don't have to face it by yourself. Again, approach your manager, talk to a trusted colleague, seek medical help if you need to. Once I figured out what was wrong, I was able to devise a plan and recover. I found in my situation that time away from keyboard was the best thing. And now, and while I still have intense moments at work, I'm much better equipped to deal with it. I've got the support of my team, and my team is aware of the signs of burnout and behold each other accountable. So it's great to have that. And here's the moment you've all been waiting for. Here is the top 10 list. I won't read all of them since we just went through them. But I will say that burnout can lead to fatigue, excessive stress, sadness, anger, irritability, insomnia, alcohol or substance abuse, and other medical conditions. These are all things that are not good for humans. So if you're a manager, if you're a people manager or you work with a team, not only do you need to know the signs of burnout, but you need to be understanding and supportive. Help those around you and under you to avoid burnout. And I put a link up here for this burnout index. It's a 10 question quiz you can take anonymously to help you access, assess your stress levels. It's a really cool tool. So again, I hope these tips I shared today can help you put yourself first to reduce stress and prevent burnout. I've got all of the, everything I referenced here is linked in the slide, so which are available to you. And that's all I have for you today. Here's my contact information. We're gonna hang around here in the chat for a few minutes. Again, I encourage you to help, to jump in and help each other out. Really appreciate your time today and we'll jump in chat for any Q&A. Thank you so much. All right, well, that was fun watching yourself do a recording. I've got just a few minutes for questions and then happy to jump over and hang out on Slack for a little bit. The first question is, can you provide our slides? Yes, I will add that to Slack here in just a few minutes. It's got complete speaker notes. So hopefully that will be a good resource for you. Second question is about exit strategies and how do you have a conversation about doing repetitive work that can't be automated? So I touched on this a little bit in the talk but if you could find someone to be as a backup, that would be ideal. Maybe you can share the load with that other person or other people. Make sure that what you're doing is documented so that other people can do it. I'm gonna try to get to one or two more questions here. Hopefully that's helpful. One other question here about setting boundaries, particularly when we have virtual conferences and virtual meetings all day. I think it's really easy just to get distracted and pulled back into work. So I know when I'm doing conferences like this, I just communicate with my team that, hey, I'd like to spend the majority of my day doing some training at this conference and just letting people know what my availability is. Obviously, emergencies come up and fires come up but do your best in advance to do that if you can. Easier said than done. I'm gonna stop there, we're almost out of time but I'll head over to Slack and hang out for a little while and I hope you enjoyed the talk and I hope you learned something from it and can please share this with other people. Thank you.