Notes on Almost Burning Out

I recorded the first version of this on a train, talking into my phone with station announcements cutting in over me. That tells you most of what you need to know about the state I was in. The last couple of weeks were rough — not dramatic, not a crisis, just the slow kind of rough where you notice you haven't had a real day off in a while and you can't remember what you did with any of the hours.

So I did the thing I'd do with a broken system at work: stop, find the causes, change one variable at a time. This is that writeup. It's not advice. It's an experiment log with no results yet.

TL;DR

• Three causes: constant context switching, no boundary between work and life, and pressure I invented to prove value nobody asked me to prove.
• The third one was the real one. The company has runway and the team already trusts me — I was sprinting against a deadline that didn't exist.
• Three rules I'm testing: one notification channel, a forced break every hour, and a hard line between the workday and the rest of the day.
• Verdict: unknown. I'll update this post when I know.

Cause 1: I never finished a thought

The pattern was always the same. I'd get momentum on something — real momentum, the kind that takes twenty minutes to build — and then a Slack message would land, or my boss would ping, or a triage would come in, and I'd stop. Not "finish the sentence and stop." Just stop.

The cost isn't the interruption. It's that afterwards I'm holding two things at once: the thing I'm doing, and the thing I now have to remember to do. Do that enough times in a day and you're not really working on anything, you're just maintaining a list of open tabs in your head. The work still got done. It got done badly, and it took the whole day to do it.

I've written before about how execution getting cheap moves the job up a level — but judgment is exactly the thing that doesn't survive being interrupted every eight minutes.

Cause 2: Monday through Friday was only work, and so was Sunday

Working from home blurred the edges until there weren't any. Monday to Friday was work. Weekends, I'd still check Slack — not because anything was on fire, just because checking had become a reflex. So there was no moment, anywhere in the week, where I was actually off. Rest that you might get interrupted from isn't rest. It's standby.

Cause 3: I was proving something to people who already believed me

This is the one that actually mattered, and it took me the longest to see.

Somewhere in my head I was afraid I wasn't providing enough value to the team, so I kept pushing to prove I was. Then we did a review, and it turned out they trusted me. They already thought I was good at the thing I was trying to prove I was good at. The pressure wasn't coming from them. I'd generated all of it myself and then treated it as an external deadline.

And the surrounding facts didn't support the panic either. We're a Series A company with a long runway, tens of millions in revenue, a strong relationship with our investors, and a strong team. Nothing was about to break. I was sprinting like something was.

Worth saying plainly: the fear was real even though the threat wasn't. Being told the numbers are fine doesn't switch it off. But it does mean the fix is about managing myself, not about working harder.

The three rules

1. One channel gets to reach me

I turned off every notification connection between my phone and my Mac. When I'm working, I don't check my phone. On the Mac, the only things that can interrupt me are work channels — Slack, Squad, Gmail. One surface, not five. Everything else waits, and it turns out everything else is fine with waiting.

2. A real break every hour

Every hour or so I make myself get up and do something that costs nothing to think about. Walk around the block, look at the neighborhood, grab a coffee. The point isn't the walk. It's that my brain slows down enough to sort through what's next — including the life admin I've been deferring — without any of it being work. No podcast, no Slack on the phone. Just the cheapest possible thinking.

3. A hard line between the workday and the day

My work takes about 80% of my week, and some of it genuinely happens at night — my boss is in the US, our customers are in the US, and that's the job. Fine. But when the call ends, it ends. I go into calm mode: rest, or do something I actually want to do, offline from anything that can pop up new. The work being chaotic is not a reason for the rest of the day to also be chaotic. If anything it's the reason it can't be.

We'll see

That's the whole method. Three rules, aimed at three causes, and none of them are clever — the hard part was admitting that the third cause was self-inflicted.

I don't know yet whether this works. Ask me in a month. I'll update this post either way, including if the answer is that I quietly stopped following my own rules by week two.