‘Cause every footstep was a lifetime passed
Every pin prick left an autograph
Sign the old familiar photograph
Too old to last
Too young to fall apart
Too young to fall apart
Too young to fall apart
Too young to fall apart

–Lane 8 “Yard Two Stone”

we don’t talk about burnout enough in the US. It’s just something that people who are lucky enough to have health insurance and therapists ever talk about. And even then, doesn’t mean the situation gets any better. It might even get worse.

Working where I do, I am extremely lucky in a lot of ways. I have a great bunch of mentors (hi WG, WM, DK…). I have a lot of freedom to make mistakes as long as I’m learning from them.

But burnout is real and something everyone should take a moment to reflect upon.

I mention this for a few reasons, not least of which is that doing two jobs for the last few months has worn me down, that I’ve pulled back from a lot of my non-work commitments (e.g., WMATA’s Riders’ Advisory Council), and that I’m getting on a good night ~5.5hrs sleep. This has been detrimental to my life overall and has had some serious negative consequences that will be with me for a very long time to come. There’s also the risk of spiralling, something I’m personally terrified of happening.

There’s a quiz going around tech twitter and similar strata to measure burnout amongst tech and tech-adjacent people. I didn’t give them any personally identifiable information but they do have some helpful questions to ask yourself at the end that I copied down for future reference.

I mention this because my burnout score was 5.4/6. And it has left me with a lot of questions to think about right now. First and foremost: how to stop it from hitting 5.5.

I shared it in the Code4Lib IRC and may try to get a group together in Pittburgh to talk about it. For Library people, it’s something we definitely need to talk about and for LibTech folks, that goes triple. There’ll be a meeting at my house tomorrow at 2:00pm.

The topic? “How to not be like me and let it get as far as it has.”

It feels tough to admit this, I guess. But especially in such a public way. Alas.

Coding makes me anxious. I’m still very much an amateur, despite using it at work. I have a lot to learn and seemingly little time to work on it (for a lot of complicated reasons almost all to do with the pile of hats I’m wearing right now).¹

That means I don’t have a lot of time to focus and actually learn stuff. I used to spend some time on the weekends doing stuff and joining the Tildeverse (I’m on ~team) has helped a lot too (here’s looking at you, ynx, gbmor, ben, jess, and june). If for no other reason than it’s being an encouraging kind of place where asking for help and fucking up are both okay.

But I’m writing this because I wrote a script today to replaces some aliases in my fish configuration for internet radio stations I really like. And for the first time, it felt kinda natural, like I knew what the fuck I was doing.²

So here it is.

It’s simple and it just does a very simple thing, but it’s mine.

And yes, I do use a cowsay fox to tell me stuff and call me chief. Her name is Beate and I’ll brook no snarkiness here…

Too much. It’s really become all too much.

Since I started using DevonThink last year I dump all of my email from the previous month into two databases, one for work email and one for personal email. When I went to do this yesterday, I decided it would be much more helpful if I created subgroups for each year of email. So, I decided to split out all of the pre-2015 email from the main database and stored it in a few safe places.¹ All fine and good.

But this made me realize the frankly kinda shocking fact that my email volume has grown enormously in the past few years. Not just because of starting a full-time job, but my personal email especially.

In other words, that’s an increase of 1590%(!!) in personal email since 2015 and a much more modest 15% on work email. For January 2020, I’m at 1988 personal emails and 1291 work emails. Assuming the rest of the year is about the same rate, at current I’ll get around 23,856 personal emails and 15,492 work emails. Shattering last year’s record by 8,282 more emails.

This is, pardon me, fucking madness.

What the hell happened to reach this point? Well, I have a few theories.

1. Newsletters and Notifications.

I’ve made the mistake of signing up for a lot of email newsletters, most of which are just marked as read and ignored.

Some leading offenders:

• The Washington Post [email protected]: 720 (2018), 1170 (2019)
• Richmond Times-Dispatch [email protected]: 239 (2018), 508 (2019)
• GitHub (new versions and discussion in watched repos) [email protected]: 132 (2018), 262 (2019)

My Fear of Missing Out (aka FOMO) is itchy AF. You get the idea.

2. I’ve ended up on too many promo lists.

Admittedly, since creating a domain that allows me to use anything in front of the @ sign (e.g., [email protected]), it has allowed me to sign up for things without thinking.

3. I just have so so so much more to do. sigh

The worst part maybe is that as a person who really likes having an empty inbox, I do get a little antsy when that’s not the case. That’s been harder and harder to achieve. So now I’m at the point if it’s an email that I’d otherwise ignore and mark as read, I’m finally gonna just unsubscribe. The only way I can even begin to process all of this is the 48 different sorting rules I use with Fastmail (referral link) to create a vague sense of order.

But this is absolute madness. I’m too connected and it’s not just email: Slack, Signal, IRC, Twitter (hell site that it is), SMS, it’s godforsaken madness. During the day I charge up my phone at work but hide it under my monitor stand so I don’t even think about it. I’ve forgotten to take it home a few times and am probably better off for it, in anycase.

Nevertheless, something’s gotta give. This is just…

YIKES.