Today, I was reading a blog post “Surviving Burnout” on dev-human.io. After reading that blog post, I realized that breaks are so very much important in life. And the very fact you should learn how to say no in life, politely though. It has been more than three years since I went out for a long vacation or a sabbatical for that matter. I have simply been coding and working on projects continuously (even during the weekends) to achieve the work deadlines. But I guess, amidst all this, we must realize that the run for these deadlines is never really going to come to a standstill.
I remember the time when having hundreds of assigned to-dos used to give me a lot of stress. No matter how hard I tried to finish all those to-dos and managed to bring those hundreds to few, but after 2-3 weeks it would all be same again. However after reading this post, I realized that I share one of the three symptoms that were mentioned in the post, i.e., “Forgetfulness.” Since I am a web developer turned into a Team Leader & Manager, I would struggle hard with managing my things, calendar events, note takings, and writing training process for employees etc,. Also owing to my work responsibilities (where I have to manage different team members and different teams), I would skip my important dates and prioritized tasks or would end up forgetting and assigning tasks to my team members. I often wondered if it was due to my bad management, but I believe that my forgetfulness had been contributing to it as a significant reason. I first kept on ignoring this for a few weeks, and then soon did I realize (actually after a few months, to be honest) that – this was certainly something that I could not afford to ignore. Because it was not only creating problems in my professional life, but was also affecting me as a person.
I soon visited a doctor, and he advised me to sleep properly and even gave me some medicines to ease the condition. However in midst of all, I realized that the medicines were not the things that I ever needed, I just needed the sleep (a good sleep, I’d say). As the time passed by, I started feeling better and my management skills were soon improved by a great extent. Not just that, I was also getting better at defeating my forgetfulness. But I do realize this very fact now that whenever I take too much of stress or make myself buried with too much of work, those symptoms tend to crawl back. I do admit however that I tend to spend too much time in front of my workstation.
Anyways, after reading that blog post, I feel that I should bring some changes to my work style or tweak it to a level. And I should finally learn to say no. And, and… I should seriously stop getting stressed due to too much of my work.
It’s like – instead of doing everything by myself and hesitating to delegate difficult tasks to my team members, I should try to trust them some more and should delegate tasks to my team members. And yeah, communicate more and more with people within the society.
