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Update: I stopped taking full days off and my burnout actually got worse
Everyone in here says to take a full day off each week, no laptop, no email, nothing. I tried that for 2 months and it backfired on me. A full free Tuesday sounds great right up until Monday night, when I'm lying in bed at 11pm thinking about the pile waiting for me, and then the whole day off I'm just dreading Wednesday. I'd rather work 4 easy hours on a Sunday morning with coffee and a podcast than white-knuckle a total shutdown and pay for it with a bad night's sleep. A guy I split a studio with in Spokane calls it a maintenance day, and that name fits better for me. My stress went down when I quit treating rest like a rule I had to follow perfectly. If a 6 hour Saturday morning clears the deck so I can actually relax Sunday, that counts as rest in my book. Curious if anyone else finds that a lighter work day beats a full one off, or if I'm just bad at relaxing.
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the_john1d ago
Did you ever try a real day off and feel like it made the dread worse too? I used to be in the full shutdown camp and thought people who worked a little on weekends were just fooling themselves. Then I had the same thing happen, where the free day turned into a stress day because the work was still sitting there in my head. Now a short Saturday morning with coffee and no email open does more for me than a whole day of trying not to think about it. It sounds dumb but the dread is really about the pile, not the work itself, so chipping at the pile kills the dread. If a light work day makes Sunday feel actually free, that's rest, no matter what the rule says.
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