From your experience, is the most damaging part of a cause based burnout the emotional fallout of putting so much importance in The Cause, and then beating yourself up about not meeting the crazy high standards you’ve made?
To me, the most effective way I’ve found to avoid getting sucked into “you aren’t doing enough!” has been to ask my self as many specific questions as possible about what exactly I “should” be doing. How much is “enough”? Am I actually capable of doing “enough”? Is “enough” just serving as an unreachable point of emotional satisfactions? In my own mind, I’ve found a few times that thoughts like, “You are bad because you aren’t doing X!” didn’t really care about the X at all; they were just excuse for me to tell myself I wan’t good enough.
Something that’s helped me a lot has been getting a better feel for how long certain works takes me, how long I can do focused deep work reliably, both of which have made me a lot better at answering, “Can I also take on tasks X and Y this week? What will or won’t have to be sacrificed?” Then, if you feel like you want to be able to do more for your cause, it becomes a matter of finding ways to train and expand your capacity.
Yeah, I think the biggest problem for me was that I felt deficient for failing to live up to the standard I set for myself. I sort of shunted those emotions aside and I really fell out of a lot of habits of self-improvement and hard work for a time. So I would say the emotional fallout lead to the most damaging part (of losing good habits in the aftermath). Thinking about tradeoffs in terms of tasks completed is a good idea as well, I’ll try doing that more explicitly.
I’ve found that doing postmortems on all my projects is extremely helpful for keeping the long term perspective in mind. I think this is probably because it forces me to make all my projects discrete entities over time, forcing me to step back, reflect, and adjust my course instead of clustering them all together as “work” in my mind.
This carries the added benefit of giving me lots of information about my workflow and how it fluctuates under various conditions. For example, I’ll usually record the costs of the project (Money, Neutral Hours.), any external variables (time constraint, multiple projects at once, working with or without people, etc.) and any factors I constructed (How well does a donut per $X/Nh incentivize me to do a certain kind of work, what happens to my comprehension and test scores when I study with naps or interval breaks or whatever.) Additionally, this makes for a convenient way to optimize different activities for certain outcomes by way of experimentation.
From your experience, is the most damaging part of a cause based burnout the emotional fallout of putting so much importance in The Cause, and then beating yourself up about not meeting the crazy high standards you’ve made?
To me, the most effective way I’ve found to avoid getting sucked into “you aren’t doing enough!” has been to ask my self as many specific questions as possible about what exactly I “should” be doing. How much is “enough”? Am I actually capable of doing “enough”? Is “enough” just serving as an unreachable point of emotional satisfactions? In my own mind, I’ve found a few times that thoughts like, “You are bad because you aren’t doing X!” didn’t really care about the X at all; they were just excuse for me to tell myself I wan’t good enough.
Something that’s helped me a lot has been getting a better feel for how long certain works takes me, how long I can do focused deep work reliably, both of which have made me a lot better at answering, “Can I also take on tasks X and Y this week? What will or won’t have to be sacrificed?” Then, if you feel like you want to be able to do more for your cause, it becomes a matter of finding ways to train and expand your capacity.
Yeah, I think the biggest problem for me was that I felt deficient for failing to live up to the standard I set for myself. I sort of shunted those emotions aside and I really fell out of a lot of habits of self-improvement and hard work for a time. So I would say the emotional fallout lead to the most damaging part (of losing good habits in the aftermath).
Thinking about tradeoffs in terms of tasks completed is a good idea as well, I’ll try doing that more explicitly.
I’ve found that doing postmortems on all my projects is extremely helpful for keeping the long term perspective in mind. I think this is probably because it forces me to make all my projects discrete entities over time, forcing me to step back, reflect, and adjust my course instead of clustering them all together as “work” in my mind.
This carries the added benefit of giving me lots of information about my workflow and how it fluctuates under various conditions. For example, I’ll usually record the costs of the project (Money, Neutral Hours.), any external variables (time constraint, multiple projects at once, working with or without people, etc.) and any factors I constructed (How well does a donut per $X/Nh incentivize me to do a certain kind of work, what happens to my comprehension and test scores when I study with naps or interval breaks or whatever.) Additionally, this makes for a convenient way to optimize different activities for certain outcomes by way of experimentation.