MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike. I'm hosting again today. It seems like I've done a long streak here [laughs]. I've got a great panel with me here today. I've got Eddy. I've got Ramses. I've got Justin, Dave, Kyle, and Will Archer, as is usually with us, is here with us today as well. And I'm going to jump right into a story, and I'm going to talk a little bit deeper about that to introduce our topic. This is something we’ve talked about before. Well, I'm going to start with a story, but then circle back. I'm going to talk about when I was a teenager [laughs]. I think I was 18, 19, late teens. And when I was a kid, it was my parents, but mostly my mom would tell me to go out and weed the flower bed. And I hated it. I hated the fact that I had to go out there and do what seemed like a totally pointless task. It doesn't look that much different. The flower bed is going to look messy. Anyway, we got rid of the flower bed that had most of the weeds because it always looked bad, and we just put a lawn there [laughs]. It was going to look bad anyway. And I'm just going to go stand up there in the sun for, you know, an hour, pull these weeds. They'll be back next week. It just drove me crazy. I hated it, and it ate at me. So, it was this thing that anytime I had to do it, it was just, ugh, again. I’d complain about it, as kids are prone to do [laughs]. And I was 18 or 19, and I got a job, and I was pulling weeds [laughs]. And that old feeling came back, and I was starting to feel all those feelings. And I thought about a friend of mine, a friend of mine named Dan. He's great. He worked at a plant nursery, so he’d been working at a job where he pulled weeds most of the day, every day, and had done that for years [laughs]. And I thought, what would Dan do about this? And I realized he seemed to enjoy it. I thought, well, you know what? I'm sitting outside, and [laughs] there was this sunrise. I thought about this as the sun was coming up. You start early when you do landscaping kind of jobs because it gets hot, so [chuckles], you know, early in the day. So, I’m sitting there, and I’m seeing the sun come out. Like, I'm watching the sun come up. I'm outside. I like being outside [laughs]. I am doing something that I actually enjoy. I'm making money. I'm getting paid decently. And the only reason that I'm not liking this is because I've built a habit of not liking this. What's wrong with just following the weeds and thinking about something else? And it was actually kind of a formative moment in my life. And I said, “What would Dan do? [laughs]” It was more than that because I started thinking about it. I could be enjoying this. Why am I not enjoying this? And I got to make a choice. Now, I think there's a lot deeper picture to that. There was a reason I didn't enjoy it [chuckles] because the history leading up to it, I didn't have a choice in the matter. And anytime you lose any agency, that personal ability to make choices, it takes something from you [chuckles], and it had been taken. And I’m like, hey, I’m going to take it back [laughs], and I was able to in that time. And I try to think about that when I'm in those situations, and sometimes you can't, right? You can't just say, “I'm going to be happy today.” One of the best ways to not be happy is to say, “I'm going to be happy today [laughs].” It doesn't work. You can't choose that. Keeping along with talking about weeds, it's like a garden [chuckles]. You cultivate a garden and help things grow. The plants grow on their own, right? But you can plant the seeds. You can pull the weeds. You can cultivate around them. You can fertilize, and you can put mulch down. You can do all kind, you know, to retain moisture, you can water it. There are all kinds of things you can do to provide a great environment for those plants to grow, and happiness is the same way. You can't say, “I'm going to be happy today.” In fact, it's really offensive usually to say to somebody, “Why don't you just smile?” Don't say that [laughs] because it's patronizing and diminishes somebody's real experience, and that's not going to fix the problem. And I think sometimes people are trying to say, “Well, you know, kind of fake it till you make it.” There's some aspect of attitude that can change that, but you got to cultivate the garden, right? And if somebody takes away your ability to do that, then those weeds are going to come up, and there's not much you can do about it. But there are things that you can do, which brings us to our topic today. About a year ago, we did a session on burnout, and we're coming back to that today. If you haven't been living under a rock, living in a cave for the last several months [chuckles] cut off from outside civilization, or maybe you've been up on the space station and just landed, there's been a couple of people like that [laughs], you may have noticed that there are a lot of things going on in the economy [chuckles], a lot of things going on in the economy, a lot of lost jobs, and particularly in software. When the interest rates went up, a lot of the big companies said, “Oh wow, I can invest money in other things besides my people, and it'll make money.” And they did. And they said, “Oh, let's go of all those people.” And so, there's a flood of thousands, tens of thousands of people from big tech companies that have gone on the market, and that, obviously, affects the market. A lot of companies are also asking questions. We talked about this a few sessions ago. What's AI going to do? What are all other changes going to do? And it's hard to find a job. So, a lot of people don't feel like they should move, and you maybe shouldn't. There's changes we have to make. And a lot of us are in situations where maybe some people have left, and we're doing extra work. So, revisiting burnout seems like a great topic today. It seems like a really good place to go. And I'll maybe put a little disclaimer here. There have actually been some really positive changes at Acima in the last month or so that have kind of lightened the mood. But sometimes things are, you know, in the real world, sometimes things are up, sometimes things are down. And I think we should really grapple with this. What do you do? What do you do to address burnout when maybe you can't change jobs? Now, when we talked about this before, we talked about some big things we could do. Maybe we can reduce your hours. You can work with your manager. Particularly if you're a manager, maybe you can reduce some hours for people so that they have more flexibility with their schedule, right? And there are a lot of things about the things that you can do there. Well, we're going to talk about it today from a different perspective. If you're not the manager, if you’re not the one who can make these kinds of choices, how do you make life work when you're threatening burnout? And I'm going to start. I've been talking a little bit because there's a lot to lead here with. I think it'll help the discussion. I actually went to the Mayo Clinic, to their website. And they have a list of symptoms of burnout and possible causes. So, I'm just going to mention some of these because I think it's very effective. It's like the definition from a leading clinic. They say, “Do you question the value of your work? Do you drag yourself to work and have trouble getting started? Do you feel removed from your work and the people you work with? Have you lost patience with coworkers, customers, or clients? Do you doubt your skills or abilities? Are you using food, drugs, or alcohol to feel better or to numb how you feel?” And they mentioned some other things that can come out of there. And then, they said possible causes. And I think this one's really interesting as well. “Lack of control. Lack of clarity about what's expected of you.” I could go back to that lack of control. I didn't get to choose where I pulled the weeds [laughs]. “Conflicts with others. Too much or too little to do. Lack of support. Problems with work-life balance.” And they've got more material as well. But I think that sets the stage, you know, I want to define what burnout is. It's like, you're not happy anymore, but it's more than that. You tend to get aggravated. You don't care about it. You don't want to do your job anymore. Just overall, this negative affect that's caused by work. So, lots of preface, and one shiny example of a time that I got better with it in a relatively easy situation to do so. What are your thoughts about burnout? Feel free to tell stories, you know, about what you're dealing with. Remember, not everybody here works at Acima [laughs]. So, don't take this as an indictment of our workplace because we'll tell stories from lots of places of business. But what do you do, and what can you do when you maybe don't have as much control as you'd like to have? WILL: I've got a burnout story from a different perspective. So, in the before times, in the olden times, I had my own software company. I ran my own software company for 10 years, right? 10 years is a looong time to be in the game. And so, it is good and bad, right? Because, on one hand, like, you're going to feel some burnout. You're going to get that burnout. And, on the other hand, like, you have effectively unlimited options to do it. You could do whatever you want. You're going to pay for it, but you can do it. And, like I said, 10 years. You can have unhealthy work habits for a year or two or three even, if you're a real hard charger. But at 10 years, you are going to have to be familiar with your limits. It's going to be like you're a professional marathon runner or a bike racer, whatever, where managing your energy and your endurance is a fundamental job skill. And so, where I got really familiar with burnout was when it was maybe a year in, right? And I had a giant feature that I got out. I don't even remember what I was trying to get out, honestly. But I remember I worked haaard, like, no offense, but you don't work that hard for somebody else's shop. If you did, you'd have a mild form of brain damage, and God bless you for it. But it was like, sleeping in the office, like, extreme grind mode. And I shipped my thing, and I was like, I know I'm loopy. I know I'm messed up. And I know I got to get this thing because the next thing is coming, right? I didn't do that for fun, and the treadmill never stops. But I knew I needed to get my legs back. And so, what I did was, I was like, okay, I'm going to go in. I'm going to wake up when I feel like waking up, and I'm going to go into the office, and I'm going to work until I don't feel like working anymore, and I'm going to get out. Like, okay, you know, for, like, a week at least or maybe two, I'm going to do that. Because I manage my productivity like a professional athlete, like, LeBron James ain't got nothing on me. I had a program, which is an endorsement, called RescueTime. And there are other ones. RescueTime is the one I use. And all it does is it tracks every single thing that you do on your laptop, like, spyware to the maximum, right? And I track my productive hours, and my back off week, my rest week, and my ultra hardcore sleeping, eating, drinking in the office, everything at my desk, exactly the same, exactly the same amount of productive hours, dead even. MIKE: Wow. WILL: And I think that's the nature of burnout and the insight that you really need to take from that is it is...and I keep on going back to this marathon analogy because there's a thing called a wall, where you bonk in a marathon where you have exhausted your muscles capacity to generate energy. And you cannot run. A marathon is like this sort of, like, your muscles get sugar and blood and break down fats and whatever. They break down energy, break down energy, break down energy. And you're replenishing energy, you know, your anaerobic state, and you basically want to ride this way. So, if you're crossing the finish line and, like, the gas tank is empty, right? Because when the gas tank is empty, you're done [laughs]. And that was exactly where I found myself. I was done. I hit that wall, and I was finished. But failure was not an option. Stopping was not an option. And you'll see the people running marathons, where they soil themselves in various ways, and they're staggering zombie-like because they're not done. And the reason burnout is...you have to manage it. You cannot muscle your way through it. If I can get anything into anybody's head about burnout, it's that you cannot muscle your way through it. You can't do it. And when you hit that wall, you need to make some kind of a change. There’s nobody in your office, in the office of Acima that was as motivated as I was at that time to get things done. And I just couldn't do it until I got right. And I think because it's internal, it's a really seductive thought pattern to say, “Oh, I'm a bad person. Oh, I suck. Oh, you know, I lost it,” like, whatever, whatever, whatever because it all exists in your head. And it's not like I'm staggering my way to a finish line on a marathon, and my legs just won't move. So, anyway, that's maybe what I would offer in terms of my experience with burnout. MIKE: That's fantastic. I love that analogy. I've actually read a lot about this [chuckles]. I've read a lot about this marathon. It's primarily in your liver, I believe. There's glycogen, like, you take glucose, and you stick a whole bunch of them together, and you just have this kind of glob of glucose gunk. It's a sugar that your body can reserve, and your body tends to keep about two hours of reserve. And if you're an absolutely elite marathon runner, you could do it in about two hours. And so, people get close to that finish line, and they hit that...it's gone, right? WILL: Yeah. MIKE: They're almost there, and they just...you're done because, literally, there is nothing there. And if you don't carefully replenish that reserve, there's nothing you can do. I do a lot of cycling. And I've experienced this very personally [laughs]. If I don't keep that chug sugar, right [laughs], and it's really sugar, if you don't keep that energy up, then you will hit that wall, and there is nothing you can do. And you will feel terrible. And it doesn't matter how much you want to go. You're not going to. You're not going to go any further. And very much you think, well, if I just push harder. No, that's not how it works. It's just not. DAVE: It’s like trying to get out of bankruptcy or trying to prevent bankruptcy by spending more. MIKE: [laughs] DAVE: You are headed to bankruptcy because you were cashflow negative. And then, you’re white-knuckling through it. You’re just, like trying to pay more. It's like the old joke about Walmart, right? It's like, we're going to sell these for less than we paid for them, but we're going to make it up in volume. No, it doesn't work that way [laughs]. WILL: Yeah, precisely. MIKE: And you also said that you do that self-judgment, right? There's a lot of self-judgment there. Well, if I were just more capable, if I were a better person, if I cared more, I would get there. But there's physics, right [laughs]? If I care enough, it doesn't make me fly. EDDY: Talking from someone who came up from QA not knowing much about development, I spent the first year and a half diving in, like, trying to learn everything all at once, drinking from a fire hose. But it's fine. It's fine. It’s fine. It'll eventually click. I don't have to worry about it. I'll get to a point where I'm really, really good and I can slow down, right? But the problem was I never knew when that slowdown was supposed to happen, right? Like, to me, it was always keep going, keep going, keep going. And oh, if I just learn this, if I just learn this, then I'll be good. Oh, but if I just learn this...and it was a constant hill over and over, and eventually, like, the gruesome hours finally caught up, right? So, I think part of burnout is really trying to understand what your limits are and take a break before you hit that point. WILL: Absolutely. Absolutely. I am a big fan of metrics and tracking and stuff like that. Like, RescueTime, I got a lot out of because it was like, it’s been tracking everything I've done on the laptop for 10 years plus. It's got a big data set, and you could see where you go bad. And so much of this stuff, you know, if anybody's listening to this podcast, you're going to have to come up with your own blend of herbs and spices. There's going to be things that mess you up. There's going to be things that you can do, things you can't do. And a lot of it is just...what I hope we could get into is sort of small ball tactical things where it's like, do this; don't do that. You can get this big grab bag of things that you could try out to keep yourself on the ball. Because it's going to be a personal recipe. What works for me won't work for you. What works for you won't work for me although it's going to rhyme. And there's probably stuff that if you can't lift directly from somebody else, you can certainly take inspiration from it. And it's also dynamic, right? That's the thing. Your brain is, I don't know, like, I anthropomorphize, the slack-off part of my brain, the resistance. To take something from a really good book called “The War of Art,” that deals with working artists, people who have a day job and want to maintain creative pursuits in their lives, like, that concept of resistance is burnout by another name. And it will always come at you, and it will come at you in a thousand different ways. And the thing that worked today might not work tomorrow, might not work the next week. And your tools get dull from overuse, and you'll try. It's always going to be ups and downs, and you just sort of try and make sure the trend line is going up. But you're going to have bad days, you know, you're going to get beat. MATT: A lot of this comes from culture. There are a number of us on this call who have been around a while, and I think most of us that have come from a world of early startups. That early startup mentality is a constant death march, and it kind of gets instilled in you. And, unfortunately, I still have that in me a lot because I spend a lot of hours outside of working hours doing things related to work because that's just who I am. However, it's not sustainable. It's absolutely not sustainable. And I think if it comes from the top, that culture of work-life balance, ending death marches, which if you're applying modern software principles, you shouldn't be doing death marches, right? If you're Agile, if you're CI/CD, those types of things help prevent it, but it's still around a bit. And when you feel that pressure, as adults, we want to take the responsibility upon ourselves to see it through, and I think that's oftentimes where we fail. And it's surprising to me, honestly, Will, that you said the amount of time of your productivity was the same because I find myself less productive. If I'm working 19, 20 hours a day versus a healthy I want to work 8 hours a day, I'm going to get more productivity out of that 8 hours every time. WILL: I was highly motivated, like, nobody would work those hours if their name wasn't on the door. MATT: Yeah, I've had a few of those for sure. WILL: I’d be like, if one of my junior devs was working like that, I'd be like, “Hey.” DAVE: Go home. I need you here tomorrow. MATT: Yeah. Slow down. WILL: Yeah. Go home [laughs]. MATT: And often, things that have motivated me to do these things it's that dangling carrot, right? The thought of equity and the payoff. And if this is successful, what am I getting out of it? And there's always going to be those types of motivations I think that force it. But how many of those things have actually paid off, right? I think in 20, I don't even know how many years anymore, 27 years doing this, twice it's paid off for me. And I–- EDDY: I think part of that comes from pride in your work. If you're stamping the work that you're doing and it's going out in the wild, right? Like, you want to make sure that it's pristine; it's sustainable; and it's good. That was part of my problem dealing with burnout. It was like, dude, this project will have my name. I'll have the git blame. I’ll be the person who was involved in this project. I want to make sure it gets done correctly. It was my big hurdle. MATT: Yeah. And I think a lot of that really boils down to trust, right? Trust your peers. Ask for help. Have the confidence to ask for help and reach out and say, “Look, you know what? I need a break. I've been going constantly on this, and I need someone else's eyes on this, and I need to slow down.” And that's really important to have a healthy work-life, right? WILL: Yeah. It’s hard, too, because I suppose one of the worries is, like, people who have the personality traits that I would say are required to be a good developer, right? You need to have a belief in your work. You need to have self-motivation. You need to have conscientiousness. You need to have, if I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, maybe a little smidgen of anxiety around. Like, most of the really good developers I know they got a little anxious [inaudible 24:57] in them. MATT: Everybody on this call with anxiety raise your hand, really. I bet you every single person on this call has it [laughs]. Absolutely. Absolutely. WILL: This is a little bit of a tangent, a little bit of a tangent. I had a buddy who went through some personal stuff, and he went on anti-anxiety meds because he was going through it. He had some life challenges, and he couldn't [laughs] work anymore because without the anxiety, he [laughs] was just like, “I'm not doing this. This is stupid.” MATT: I experienced the same thing, did the same thing. WILL: And it’s -- MATT: You need it. It pushes you, right? WILL: Sure. Sure. But at the same time, when you have those kinds of personality traits, when you find yourself in a burnout situation, what I think is so insidious...and it really depends strongly on leadership to lead, and when I say leadership, I don't mean managers of a certain level. I mean leadership which may or may not exist. If things aren't going good, as a general rule, when you hit burnout, like, things are not going well. And so, when you need these sort of coping strategies for burnout, it’s exactly when there's a lot of pressure on you to perform, if that makes sense. Like, I didn't do my experiment on working not even half the hours and getting the same amount done until it shipped. I shipped first. This is the last time I'll say it, regular employees should not and will not, and I think, cannot work like that. You shouldn't do it, and you cannot do it long-term working for somebody else because there's no...if you're going to work this hard, man, just get a different job, you know. Just do something else. DAVE: Yeah. If you're going to drive yourself that hard, you need to be owning your time, not renting it. WILL: Exactly. EDDY: I do want to take a moment because I feel like the standard or the norm has always just been 40 hours. I don't know when that was established. It's way beyond my time. But when I started working, it was -- MATT: It was before all our times [laughter] Henry Ford. EDDY: Gotcha. WILL: That was the productive amount of time that somebody could bolt a door on a Model T Ford. It's literally that. He had a...not a spreadsheet, right? He had a bunch of people with adding machines tacking up the optimal amount of productivity. And it wasn't 12 hours, and it wasn't 10 hours; it was 8 hours. And it was working the line at the Ford Plant in Dearborn, Michigan in the, what, 1920s. That's it. EDDY: Wow, Today I Learned. MIKE: People used to work on farms. It was 12 hours a day, 6, 7 [laughs] days a week, and it was a real shift. 40 was, like, wow, you're dropping that? It was research. DAVE: From way back. MIKE: That's what you can actually do effectively. EDDY: Now, I wanted to just list out just a couple of things from countries that have gone away from that normality, and they have noticed no effect on productivity, right? Just to name a few, because it's kind of extensive, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, France, Belgium, et cetera. Like -- JUSTIN: You're just naming all of Europe, man [laughs]. EDDY: I guess. MATT: Scandinavia anyway. [laughter] JUSTIN: I want to go to Europe now. MIKE: [laughs] EDDY: The average is about 30 hours a week, right? And they’re able to be -- MATT: Yeah. They're on a four-day work week generally in those areas. EDDY: I'm wondering, just by naming these, I'm wondering how prevalent burnout actually is, right? Like, it would be a really awesome comparison. I don't know, but I’m willing -- JUSTIN: You mean burnout in Europe versus burnout here? EDDY: Yeah. Like, that would be a really nice contrast, right? Just to see if there's a direct correlation between that. MIKE: There’s an interesting -- WILL: Don't forget the salary difference between Europe and here. A senior dev in Europe is making like, I don't know, like, not a lot, 70, 80. That’s like, upper level. EDDY: Sure. But, like, cost of living is also less, too, right? So, you're able to make a fraction of what you make in the U.S. living in another country, but you’re -- JUSTIN: It depends on the country. MIKE: Yeah, it depends on the country. MATT: And I think that goes into politics, which we do not want to discuss on this podcast. [laughter] MIKE: But there’s a contrast, too, because, in China, they have an opposite thing where people will die because they're working so many hours. Like, they've literally been awake too much, working so much their body just stops. And that is widely acclaimed. And I think sometimes there's looking down on, you know, they look negatively at people, like, you're only working 40 hours? And that is true with some businesses as well. And some people make it work. I think maybe a bigger question is, without going into politics, why would some people feel like that's what they need to do, and some people don't? What’s the difference? WILL: Well, they call it -- MATT: Human conditions. WILL: They call it 996, 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 at night, six days a week. That is the working thing. And I'll tell you exactly what it is. It's because, like, China's a dog fight. If you are in the top level of China like Beijing, or Shenzhen, or the big cities in China and you got a good job, like, you're living real good. However, most of the country is not like that. And there are a hundred poverty-stricken, rural people gunning for your job. And so, it is a pressure cooker, the likes of which we can't really fathom in the West. MATT: It's also individual, right? Some people just aren't built for it. Some people are. My grandfather worked full-time until he was 92 years old and died. He didn't have to. He owned the company. The company's been around since the early 1900s, successful. He owned it, but he was at work every day until he was 92 because that's just who he was. And some people are just like that, like, it's what defines them. Is that right? I don't know. I think that's subjective, but -- MIKE: Well, you both just hit on a couple of things. If you have to do it, that sure provides a lot of motivation, right? That lights a fire beneath you. Like, if I don't do this, I lose my job, and I'm going to be out on the street. It gives you a lot of motivation to work hard. Likewise, if it's your own business and you love it, you want to do it, right? Having intrinsic motivation makes a huge difference, and that comes to what feels like work versus what doesn't. Now, it might still feel like work if you have to do it, but you do that to feed yourself, feed your family. You do that because it matters. And it kind of comes down to that, what is what you're valuing and if it aligns with your values, then it sure works a lot better. EDDY: Well, I do want to reemphasize that it is habitual. Like, my dad recently retired, right? And he was working 6 days a week, you know, 6:00 in the morning to 6:00 p.m., sometimes 7:00. That's also because he took pride in his work. But he did that for years, right, over 80% of his life that he did work in before he retired. But even so, after he retired, he started getting his pension. He was still getting up at the same time he was. He was still doing things around the house. And people told him, “Dude, you're done. Relax. Wind down for a little bit. Take a walk. Sit down on the couch. Be on your phone. Be lazy. You deserve it.” And he's like, “Oh yeah, no, it just feels really weird to just not have to do this anymore.” [crosstalk 34:10] JUSTIN: I do have to say one thing about that. A lot of people their work defines their life, and if they were to retire, they have no life outside. Like, they don't have friends. They don't have hobbies. They don't have things they like to do. Maybe they got divorced because of work. All those things can really make you think that, hey, work is my life. And, I don't know, and personally, I think that's pretty unhealthy [laughs]. So, if you look in terms of enjoyment of life and happiness of life, if that was your goal, you got to make sure you cultivate those relationships that are outside of work. MATT: Yeah. I think...and it's just personality types, right? And I'm by no means...I am not saying I'm a workhorse, anything like that, but my entire life I've just always wanted to be the best at everything I can do: athletics, school, and my job. I want to do the best possible job I can do in anything I do because, at the end, I feel really good about it. Sometimes it's really hard getting there, but it's worth it to me. I was a wrestler. Anyone who wrestled knows how hard of a sport that is. I played six different sports in high school, wrestling by far the hardest sport there is, training every day for hours upon end for three minutes to get through three minutes just so you can be the best at it. It's that kind of thing, and maybe it was just my family. I came from a family who...my older brothers were the same way. So, I think I was just kind of raised on that, and I saw them doing it. So, I wanted to be that way, too. But also, not everyone's that way. I have friends who they couldn't care less. They're just like, I'm going to go do what I need to do. I'm going to get it done, and then I'm just going to go about my business and walk away. And I, for one, struggle with that. I think about work when I lay in bed. I think about work when I wake up early in the morning. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, but you're right, it's what defines a lot of people. And my wife calls me out on it often. She's like, “Okay, let it go.” I say, “Okay, I'll try.” But it just doesn't go, you know. EDDY: You know, I used to have that mindset growing up. Like, I was always competitive, always wanted to be the best. But I found out really quickly that there was always going to be someone better than me. I think it's just inevitable. You can be the GOAT of a player, but you're going to run into someone who's just naturally better than you, or they went at it harder than you did. MATT: There’ll always be. EDDY: You’re always going to find someone that’s better. MATT: There's always someone better. EDDY: Oh, 100%. MATT: And there's always going to be, you know. The whole LeBron, Michael Jordan thing, right? Objectively, Michael Jordan is better; we all know this. But, eventually, there's going to be someone else who comes along who is better. EDDY: Yeah, 100%. MATT: And who changes the game like Jordan did. EDDY: 100% MATT: Wilt Chamberlain did it. Bill Russell did it, Dr. J, Magic Johnson, and then, Jordan came along. And there's always going to be that next person. But, for me, as long as I know that I'm trying my best, that's enough for me. I don't actually have to be the very best person at something. I just want to know that I'm giving it everything I can give, and I just feel good about it. MIKE: Well, I think you're touching on something there. Not everybody has got the exact same personality type, but we all seek for meaning. We want to have what we're doing mean something. And if work is the main thing we do, going to what Justin was saying, you know, if it becomes everything that defines our life, well, that defines our meaning. It's critical, and this goes to the burnout to find meaning. And it probably means that you're going to have to find some meaning in more than one thing in your life. MATT: Absolutely. MIKE: Because one thing is never going to be enough. Think about retirement. It's very common; you've probably heard about this. The people who retire and do nothing they don't tend to last very long. It doesn't work. If you want to be happy and healthy in retirement, you do something else, right? You have that other thing that gives your life meaning. Because if your goal is to do absolutely nothing and have no meaning in your life, well, now you have nothing to live for and nothing you care about. And that's not what anybody wants. Finding meaning in your life, and we've talked about tactics. Having something else, I think, is absolutely vital. And I know, Matt, you have things outside of work that you care about, too, and if you have those...and maybe there's two things you care about at work. People switch careers, right? But there has to be...you have to define yourself as being valuable outside of just what you accomplish at work. Not that it's not incredibly rewarding to accomplish something at work; it absolutely is. And you can accomplish things elsewhere, too. Your life can be more than that, more than just that. You have to find the places to find meaning. So, I think if there's one thing...and this goes back to right at the beginning of the call. You have to find personal value out of what you're doing. I am digging a ditch, and [chuckles] it will accomplish something, right? And that is providing meaning to your life. And maybe you've got hobbies. Maybe you've got a family you're doing it for. Maybe you're trying to help your elderly parents in China. So, you're working as much as you can because you care about them. That meaning, I think, is the first thing. Find what you care about and work on that. People say, “Find the thing you're passionate about, and that's the work you should do.” That's a lot of times misconstrued. Find the thing you're passionate about that you're willing to do stuff that sucks [chuckles]. Like, it doesn't mean you're always going to enjoy it, but you're passionate enough about it that you're willing to do the things you don't enjoy because you find meaning and reward out of it. Oh, if you find that meaning first...and our values are different, right? But if you can find the thing that you value and be working for that, that can help you get into alignment. So, I think that's tactic number one. And we kind of danced around it, but it came at it in several different ways. That meaning is central. I think that's item number one. WILL: Okay, but expand on that a little bit more because I'll be perfectly honest with you. Like, I have plenty of meaning outside of my work, but that's not helping me. Knowing what it is I'd rather be doing than sitting here [laughter] debugging this preview access token while I'm recording [chuckles] this podcast... MIKE: [laughs] WILL: If you see me with my head over, that's not making it...I mean, like, knowing that I would rather go and play with my kids is not...that's not making the medicine go down any smoother, where it's just like, I'd rather be playing Elden Ring. MIKE: [laughs] WILL: I'd rather be playing my guitar. I'd rather be X, Y, or Z. It’s like -- MIKE: Well, you mentioned your kids. WILL: Sure. MIKE: I'm guessing that some of your income supports those children. WILL: Baby, without the kids, I would live in a storage container and be happy as a clam [laughs]. MIKE: So, you just answered your own question, right? You said, I am doing this because I care about something. I am earning this income for more than just myself. I have this work that I'm doing because I care about the money because I care where that money goes. It's investing in these people that I love. WILL: Well, I think that's true. I think that's true, and I actually think...there was another thing that I wanted to bring up, which was...there was a quote from Marissa Mayer, formerly of YouTube and then of Yahoo. And she got drugged through the streets, pilloried for this comment. But in my opinion, she was right. And what she said, effectively, was, I don't believe in burnout. People are not doing the things that they want in life, like, what they want to do in life. If they want to have dinner with their kids and they can't have dinner with their kids because they're working, or they want to go for a run, or work out, or go on a date with their wife, whatever it is, you're either doing something that you think is stupid, or you're being blocked from doing something that fulfills you. And if you're meeting those goals, right, obviously, you need to maintain your physical and mental health. Another analogy is...so, I play music. I’m a musician. The standard day in a recording studio, if you're like, “I want to buy, you know what I mean, I want the day rate, right, I want to buy [inaudible 44:13]. Give me the day rate for this recording studio.” The standard day in a recording studio is 12 hours, and that's 12 of the hardest hours you've ever seen anybody work in your entire...When you get done in the studio, you are wrung out. It's hard work. It's 12 hours a day. Again, people at a regular office job they don't work like that because they don't have that motivation. And you're not going to have that motivation in identifying that stuff is not...it will help you improve your productivity by identifying and protecting it. If you could say, I need this, and you make those boundaries and you guard them assiduously, then you can work hard. If you know what I need to do to stay even and I protect that, the rest of your day will be more effective. JUSTIN: Going back to what Marissa said, it’s like, if you aren't liking what you're doing, try to change it. And you may have to do the ditch work for a while to get to where you want to be. But, I don't know, it's kind of funny because I used to laugh at life coaches because I'm like, oh, those guys, you know, who needs help from somebody outside themselves to figure out what they want to do. But there is actually some value in there in terms of, I don't know, there's probably a lot of value in it, but this is what I think of now. If you can identify what you really want to do and then have somebody walk you through the steps to get there from where you are currently, that is worth something. And so, if you're just digging ditches right now and you're not happy, try to figure out what you want to do to be happy. And, hopefully, somebody will pay you for it, and if they won't, figure out what you can do, how much money you need before you can go and do it, you know, whatever. Because if you aren't happy right now, generally, it's not just...it's hard for you to be happy and for the people around you to be happy, too, because that affects how you interact with others and everything. DAVE: When I was in my 20s, I had to work crap jobs because I was in my 20s, and that's what you get when you’re in your 20s. You work crap jobs. And I hated it. And I was working at Walmart, like, at the electronics counter. And it's an honorable profession, but it wasn't the career that I wanted, and I hated it. And I realized I need to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I need to figure out a direction for my life. And I'm like, okay, yeah, I love computers. I love programming. I've been doing it forever. I should try and get paid doing this. And overnight, my job at Walmart went from being this crappy, drag your butt in thing to I'm paying for my education. And it became valuable and meaningful. Being able to do a bait and switch on your brain and basically say, “Hey, this thing that you hate, here's a reason to love it,” you know, it's super-duper powerful to see that when you can. There's a trick that I learned in my teens. I want to say it was Tony Robbins. Google can fact-check me on this. Tony Robbins’ problem-solving questions. Like, the choices you make about the things that you are dealing with entirely, not dramatically, entirely frame the attitude and opinion that you'll have towards that thing. And so, if you find yourself really, really stuck...now, Tony Robbins is big in NLP, so he likes using specific language to minimize or maximize certain things. So, you can tell in these questions that he's definitely trying to make you think that the problem is smaller. Just choose to see the problem as smaller and manageable. But the five questions and I can do them really quickly for you, number one is “What's great about this problem?” If you've got a problem, like, if production is down, if that is a problem for you, that means that when production is up, you're making money, so that's great. And the more panicked you are about production being down is probably because the more profitable you were when it was up, right? So, there's actually a great side to it. Then the next one, and this is Robins’s minimizing language, “What's not perfect about this?” And then, the next three questions are just “What am I willing to do to have it the way I want it?” “What am I willing to stop doing to have it the way I want it?” And then, the magic one, “And what can I do to make it fun while I deal with the thing that I don't like?” And being able to carry that in your back pocket is so powerful because you can literally take, you know, management says, “You have to do this. Here's your death march.” And you're like, okay, I'm going to figure out how to turn this into my choice, into my career, my life, my job, my cathedral. Mike, you mentioned digging ditches. When I was a kid, I hated digging ditches because I was digging ditches. My dad he didn't love digging ditches, but he wasn't digging ditches. He was investing in the landscaping on the property. He was putting in sprinklers. He was, in his head, enjoying not having to go out and move the sprinkler every day when he was watering the lawn every time he shoved that shovel in. Where I'm just like, man, this sucks. I don't like it. And he had meaning, and I didn't. EDDY: I do want to just say though, that one thing that's really helped me not get burnout I have obsession disorder a lot of the time. So, when I gravitate to something, I get obsessed, right? And I'm like, I need to know everything I can about whatever it is, and quickly. A passion can quickly become obsession, and you got to know what that limit is before it gets out of hand. For me, I live by that. You got to make sure you know that your passion is not an obsession. MIKE: There's a word that Will said as he was speaking. He said boundaries. And I'd like to lean into that because we've talked about finding meaning and we've talked about that for a while. Yeah, that matters. What's the next step? You've got to put up a boundary somewhere. If you think that this is what I care about and these are the things I don't care about, well, what are you going to do to say this is where the things I don't care about end and the things I do care about stop? Now you might have to do some of those. There might be some things. But if you don't say, “This is where that stops,” then it's going to eat everything. Whether it's be something that you think is cool and you go down a research rabbit hole and then your whole evening's gone [chuckles], and you don't get to do the thing that you wanted to do. Or there is the end of your workday, and you just want to finish this project, and so you keep going till it's done. The next thing you know it's seven o'clock, and you're still working on it. You have to draw a line. There has to be a boundary. And if what you care about is that your life is sustainable, and then you reach...and going back to what Will said about it’s the exact same number of hours. You reach the end of the day. This is one thing that works for me. I reach the end of my workday, turn off my computer, and I walk away. Now, maybe before bed because there are some important things, and I'm going to check my messages. And if I get a message from my boss a couple of hours later because something bad's happening, yes, I'll look at that. But overall, I've got this boundary, right? This is the end of my workday, and I’m going to work hard during that workday [inaudible 52:18] work on something else. Same thing in the morning. I've got the things I care about. I'm going to work on that. And now I'm going to set that aside, and I'm going to go start my workday, and there's an edge. Figuring out where those boundaries are, I think is...and my perception and it's kind of come up from the group as well is we talked about tactics. That is number two. Find boundaries and hold them because if you don't, then you're not in control anymore. KYLE: So, I've thought about this a little bit as we've been talking. One thing that I've done, and maybe this is a bit of a pessimistic approach, but I will look around and see how much effort I'm putting into something. I'll look around and see how much effort co-workers are putting in. They might be putting in more; they might be putting in less. I think a lot of it, for me, and what will contribute for burnout is not even necessarily how many hours I'm doing. Because at one company or one project, I might be willing to do 60 hours, but another one, it's only about 40. And a lot of that comes down to is I'm looking and the person that's doing less than me is getting just as much recognition, or the person that's doing more than me is getting just as much recognition. Well, the value, to me, is not that much higher if it's not higher to the company. If the company isn't going to turn around and recognize people, why put in that extra effort and cause that much more burnout to yourself? I feel like that's something I've had to weigh personally. WILL: I think it's a really interesting thought, right? Because so much of this has been, like, I think implicitly and unconsciously about, like, it's on us. It's on us, right? It's on us, our problem. This is our fault. This is our thing we need to deal with. But with the possible exception of me because I got myself in that. I got myself in that hole. KYLE: Yeah, self-employed. WILL: A whole lot of the burnout that we get exposed to it comes from external stuff. If we were some sort of utopian workplace where it's just like, “Everybody, just go out and do your best man. Just do your best,” like, I think that would work a lot better than maybe the business classes would think. But there is external stuff that's coming down that is imposing this burnout on us, and it's not in our power to fix it. If you got a bad manager, you got to fire your manager. That's your job. You have to fire your manager. Sorry. If your manager sucks, you got to fire him. It is incumbent on you and a capitalist free labor market to fire a crappy manager, and that company might have to go with them. And so, how do you identify a situation where it can only be fixed by a hit in the bricks? Because nobody wants that. I don't think anybody really wants that. But as individual contributors, especially, the lower you are on the totem pole, the more you need to acknowledge that as that must be done. How do you identify a situation where you need to save yourself? DAVE: Seth Godin wrote a book years back called “The Dip.” He talked about, basically, like, you're going along and then things start to get worse. So, your trend line of happiness is going down, and you have to make this choice. Is it a dip that's going to come back up, or is this the beginning of the cliff? And the interesting thing that he said was a lot of people walk around with this idea that winners never quit, and quitters never win. He says, that's not true. Winners quit all the time. Winners are very, very good at early, early, early identifying this is not a dip. This is a cliff. I'm out. And they bounce as soon as they know that they're throwing good money after bad or good time after bad. And, for me, that, I think, is the...there's a fantastic question...man, I'm a bookworm today. Martin Seligman's “Authentic Happiness” he gives a fantastic question, which is, if you could do this...there's some tasks that you loathe doing. Ask yourself a question, if you did this perfectly, if you did it absolutely to the best standard of your ability, would you be happy with your work, or would you just feel relieved that it's done? And if it's the latter, you'll never find your happiness there. Stop trying to get better at the things you're bad at and start investing in the things that you're good at. And, for me, identifying where the dip is I will often look at it and go, if I hit the bricks, will I regret going? You’re in the building. You're trending down. You're like, should I...I don't want to give up what I have. And so, you have to flip it around and say, “If I don't leave, will I regret staying?” And that, for me, can frequently help identify, yeah, this is a dip. I want this to get better, not just for the relief, but because I really want the outcome from this. I really want to achieve what I'm doing here. WILL: I don't know, man. I don't know. I suppose what I'd say is if I'm being really honest about the arc of my career, I have been pretty darn successful, and I'm really proud of the work that I've done. But at least 80% of it, if not higher, it is just I have a high capacity for frustration, like, I got a high tolerance. And I'll sit down with something for a period of time that is not reasonable. And over the arc of my career, I think by most metrics I've been pretty darn successful. But I don't have any illusions about...like, I'm clever, but I'm no genius. But I will bang my head against that wall until it falls down. And it's been good to me, but it ain't no fun. It ain't never been fun. And it's not going to be fun tomorrow. EDDY: Yeah, Will, but if you bang enough times, you'll end up with a concussion, then what will you do? WILL: You should have seen the other guy. EDDY: [laughs] DAVE: My plan is to keep doing this until the wall gets a concussion. That's right [laughter]. WILL: It’s worked so far. I got a lot of holes in walls behind me. KYLE: So on the flip side, I feel like I could definitely relate to some of those points that you're bringing up, Dave, specifically just I go through those trends. You know, when my job is something where I'm just like looking at the clock, waiting for the day to end, that's when I start thinking, oh man, should I be moving on? Should I be looking for something else? And, like, a lot of the time, I actually really enjoy what I'm doing. And in a way, having a, “salary,” in air quotes, position where I can work more than 40 hours is somewhat nice because sometimes it's just like, okay, cool, I'm working on this. I need to get it done. I'm really enjoying myself, and all of a sudden, I've worked 2, 3, 4 extra hours, randomly, and it's one of those things like, oh yeah, this is cool. And I do feel like, at least in my career, I've gone through phases, right? And it is one of those things where it's just kind of like, ah, I'm waiting for the day to end, but maybe this is just a dip. Will things get better? And over my seven years at Acima, I will say it has had dips. WILL: [laughs] KYLE: We have been going through dips, but it has gotten better enough that I've insisted on staying. So, I really resonated with what you were saying. WILL: I don't know. I suppose, like, I think it takes different forms for different people. What I would say with my current gig, right, my current gig has been psychologically pretty challenging. So, for people who don't know, I'm a consultant and a fairly high-level consultant. I've been a fairly high-level consultant for going on four years at a very large electronics reseller that doesn't have the greatest technology stack. And I'm in a psychologically very difficult position in that I have a lot of responsibility, but I'm also like the help, so there's not inconsiderable amount of pressure to be like, what have you done for me lately? But I'm also, like, othered, if it makes any sense. You get a lot of money, but your seat is never secure, and you better be conscious of that. I walked that line for a long time. But in terms of jobs, in terms of job unpleasantness, this is fairly high on the list, but I’m there for a reason that isn't, you know, this is a fun job. This is a good career job. I'm here because I'm here for my family. Flat out. And that's it. That's sort of external motivation. And I think, bluntly, a lot of people are like that. Like, you can get a full remote well-paid middle to upper-middle-class job that affords your family a pretty nice lifestyle. But you need to be locked, in, and you need to make sure you stay locked in. Because I suppose, I think, this is probably true for you as well, but I can't just sit and wait for the clock to roll over. I have to be fully engaged. Like, if I finish my work, boom, it's five o'clock somewhere, but it never works out like that. It never works out like that. But I have to be engaged so I'm not working till 10:00 at night. And that's why I worry so much about productivity because I'm not punching the clock. Like, I need to get my work done. If I don't deliver, I am done here. And so, I've got to lock in. I can't just run the meter. It doesn't work like that, I think, for any of us really. DAVE: So, a lot of what you're saying, Will, is resonating with me. In the late noughties and the first half of the teens, I was running a contracting shop and consulting, freelancing all the time. And I had to drop and get a W2 because my boss was a slave driver. What I found out about myself is that if you hand me a death march, I will push back. Like, I don't care. I've insulted vice presidents in a meeting in front of the entire company and once it cost me my job, so I will mouth off if I need to. And if somebody says, “You need to be in here 60 hours a week. I want you from here to here on Monday through Saturday and da, da da,” I'll be like, “No, if you've got a project you want done, tell me what you want done, and I'll do that.” And what I found is I will not do a minute of death march. But if you put a rabbit out where I can see it, I will chase that thing until I drop. I'll be up till three in the morning every single night running after that thing. And that's what I ran into when I was consulting was there was always one more rabbit. And so, I couldn't drop the sword at the end of the day. WILL: Yep. Yep. I definitely identify with that. DAVE: You were talking, Will, about shoveling up the crap parts of the job. When I was consulting, the thing that I found very quickly is when you are the only employee, everything is your job. I have literally worked on a project where in the morning I was adjusting pixels on a GUI for a Windows app, and that evening I was soldering chips to fix a defect in the hardware that that GUI controlled. And I was like, you call yourself full stack? Go below the server level. When you bust out a soldering iron, we can talk. And I personally I love electronics, and I love the soldering, but I could easily see how this is just yet another piece of crap that I've got to do. And it's a great skill though, right? You end up being the guy on the team when they go, “There's this one piece that nobody knows how to do because it's completely weird and strange,” and very quickly, people around me are like, “Ask Dave. He's always about doing some weird thing that nobody else is looking at.” And it comes from that everything is my job if I'm the only one here. WILL: Oh, I know. No, I am well aware. I'm well aware. I have made it through so many...I got five horses shot out from under me last year, like, managers. Like, my managers are gone five times. And here I sit [laughter] working for somebody. Somebody is just like, “No, no,” keep that one. I mean, I don't know. It's something [laughs]. It’s something. MIKE: It feels like dancing around the same couple of things. If you're willing to put up with the misery because there's something you care about, then you'll keep doing it, and you'll probably be pretty successful. If you're the person who will chase down until you find the weird thing or will just put up with frustration...I've long felt that software development is mostly dealing with frustration, by the way [laughs]. If you're willing to put up with that frustration for a long time, you can be successful. But you've got to value enough to be willing to keep sitting in that seat and keep dealing with the frustration. I have known some people who are like, yeah, I'm getting tired. I'm going to go on social media, and it doesn't work. You actually have to care about enough to be frustrated for a long time [laughs], but if you're willing to do that, that works. Then also don't let that glycogen run out, right [chuckles]? You have to have those boundaries. So, find the meaning. Remember that meaning. Put the boundaries where they need to be. Is there any other tactics that we should talk about? Because we keep on coming around the same couple, and maybe that's it. Maybe it's as simple as...I didn't say it was easy, but maybe it's as simple as those couple things. Are there any other high-level tactics, or even low-level, or just little things like your Pomodoro or whatever it is? WILL: Yeah, here's a canary in the coal mine for me. Like, a canary in the coal mine where it's just like, oh, it's starting to creep on. Because I think burnout is a lot like hypoxia, like, where you're not getting enough oxygen in your brain, and you're getting loopy. You're getting sloppy. But it's very difficult to measure your cognition with your cognition, especially if it's starting to go down. Now, what are you going to feel when the grip is starting to slip? What are you going to start seeing? RescueTime is a good thing to get on your laptop if you can get it on your laptop, right? You can get a corporate laptop now, and RescueTime is, I think, maybe with some merit, like, flagged as malware [laughs], so that's not possible. But look at your screen time on your phone. If that’s not enabled, you should be looking at it. Screen time starts to shoot up. If you can get RescueTime on your computer, you find yourself like, whoa, look at all this. Look at all this stuff that I'm doing on the laptop that's not work. That’s not so good. Another one, real, real important one, if you are a thought worker, if you are working with your brain, you need to maintain your brain. And the number one with a bullet thing you need to be dealing with with your brain is your sleep. If you are not sleeping...seven hours is an absolute minimum. And so, what you'll see when you're starting to approach burnout is bedtime starts to become a challenge because you didn't get what you needed out of your day. You need some kind of time to yourself. If I don't have an hour at the end of the day of Will Archer screw-around time to do just whatever dumb crap that I want to do, then I am going to steal it from my sleep. When I steal it from my sleep, then it affects my mood. It affects my flat-out intellectual capacity. Everything starts to go wrong. So, when you start messing with bedtime, think about your day, think about your burnout, think about what's going on, right? So yeah, screen time, like, the quality of your work. What are you doing? Once you find yourself zoning out, you really need to start digging into that. And I'll give you one more because I want to give other people a chance to contribute to this. Well, how do you figure out what you need to do? I am a giant proponent of journaling, like, reviewing your day at the end of the day, reviewing your day at the beginning of the day. What do you want? What do you need? What are you grateful for? What did you miss? What did you not want to do? Like, where did you feel bad? And then, you got to write it out. You have to scribble it out with a stick in the dirt because that's how your brain processes things. And, like, those three things, like, four or five things, I guess, if you manage those, that is the check engine soon light, and you can start to unpack what's going on and what you need to do to fix this. DAVE: You just triggered something in my head, which is having a unit test for your brain, right? You need these things that are alert triggers that, like, if this happens, you're going to think it's a small thing, but you need to treat that like the oddly specific, highly significant thing. This is a ripple in the water, but you're out past the shoals. There shouldn't be any ripples in the water. You're going to run a ground if you don't pay attention to this that kind of –- EDDY: You need a return statement. DAVE: Mm-hmm. The moment I discovered unit tests for my brain were a thing was...and I won't tell the whole story here. But I thought it was a Wednesday, and it was Sunday. I was mad at my co-workers for not showing up on time because I needed to talk with people and, like, where is everybody? It's Wednesday. And they're like, “Dude, it's Sunday. They're not coming in today.” I'm like, oh yeah. It was time to change. Like, the timbers in the mind of my brain were creaking and groaning ominously. But related to that, Ted Woodford runs a fantastic YouTube channel where he repairs guitars. He's awesome. But every day when he gets up to go to work, he plays chess online with a medium-level, the same medium-level AI opponent. And if the AI mops the floor with him, he's like, okay, I'm not firing on all cylinders. I'm going to pick the dull jobs that I don't need to be sharp for. There's a lot of buffing and polishing that needs to get done in the shop. I’ll do that today. And then, he'll have days where he just absolutely trounces the AI, and he's excited. And he's like, okay, I'm actually sharp today. I think I'm going to pull down that $30,000 guitar and start cutting the inlay for the fretboard. And that's risky, dangerous work where you can cause a $10,000 mistake with just one blink of away from what you're doing. And so, he actually measures his capacity every day and then tries to adapt his work to suit. We don't always have that freedom, but when you do or when you can learn to, hey, let's move this around, it's super-duper useful because everything just feels hard or easy. We never think, I am coming to this at something other than 100%. You can't...yeah, it's hard to just...sorry, last thought on that. When your judgment becomes impaired, the first judgment to become impaired is your ability to judge your impairment. That's the very first thing that goes. EDDY: It sounds like drunk drivers, right? DAVE: Mm-hmm. I will take sleeping pills at night, and then I'll go out in the garage and start working in the shop with power tools. And on the way out, I will tell my Amazon, “Set a timer for 60 minutes,” and where Liz is sitting, my wife, after an hour, the robot pops up and says, “Go tell Dave he's no longer authorized for power tools.” And I'll be up to my eyeballs building a guitar trying to route out a truss rod pocket, and I'm lost in it. And I'm handling a router, which is one of the most dangerous machines, most easy to hurt yourself. And yeah, Liz will be like, “Honey, it's...” I’m like, “Oh yeah.” And I'm fine. I'm like, no I just want to just cut more. And I've had to learn when she comes out and says, even though I know I'm going to feel like I'm fine, I'm going to down tools anyway. And I still have all 10 fingers. EDDY: You know what, Dave? There's a couple of times where my wife does come into my room, and she's like, “Hey. Are you done yet?” She’s like, “You know it’s X time. Do you still need to work?” And I look at her and I'm like, “Eh, you know what? No, I think I'm in a good spot,” right? And I just shut off. So, sometimes you do need that external influence to remind you, saying, “Hey, I think you're done [laughs].” MIKE: So, we're talking about enforcement of boundaries. You can't see it. And then, I think Will brilliantly said, what's your canary in the coal mine? What can you do? Because yeah, your cognition is damaged, so it's not going to pick up. What can you use to measure it and then enforce that you do something to stop? DAVE: It's the spinning top from Inception, I just realized. WILL: I'd say a unit test that you can get for your brain, right? It's not the same as playing AI chess, right? Because I think that's great, but I'm just not that good at chess. But one thing that I do to measure is I really...so one of the things that I've found overall productivity-wise is I have a checklist to start your day. I start the day the same way every single day. Every single day, I start the day the same way, and I do the same thing, and I have a spreadsheet for how long it takes me to get through the steps. And the last step is I wrote a line of code, right? One line of code, code is down, whatever it is that starts your day. Because once I'm in that flow state, I could cook. That's never really been my problem. Like, getting into flow state not a big deal. Getting into flow state hard, staying in the flow, riding that wave, baby, I'll ride all day. And so, write yourself a checklist. What do I need to do today? What's going on today? How am I going to do? I like to put on my instrumental music. I like to do a little stretching, whatever I got to do. And the last thing is write my first line of code. And how long does that take me? From when I sat down to where I got an atom of workout. MIKE: So, a simple metric. DAVE: What's your typical variance on that, Will? Do you have some days where it's five minutes and other days where it's three hours? WILL: No, it's rarely three hours. I'd say it's probably between 10 minutes and 20 minutes because it is a routine. I do things. I plan my day. I reflect on what I'm trying to get done. And so, if I do a good job, 10 minutes, and I got something out. If it's a bad day, it could be 30 before I get something out. If it's a terrible day, honestly, a terrible day, like, it never happens at all, you know, if it's that bad, if I'm really feeling it, yeah, man, sometimes we just never get out of the gate. I've had zero days before. I really don't like them, and they're pretty uncommon. DAVE: For me, it's always when the schedule gets moved externally. That's the thing that breaks me up. It is like, you're not going to get to write that line of code because you walked in the door, and there's an all-hands meeting going on right now because people dropped in this week, and yeah. WILL: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You get pulled into something else. Yeah, almost always, almost always, like, a zero-day is because something else happened, and usually, it's something important, and I shouldn't count it as a zero. It's just not that. It's not what I wanted. EDDY: To be fair, if I never type git in my terminal, I count [laughs] that as a non-productive day. WILL: Well, what do you guys think about things to get out of it, right? How do you get out? How do you get out? Because okay, so I want to set the scenario, right, you've been working really hard, and things are messed up. Like, work is messed up. No blue skies on the horizon, right? But you know that things have gone bad. You're burned out. And I'm not writing you a hall pass to say, “Well, I shifted so now I can take a breather,” because a lot of times when burnout is happening, you're bumped deadline, and your burnout is bumping another deadline. It's like dominoes. And nothing is going to change unless you sort of get right. What are you going to do? MIKE: I think there's a critical thing with this. You didn't get there in a day, and you're probably not going to get out in one either. Going back to your marathon running, if you hit that wall, it's not going to go away in 10 minutes [chuckles], probably marathon, you're out. Maybe you're going to crawl to that finish line, but you're not going to be effective anymore that day. It's going to take you a while to get out. Part of the reason to catch it early. But I think you have to have a plan that is not looking at the next day, not the next week. What am I doing over the next month? What am I doing over the next year to right this ship? Because if you take short-term fixes, little patches, it's not going to do the job. EDDY: Well, have you guys seen that picture, like, that meme online where the miner is going through the coal mine, and he's like going at it, going at it, going at it? And then, he's an inch away from finding the gold, and he just gives up and says, “Ah, man, I'm done. This is fruitless. I'm not going to get to where I need to go.” And you just give up. I feel like a lot of people feel like if I just push a little bit more, I'll find that nugget. And I feel like that's like that dangling carrot we were talking about earlier. WILL: I hate that meme. That's a stupid meme [laughter]. DAVE: Because the miner has no information. It could be a mile of rock. Yeah. WILL: It’s a stupid thing. That's dumb, and it's destructive. It makes me low-key angry. EDDY: [laughs] MIKE: Gold is extremely rare. EDDY: I was going to say, like, it is a very valuable point. MIKE: Gold is rare, and you don't just go digging away in rocks and expect to find that nugget. You do research on geology. You do the research and figure out what is going to lead to this vein. And you follow that research, and you use the patterns in the rock. If you're not doing whatever...and I'm not an expert in this, but there's people who are, and you use that expertise. Like you said, there's no information. Unless you're using that information, unless you know that there's that gold there, you're doing the wrong thing. You're just randomly digging a hole. You're doing it wrong. DAVE: Wow. I just realized when we're death marching, when somebody comes in and says, “Go do this,” it feels like go dig in the mine with no direction, no guidance, no understanding of where we're headed to. Yep. WILL: I remember, man, I remember, like, what do you call it? It was last weekend. It was last weekend. I had a really gnarly...and we had some features that were backed up, and I had to do a bunch of git surgery because our main branch wasn't going live. But we had some critical bug fixes that need to roll out. And so, I was doing brain surgery with git. It really sucked. We've all done it. It's not fun [laughter]. And it was, like, midnight on a Friday because it just had to get out, and I got it all done, and it was fixed. And I had to reset the branch, and I had to do with git force push, but because I was so tired and I was burned out, I smoked my branch with the force push, and I lost everything. MIKE: Oh man. EDDY: There's people on the team that I've heard that have protection against their commits because they want to be really, really sure that it's intentional and that they're going to force push changes. WILL: That's why I make the big bucks because I got a steady hand of like, you know [laughter], you want to do home surgery on prod? Okay [laughs]. DAVE: Do you know what the ohnosecond is? It's the smallest measurable unit of time. It's the amount of time from when you made a colossal mistake to the moment you realize it's too late [laughter]. For me, it was backing up a database to do some work on it. And while I was backing up on it, I screwed something up, and I dropped to the console, and I was tired. And instead of restoring the database, I deleted it. And this was on Linux, so there was no un-delete. And I literally deleted the production database, and the only thing that saved us was we had a backup from the previous night. But I literally had to walk through the building, apologizing to the staff saying, “I threw away all your work this morning. I'm so sorry.” Fortunately, it was only, like, two hours’ worth of work. I think they were impressed that I actually came out and apologized, that I owned it, but still, just oh no. WILL: Yep. I’ve done it. EDDY: Good thing you had a snapshot because holy cow [laughs]. WILL: Yeah, I smoked a prod database back in the day. It was just me. There was nobody else. It was only me, and I did it. I did it. And it was taking too long, and we were like, oh, why is this taking so long? This was just a simple [laughter]...this was a simple process. And I'm like, [laughter]. They're, like, diligently going line by line and just like, nope, nope. Delete, Delete. Delete. Delete. And I'm like, ahh. DAVE: Yep. Ow. WILL: We got it all back. But oh my God, yeah, the [inaudible 01:24:01] factor was really high. Oh, those were times. DAVE: I don't want to say this while Mike is on the call, but I will say that there are other teams in the building that do not have master branch protection. And the first two weeks that somebody from engineering was working on the data team, there's three commits to master right in a row of, oops, oh no, revert fix. Revert, revert. Yeah. And then, I went back to story branches. EDDY: [laughs] WILL: Yep, it is. Got to be done, man. I know [inaudible 01:24:40] do. DAVE: Do you know what I did though? Again, part of taking control of your environment, I literally rewrote my bash prompt to print the current branch that I'm currently on, and if it's master or main, it's bold white on red. It looks like a screaming claxon error message. I cannot be on the main branch without my bash prompt yelling at me for every command that I type, and that has saved me. EDDY: There's something to be said about having protection though, on your main branch, right? If you're allowing destructive commands to be making all the way up to your main branch, maybe that's just a symptom of a bigger issue. MIKE: Well, and I would say -- WILL: I didn't smoke prod, okay? Like, I just screwed up my work. Like, I lost a day's work. EDDY: No, Will, you were just making sure that the company had a snapshot of the database. You were just testing in prod. WILL: It wasn’t in prod. It was a release. I had to cherry-pick the release in [laughter], and then there was a whole step. It's a big [laughter] bureaucratic organization. There are guardrails on stuff. But yeah...go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. MIKE: I was going to say, this is actually kind of an example that brings this all in. It kind of summarizes what we've been talking about. And you're tired; you're up late. You don't have the boundaries in place. Bad things happen, and so you learn from it. And the next time around [chuckles], you set up those boundaries to protect yourself. You set up those indicators to catch you early so that you don't get into that trouble. And remember that if you're up at midnight fixing this, that you're at risk, that right from the beginning, you're at risk, and you're going to do a whole lot better if you maintain yourself so that you're sharp when you go in because once you veer out of that, you're at greater and greater risk of not making things better, but making things worse. WILL: Yeah, absolutely. EDDY: My indicator is fog brain. Like, the moment I can't even think straight anymore, like, I'm done. WILL: Yeah. And I'll leave you with...maybe my last comment is the thing that you can do, like, this is one of my go-to's, when I find myself a little burnt, I like petty rebellion. So, I'm going to get up. Like, I got this feature. And it's going pretty good, but I'm going to get out of my house. Just get up, just change something. It's a quick hit. It's not going to self [SP], like, burnout, but do something different. Do something novel. Make something change. Make something that you're not supposed to do. You're still working but some naughty rebellion, like, some kind of small thing you can do that isn't normal. Get up and go for a walk sort of, like, tiny bits of agency, right? Where you're not completely coloring within the lines. And I understand that it's like, oh, we are saying like, how can I trick my brain into being productive in this corporate job that is draining the soul from my body [laughter]? Like, I am familiar with the irony in that, but. But nevertheless, one thing to keep in your back pocket is just petty rebellions. Small little things where it's like, we're working outside today. Like, I'm working somewhere else. And I'll tell you where after we stop recording. [laughter] MIKE: So, you’re saying, seize your agency; be human. Recognize you're not a machine. WILL: Yeah. Be human. Be human. Do something not corporate. EDDY: You know what actually helped my burnout sometimes is working on stuff that I know I'll be productive in, right? Like, for example, if I'm stuck trying to figure out a solution, a bunch of that is imposter syndrome that kind of hits in, and that fuels the fire of my burnout. But if I just pivot, work on something that I know is a simple task and I can get it done quickly, it sort of rejuvenates my fire. And I'm like, oh no, you know what? I'm not dumb. It's just a new concept that's getting the best of me. So, shifting into another task also helps a lot. DAVE: I call that getting a win, and I think I've said this to Mike in a one-on-one. Literally, I’m just like, dude, I need to get a win right now. I've had three rough ones in a row. I really need to just get a win. WILL: Absolutely. MIKE: Well, let's end there. Do something different. Just search your humanity. Go for the walk before you feel like burning down the building [laughter]. Do something that gets you right. Set boundaries. Find meaning. And to Will's point, you may not love the job. You may just be working for the business, but that doesn't mean that you can't find meaning. And it doesn't mean it's not worth getting your head right because maybe you're working for some cute, little kid with an axolotl hat on. Until next time on the Acima Development podcast.