Pocket Revolutionary

I’m still recovering from my second major brush with burnout, and this last one (quietly) almost took me out completely. Scott Boms has put together a well-researched (and lived) article at A List Apart that I recommend for anyone working in “the industry”. Even if the phases outlined below don’t sound familiar, that just means you can read up on preventing burnout before it’s too late.

The identified phases [of burnout - not in a particular order], several of which I bet sound familiar, are:

• A compulsion to prove oneself
• Working harder
• Neglecting one’s own needs
• Displacement of conflict (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress)
• Revision of values (friends, family, hobbies, etc., are dismissed)
• Denial of emerging problems (cynicism, aggression, and frustration become apparent)
• Withdrawal from social contexts, potential for alcohol or drug abuse
• Behavioral changes become more visible to others
• Inner emptiness
• Depression
• Burnout syndrome (including suicidal thoughts and complete mental and physical collapse)

A List Apart – Burnout

I hate blogging about blogging, and I agree with Jeff Atwood’s rants against “meta-conversations” (semi-ironically in his blog), but the act of blogging (or not blogging) is a valid part of my life to talk about right now. I am writing again after more than six months of nothing, and I want to explain what happened. Everyone struggles with ruts, but once or twice in your life you hit the rut, get thrown from your moving vehicle, and get hit by a train that whisks you away from your pursuits. After mixing metaphors like that, I’m sure you want to know what happened.

I was (kind of) committed to writing last year. I had worked myself to a quivering puddle, but I had saved up all of my vacation days to splurge them in December in a relaxing three weeks of writing, reading, and video games. Unfortunately, just a few days into my bliss my father died. My world turned upside-down, and I dropped everything that didn’t have to do with family or funerals. I dedicated the front page of this blog to a memorial and watched as comments rolled in dedicated to my dad. At that point, I was swept up in the tornado of family, funerals, and estate management, so I couldn’t write. Honestly, though, sometimes I just didn’t want to see my dad’s picture move off the front page. It felt disrespectful or “too soon” for those who were still grieving. Then my mom got sick, and I had another project to keep me away from the keyboard as I drove back and forth to the hospital while trying to keep the web department at Generals International running. I tried off and on to post again, but it just didn’t feel the same and I only finished one article.

My dad’s death and my mom’s illness has thrown me off in every single way… so how do I recover or at least start writing again? Well, I’m not really sure, but for now I’m forcing myself to get back to good habits. My habits were formed over years and were wiped out with one phone call, so I have to force them back in. I’ve added a special repeating “Daily Tasks” bucket to OmniFocus. It forces me to repeat new habits (short ones, at least): read for 20 minutes, write for 20 minutes, clean for 20 minutes, etc. I could say that I’m turning over a new leaf and changing my lifestyle, but that wouldn’t be true. I’m just structuring in tasks that used to naturally be a part of my day until I can “want to write” without a checklist reminding me.

What else am I doing? I’m doing [whatever is important to me] now. I’m not putting my dreams off to wait for a long vacation in December when “I’ll have more time.” There’s enough unimportant tasks to keep me busy for lifetimes, but they won’t matter in the end. I don’t know what the end of this year will look like for me, but I do know my dad’s only regrets were the goals that he didn’t start pursuing until he was 50. He died after accomplishing so many dreams, but he spent decades waiting to start even more.

I don’t write in bullet points, but if I did, this article would be simple:

• Create habits
• Do something important

I watch documentaries to learn. I watch great action movies for entertainment and escapism. I watch a handful of very special movies and TV shows for a higher purpose, though: the elusive “brain nap”. A brain nap is the closest thing you can experience to actually turning off your brain. I may dream of PHP code and bad data structures, but put me in front of an old She Spies episode and I will think about absolutely nothing.

My best brain naps normally involve the aforementioned She Spies, Freakazoid!, UHF, or basically any Sci-Fi original movie. The key is it has to be stupid enough not to require your brain, but not so dumb that you start thinking about how bad it is. You’re not trying to start an internal Mystery Science Theater 3000 monologue about the dumb actors because that is what we call counter-productive. That movie may just seem stupid, but it has to be wily enough to get around all of your brain’s guards and attempts to “think things through”. It has to appear innocent while it lays it’s trap.

Mansquito (on Sci-Fi at 3am): “Hey, Jeremy’s brain, I know you’ve been spinning on all cycles to optimize those database queries for some obscure use case, but why don’t you just take a break. Let me take over an hour. Maybe two.”

Jeremy’s Brain: “No. I suppose I can try to relax a little, but I can’t just trust you to take over completely. I’m pretty important around here. There’s a lot of things I need to— Stop rubbing my shoulders, Mansquito. I have a lot to do and— okay, that’s the spot. Maybe five minutes.”

Mansquito: “Five minutes? That’s fine. I mean, I just want you to release that stress, brain. How’s that? Would you like a drink? I happen to have some merlot over here.”

Jeremy’s Brain: “No. I mean, I guess one glass wouldn’t hurt. Um, Mansquito? This wine tastes kind of funny. In fact, my head’s starting to—”

And that’s it. With it’s hypnotic, rohypnol-esque badness a Sci-Fi original movie takes over my higher functions and knocks my brain out for two hours. As the credits roll at the end, my brain starts to come around. After an awkward silence, I get up and my brain realizes it feels more energized. It’s recharged. It just woke up from the best nap it’s ever had. I run back to the computer, optimize those queries like nobody’s business, and get started on the next big thing. Eventually, my brain will start to remember a few fuzzy scenes of genetically altered mosquitoes, but we never really talk about it. The “brain naps” may be my only secret to sanity, and we both know they are uncomfortably necessary.

Just as an update, we will be having a memorial service for my dad, Loren (Larry) Greenawalt, this Saturday, January 31st, in Austin at Trinity United Methodist Church.

My father, Loren Greenawalt, passed away on Saturday, December 20th. My wife, Rebekah, took this picture of him one of the last times he came to town, and I know he would have loved this as a memorial. He was truly the most amazing, naturally gifted musician I’ve ever known and a loving person, and we’re praying that our children will inherit just some of his wonderful talent when they are born.