Building Burnt Out

2023-05-29

I find myself in the trap of wanting to build, but being burnt out from the constant demand of doing so.

Over the past 2 years I’ve spent a considerable amount of my building services at Bash and working on my side-project, Allthings. At first I spent a lot of my development time on Allthings while my role initially centred around management of the engineering team, but as the Bash migration strategy went into the execution phase I found myself deep in code for months on end.

For the past 12 months I’ve spent all of my coding time on Bash projects and put Allthings on the back-burner while trying to keep afloat. While on holiday I tried to get back into development of it, but with the looming responsibilities at work the project started to feel more like a burden than a growth opportunity - I was worried that I’d leave my co-founders in a 12 month lurch again.

After some discussion, I’ve decided to take an indefinite break from development of Allthings without putting any undue pressure on myself (I still sort of feel like a bit of a failure, but alas)

I’m still processing this change, and while I want to build again (both in a work and personal environment), I find myself filled with fear and anxiety when starting a project or putting together planning documents.

I know that stepping away from the laptop will make me enjoy it more, but that’s easier said than done.