What exactly is burnout? Some days, you just don’t feel like working. You find yourself distracted, returning to the same line of code over and over before realizing that it just won’t happen today. If a good night’s sleep can get you back on track, it’s just a hiccup. If the struggle continues for weeks, it might be something deeper.
Burnout often translates to a total disconnection from your work – where fatigue intersects with apathy and requires a concerted effort to recover. They say that “you can’t burn out if you aren’t on fire,” so the good news is that it is likely you really care about what you are working on. But the goal is to keep that fire burning without extinguishing it.