Emerging from burnout

Behold the power of boredom

I have been on career pause for 1.5 years now. How did this happen?

I started my pause just one month after coming back to work from maternity leave for Baby #2. I was surprised that I wanted this. I went back to work full time after Baby #1 and I was, despite a whole lot of guilt and anxiety and despite missing my little guy like crazy, grateful. Grateful for my desk with a chair where I could sit whenever, the bathroom that I could also frequent whenever, and the water that I could drink, again, whenever. Baby #1 did not sleep for more than an hour or two at a time until age 8.5 months and required a solid 45 minutes of soothing after each waking. I was getting maybe 4-5 hours of highly fragmented sleep each night. If you haven’t gone through this then you may think that going to work when horribly sleep deprived was a bad thing but you would be wrong. Continuing to care for my little guy when I was in that state would have been a bad thing. Being able to stumble over to my desk in the morning and just sit down while knowing that he was safe in the arms of a loving, experienced and well-rested professional was an absolute mercy.

I fully expected the same to happen with Baby #2 and planned accordingly. I got it wrong of course. Every kid is different and taking care of Baby #2 was basically parenting on easy mode. I had also put together a lot more help during maternity leave this second time around which meant that I had more opportunity to recover and, as a result, actually enjoy my time with both boys.

So what happened when it was time to go back to work? I was bummed, really really bummed. I tried to get excited about it. I had an awesome manager and had been assigned to a project that I cared about. It was and continues to be a great company working on a meaningful set of problems. Nothing could get me to focus on any of it. I genuinely wanted to spend all that time feeding, burping, changing and of course cuddling the baby. I wanted to get my big guy off the bus after school, give him snacks, and just be with him. I also craved the moments of physical rest I would get when the baby was content or napping and it turned out that there were lots of those because, again, he was a bewilderingly easy going guy at that age¹.

I couldn’t just let myself do it, though. It was too scary. I had to justify and analyze my decision to death because that is what I do. I also had to feel very guilty for various reasons because that is also what I do. Why “guilty”? It felt deeply wrong to give up on my career, even if it was just for a little while. I also felt bad that this wasn’t an option for most parents and so, irrationally, it was somehow wrong for me to take it. Writing things down helped me work through it all. I didn’t have to feel guilty about the choices that I made with my own career. I didn’t have to feel guilty about taking a rare opportunity, either, especially when my husband was so strongly in favor of it and ready to support me in that decision. It made no sense to ignore a gift like this, one that I very much wanted to take.

True to character I ended up drafting a long list of options and applied Gil’s decision matrix to it, complete with risks and risk mitigations, my what-if machine whirring along at full speed. I had my not-so-little doc ready to go when I broke the news to various family members that I planned to take a break.

Finally I was ready. I resigned from my job. My manager and CTO were incredibly supportive and wished me well.

And it was magical. I kept one little toe in the water by maintaining a couple mentoring relationships I had but I was otherwise free. I spent all day with my baby. No meetings, no code reviews, no on-call, no quarterly goals, no weekly stats and no project planning. No back and forth with coworkers over technical designs. No worrying if my performance was where it needed to be while I battled through the fog of burnout. That’s not to say that it was all smooth sailing, of course - even easy babies require a lot of work and juggling both boys after school is rough - but it was a very different kind of work. My body was in constant motion and I was in mommy troubleshooting mode pretty much all the time while the rest of my brain was down for maintenance.

How could I tell? I discovered during naps and other moments of downtime that I had precisely zero interest in doing anything even remotely cerebral. At one point I tried taking on a few open source tickets but barely made it through two of them before admitting to myself that I just didn’t want to do it. I spent much of my spare time reading a distressing number of romance novels and not much else. It was exactly what I needed.

This went on for the better part of a year. A year! How?

I think I was just that badly burnt out. I cover a narrow slice of that story here, but the burnout really came from a lot of different places: pushing through loss of interest in my problem space, pregnancy and postpartum x2, leftover people manager stress, and the creeping sense that I didn’t have what it took to thrive as an IC again.

It took me a full year to get bored. It didn’t occur to me to even think of it in this way, though, until I read a poignant essay by a recently acquired friend, Diane Loviglio, which is aptly titled How might we give ourselves time and space to get bored?

It’s a short post and there’s a lot going on in there so I hope you will read it through. She concludes the piece by asking herself how long it will take her to “get to boredom”. I don’t think any of us can reasonably predict this for ourselves. Acknowledging it as a goal, though, is a powerful thing.

So one year in and something strange happened, seemingly on its own: my interests started to make themselves known. Romance novels weren’t cutting it anymore. As various portions of self came out of hibernation I found my thoughts were drawn to people management and engineering leadership, the very things that had burnt me out so badly in the first place. It turns out that I have strong opinions about this stuff. I didn’t actually want to people manage again, though; I wanted, instead, to do what I do best: offer loads and loads of unsolicited advice.

Hence the Substack.

So now I know that I like to write and coach. I’m also finally reading things besides romance because those parts of my brain have apparently come online, too. That’s what getting to bored got me - my interests.

So it feels like I’m solidly in Phase 2 of my pause. If Phase 1 was an extended recovery period, then Phase 2 is all about discovery and it started when I finally got bored. Phase 3 will kick off in September when my youngest starts a half-day program. I anticipate that it will be strongly shaped by what I do for the rest of Phase 2.

I’ll keep you posted.

-Nuts and Bolts

1. Things are different now, of course, because he is a Toddler and apparently those only come in one model.