As life progresses, it naturally creates a lot of challenges. Regardless of their size, they always pack more than they show. Handling them the way they deserve requires more effort than blindly fighting them until they give, and trying to handle these challenges to prevent them from repeating resulted in something unexpected: Burnout.
This was not the first time I had exhausted myself, but this was different. It developed slowly due to my habits, stronger personal support, and efforts to prevent it since I felt something was off; alas, the fall didn't stop until I understood what it was and what was feeding it. This time was different in terms of underlying cause and the required changes in my life to end it in a meaningful manner.
Normally, when an event like this happened, the solution was the "stop & restart" method, a procedure I used successfully many times. The idea is simple. Declare you're mentally bankrupt, both in time and energy. As a result, everything stops, and you start doing things related to their importance, building a new schedule from the ground up. The resulting schedule might not look different, but it's different enough to eliminate the problematic things you took on and put you back on track. This time, it didn't work. Instead, it didn't improve anything. The slow decline continued until I seized up, being unable to accomplish anything.
This is when I understood that something fundamentally different is blocking me, not the daily things that I'm trying to tackle, but the things running in the background, the things that have eluded me, or more accurately, the things I didn't pay attention to.
As far as I remember, having a secondary list for projects and ideas was natural. Every worthy idea, possible project, and thing I want to work on is recorded in this list. The list took several forms. A notebook, a text file, or, more recently, a database. This database contains notes, designs, requirements, and more. Every entry is a semi-organized checkpoint of a project. When a project is restarted, this checkpoint is retrieved and worked on, then if it needs to stop, the database is updated, and the project is left alone. This method has incubated many things, and was working, I thought.
The human brain is an interesting thing and works in mysterious ways. While I assumed that the secondary list was on my computer, my brain was keeping a second copy and working on it to find ways to progress every entry on it. Considering the size of the list, my brain was working way overtime without realizing it. The desire to keep tabs on everything and progress them even a minuscule amount burned me out with a slow yet steady ember.
As we go through life, every one of us takes on more responsibility for running our own lives. This happens slowly and naturally; hence, we don't think about this a lot. On the other hand, we humans have practical limits on what we can do by ourselves. These limits are psychological in most cases, yet there are hard, biological limits to what we can accomplish. While we tend to believe that all barriers are removable, removing the biological ones is not always possible. One can get a small boost by trading off longevity, but that's everyone's own choice.
Personally, I decided to dig into the database and remove the things that don't make sense or are no longer valid. Removing projects from the database, complete with their accumulated knowledge, felt bad at first, but considering I have the seed of the idea and everything sprouting from it, the result is not a loss. Instead, it's a removal of self-inflicted expectation, and it felt good.
I have talked about scaling down life before; however, the process was more aimed at the physical side of my life since physical space is more visibly limited. However, while digital space has no practical boundaries, the accumulation of digital artifacts creates the same mental load. As a result, I'll be treating my digital space the same way I do the physical one, and won’t skimp on my regular spring cleaning.
As it turns out, I have gone through a similar experience in 2023. While not completely identical, it's definitely related.
Until next time,
Be kind.