Alaric, I'm sorry for your loss <3 I do want to say one thing about burnout: we're all so excited to get over it and start doing the stuff we *want* to do, but in actual fact, burnout is your body and your brain telling you to literally not do anything at all. So don't sweat it if you can't do the thing you want to do. Those 3 days of doing nothing is what you need to be able to do the things you want to do. I was stuck so badly in 2021, it took me three months to be able to care about anything, and it's taken me until literally last month to be able to read anything I can engage with instead of binge reading trashy genre fiction. Sometimes I worry that we feel like time off from work has also got to be "productive" so much that we forget about proper rest, the kind where your brain gets to turn off and do it's own thing, which is something that is supposed to greatly boost creativity.
There is some research a colleague sent me when we had a discussion about burnout, and I said that I set aside time every week to stare at the ceiling and look at nothing, or even better at trees, that shows that staring at trees can equal deep rest. I have, of course, lost that link. (Tangent: I keep MEANING to store links in a spreadsheet but somehow...) Anyway, here's something from Psychology <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fallible-mind/201605/stressed-out-science-says-look-some-trees> Today on the subject. Cordially, Ameya Nagarajan (she/her) <http://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyann> On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 17:31, Alaric Snell-Pym via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: > On 13/12/2022 03:23, Udhay Shankar N via Silklist wrote: > > Hello people: > > > As an aside, I discovered in this process that "mailing list" in 2022 > > generally means an email marketing solution - i.e, a broadcast service to > > pump out marketing materials to a large list of people - and typically > not > > a discussion list, which is what silklist is. It took me quite a bit of > > research to find one that provided hosted mailman, AND was considered > > reliable. > > Tell me about it. I run a few mailman lists on my own server, and it's a > bit of a pain to keep working (it relies on a tangle of setuid binaries > and special directory permissions and all that to enable both web and > email-triggered things to share the same mutable state), and is a thorn > in the side of my desire to have email and web handled in different VMs, > so have been searching for different mailing list manager software... > and, as you say, having to fight in google searches against marketing > software! > > > So: fingers crossed. Can you hear me? > > Yes! > > How is everybody? > > I am fighting burnout right now. Work is rewarding, a lot of pressure > has been taken off me at home with the death of my mother-in-law (who we > were looking after in her terminal decline, so the person she used to be > was already gone a while previously) and with my youngest child now at a > school she can walk to so I don't need to do school runs, yet I'm still > pretty busy with looking after my (disabled) wife and two children (and > all the pets) so I'm struggling to recover from the previous few years! > > I take time off work to try and get some "me time", but I find I have to > manage that process carefully. If I take a week off, the first three > days of it I get little done as I'm just tired and lack the motivation > to do any of the things I used to be excited about. Then I start to get > some enthusiasm, start to get into something - and then the week is over > and it's the weekend full of the usual domestic labours, then back to > work as usual the next week! > > So I'm carefully rationing my annual leave allowance to keep my spirits > up, prioritising domestic efforts into infrastructure projects that make > a long-term difference to the workload, and trying to listen carefully > to what my body and mind are asking for to maintain my own health. I've > been in this kind of situation plenty of times before, and clawed my way > back out of it. I'm just hoping that this time no new source of stress > befalls me and drags me back down again! My wife has run out of elderly > parents that need looking after - but I have three parents and they're > getting a bit long in the tooth. However, they seem to have been better > at putting measures in place for their own care, so hopefully we won't > be needing to turn our home into a nursing home for any of them! > > Meanwhile, the personal projects I'm excited about are: > > - Ongoing work on Ugarit, my backup/archival system, which uses > content-addressible storage technology to manage a kind of file storage. > It has two "applications": backups, by keeping a timestamped sequence of > snapshots of some filesystem, and what I call archival mode, where it > becomes the primary storage for read-only stuff like photos, videos, > music, interesting PDFs I download, bank statements, insurance policy > documentation, and that sort of thing. Both build on the basic > storage-of-files model, just with different organisational structures on > top for navigation. I've been improving bulk throughput for backing up > and restoring large filesystems, and better isolation between different > servers backing up to the same storage vault, because I need to improve > my server backup system - but what I'm excited about is building better > user interfaces for the archival mode, including a Web-based browsing > interface for exploring/searching and archive and viewing things, as the > current command line interface isn't the greatest for day to day uses. > > - I want to learn to compose music, but traditional musical notation is > confusing with all the irregular note labels and jargon in Italian and > whatnot, and designing my own musical notation (and writing associated > synthesiser software) is simpler than learning that. > > - I run the lighting and other small electronic loads in my workshop > from a 12v battery bank, charged from solar panels and (in nasty weather > like this) topped up from grid power, but it's a manual process to > manage the different charging inputs. I want to build a push-pull DC:DC > converter with two inputs and one output so I can program a > microcontroller to do things like "Charge the battery with as much power > as can be pulled from the solar panels, but topping it up with power > from the grid to get the battery charged ASAP". This is an interesting > challenge, dynamically shifting electrical power drain from two sources > with different characteristics, driven by a state machine that knows how > to best charge a lead-acid battery. > > Wish me luck! :-D > > > > > Udhay > > > > -- > Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) > http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/ > > -- > Silklist mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist >
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