I think this depends a very great deal on what your personal definition of a ‘short burst’ is. I know some people who will overwork themselves for weeks, then burn out and be unable to leave bed for weeks; this seems bad.
On the other hand, when I hyperfocus on something for several hours and then take the rest of the day off, I know I get significantly more and better work done than when I sort of idle away for sixteen hours, half-working and half-scrolling-Twitter.
I’m not sure why cycles on the scale of weeks seem much worse to me than cycles on the scale of hours, but one hypothesis I have is that it’s about avoiding the lows going below a certain threshold. If I work very hard and am tired and hungry afterwards, that’s fine; I’ll rest and recover. If I ever reach a state where I’m too tired and hungry to be able to cook a good meal and go through some bedtime rituals, then I’ll stop eating/sleeping properly. Once you hit a local minimum, you can be trapped there in a vicious cycle where you don’t have the energy to take care of yourself properly, and you don’t have any energy because you aren’t taking care of yourself properly. Big highs & big lows are fine so long as you can recover from the big low and get another big high, but above a certain threshold you can’t dig yourself out of certain holes without help.
If longer stretches of peak productivity produce worse burnout, then perhaps the key is keeping those stretches short enough that the burnout doesn’t cross that threshold?
One important nuance, though, is that some of your intense work can be investing in things that decrease the likelihood of getting stuck in a bad attractor.
That way, you have shot at jumping to high-output equilibria that you can actually sustain.
From personal experience, I needed at least 4 different things to go right at the same time before I could start doing 60-80h weeks that didn’t burn me out:
using a Freewrite
building a custom GTD system in Roam that used the API to tailor it very heavily to my preferences
using the Breaktimer app for mac (I set uncancellable 1-min breaks every 45 min)
having a set time each Sunday for doing life admin tasks
Each of these work to counteract overwhelm and burnout in their own way. For example, the regular Breaktimers (3) prevent me from ending up in spirals of working endless, almost addictive sessions without eating or drinking. Admin Sundays (4) mean I get time for improtant tasks that aren’t work, that can otherwise blow up and become the straw that break a camel’s back (“I’ve worked 70h this week, I’m exhausted, and now I need to deal with the massively schlepy implications of forgetting to pay my taxes?”) Stream-of-consciousness writing on the Freewrite (1) allows me to notice unhappy parts of myself, and neglected needs.
Also, each of them provide a space for doing meta-cognition. Crucially, that means that if one of them fails, the others are likely to catch that and help me take corrective action. For example, during the frequent breaks (3) I might notice I feel scattered because I haven’t been using my Roam GTD system, because it feels too cumbersome. So I’ll use task capture to send that task to my admin Sundays (4), which I’ll use to code up a more frictionless GTD system. The following week, I might notice the breaktimers not working properly. But now I’m able to use the actually nice GTD system to add a task to look into and fix the whatever the breaktimer bug is.
Thus, together, these 4 help create a self-sustaining equilibrium.
Agreed! Burst work can be most effective when done on things that amplify or aid steady work (e.g. setting up new software, process automation, learning a skill).
I think this depends a very great deal on what your personal definition of a ‘short burst’ is. I know some people who will overwork themselves for weeks, then burn out and be unable to leave bed for weeks; this seems bad.
On the other hand, when I hyperfocus on something for several hours and then take the rest of the day off, I know I get significantly more and better work done than when I sort of idle away for sixteen hours, half-working and half-scrolling-Twitter.
I’m not sure why cycles on the scale of weeks seem much worse to me than cycles on the scale of hours, but one hypothesis I have is that it’s about avoiding the lows going below a certain threshold. If I work very hard and am tired and hungry afterwards, that’s fine; I’ll rest and recover. If I ever reach a state where I’m too tired and hungry to be able to cook a good meal and go through some bedtime rituals, then I’ll stop eating/sleeping properly. Once you hit a local minimum, you can be trapped there in a vicious cycle where you don’t have the energy to take care of yourself properly, and you don’t have any energy because you aren’t taking care of yourself properly. Big highs & big lows are fine so long as you can recover from the big low and get another big high, but above a certain threshold you can’t dig yourself out of certain holes without help.
If longer stretches of peak productivity produce worse burnout, then perhaps the key is keeping those stretches short enough that the burnout doesn’t cross that threshold?
I like this point.
One important nuance, though, is that some of your intense work can be investing in things that decrease the likelihood of getting stuck in a bad attractor.
That way, you have shot at jumping to high-output equilibria that you can actually sustain.
From personal experience, I needed at least 4 different things to go right at the same time before I could start doing 60-80h weeks that didn’t burn me out:
using a Freewrite
building a custom GTD system in Roam that used the API to tailor it very heavily to my preferences
using the Breaktimer app for mac (I set uncancellable 1-min breaks every 45 min)
having a set time each Sunday for doing life admin tasks
Each of these work to counteract overwhelm and burnout in their own way. For example, the regular Breaktimers (3) prevent me from ending up in spirals of working endless, almost addictive sessions without eating or drinking. Admin Sundays (4) mean I get time for improtant tasks that aren’t work, that can otherwise blow up and become the straw that break a camel’s back (“I’ve worked 70h this week, I’m exhausted, and now I need to deal with the massively schlepy implications of forgetting to pay my taxes?”) Stream-of-consciousness writing on the Freewrite (1) allows me to notice unhappy parts of myself, and neglected needs.
Also, each of them provide a space for doing meta-cognition. Crucially, that means that if one of them fails, the others are likely to catch that and help me take corrective action. For example, during the frequent breaks (3) I might notice I feel scattered because I haven’t been using my Roam GTD system, because it feels too cumbersome. So I’ll use task capture to send that task to my admin Sundays (4), which I’ll use to code up a more frictionless GTD system. The following week, I might notice the breaktimers not working properly. But now I’m able to use the actually nice GTD system to add a task to look into and fix the whatever the breaktimer bug is.
Thus, together, these 4 help create a self-sustaining equilibrium.
Agreed! Burst work can be most effective when done on things that amplify or aid steady work (e.g. setting up new software, process automation, learning a skill).
This might help me think through some health things, thank you