Burn-out!

What do you do when you get burnt our doing something you love?

Take a break, but the right kind of break. I like to go hillwalking, or trekking for a few days in the wilderness. I come back tired but refreshed, but more importantly I find it increases my brain power. It also temporarily stops the feeling of needing to escape!


Ironically I used to spend every weekend in the wilderness building a landscape photography portfolio, and eventually that gave me burn out. My break was to start programming!

Change the work environment, listen to different music, drink different coffee, do Nomadic Programming.

Meditate. If you can't stand the thought, go somewhere quiet and just relax and Clear Your Mind. Fits in with #1.

Get some good sleep. The unconscious mind is surprisingly good at rearranging things automatically. Sometimes you'll wake up and just 'know' how to do something without having consciously thought about it.

Write. It doesn't matter what. Quite often I find my writing eventually returns to the subject at hand. Sometimes I'm burned out because I have too many temporary thoughts in my head. Making them permanent helps clear the backlog and get the flow going.

When all else fails I change my visual studio code colour scheme. Can't believe the spark that gives me sometimes!

D

[quote name='wicked357' timestamp='1302459850' post='4796759']
What do you do when you get burnt our doing something you love?

Change the work environment, listen to different music, drink different coffee, do Nomadic Programming.
[/quote]

Woah! I didn't know this was a thing people do!

Oddly enough, at the end of the month I'm taking a very long leave of absence to do this very thing; travel the country, network with people and work on projects I want to work on. Except, mine's a bit more extreme since this is going to be a several month long camping trip. Mountain-Man programming? Vagabond programming perhaps?

Anyone know of any fun challenges for programming? Language specific doesn't matter I can translate to my preferred language of choice always is fun to do that too.

http://projecteuler.net/
http://uva.onlinejudge.org/
http://www.topcoder.com/

All three of those sites offer good programming challenges. Project Euler seems to be the more relaxed, it tends to stimulate the mind a bit more. But by all means, try all three. But I often find the best thing is to just get away from it altogether. Take up art as a hobby if you enjoy it. As mentioned by a poster above, I too practice photography if I need to take a break. I sit and watch the world go by and listen to music. Just see what works best.

What do you do when you get burnt our doing something you love?

When game dev stuff burns me out, I take a break from it and get some of my freelance work done. Doing *that* nonsense for a while usually has me itching to get back to games.