Managing the Burnout Burndown
In addition to managing backlogs and burndown charts, technology leaders have to follow an ever-changing software landscape, manage team dynamics, and navigate office politics. It’s no surprise that this leads to burnout. This talk will provide tools to help manage stress and reduce burnout.
Anjuan Simmons
Staff Engineering Manager at GitHub
Attendees
- Reed
| Relevancy | Interesting |
|---|---|
| 5 | 5 |
Notes
Always needing to keep up can be stressful. Always be shipping. Burned out people often burn down things. Teams wither and communication suffers. As managers or workers we need to understand burn out. “Always be shipping” turns into “always be slipping” as deadlines pass. Burn down chart is part of SCRUM. Ideal line of amount of work over number of days that goes down until all work is complete. There are other things besides tickets that need to be “burned down”.
- Burnout Problem
- Exhaustion, cynicism and detachment
- Sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment
- The ongoing feeling that today's resources aren't enough to meet tomorrow's demands
- Emotional exhaustion
- You have nothing left to give
- Depersonalization
- You start to “un-person” people
- Reduced personal accomplishment
- Gallup poll said 23% of workers feel burnout very often or always, 44% sometimes
- Workplace stress contributes 8% to health care costs or $190 billion
- High blood pressure, fatigue, sadness, anger, increased visits to doctor, more sick days
- Common solutions
- Decked out offices, amenities, treating devs like royalty
- Escapism
- Burnout Resistance Framework
- Servers as metaphor - built to be resilient, uptime, structured to handle normal load
- Increasing and optimizing your availability
- Burning down barriers
- We're built for relationships
- Work in public
- Team channels
- Recognize work
- Meet in person
- Burn down distractions
- Read Deep Work
- Get off social media
- Leverage power of saying no
- Focus on something
- “Castle” from chess - “I can't do this, but I can do this.”
- Chew your food - 32 times
- Burn down illness
- The ideal line (burn down chart)
- Volunteer
- Journal - harness your attention and focus
- Walk