Tagged “burnout”

In this talk at State of the Browser, Amy offers some suggestions for making work feel more meaningful.

Don’t treat work like an end in itself; treat it as a means to the end of fulfilling your purpose.

What are your key skills, experiences and values? Write them down, them summarise how these come together as your “core perspective” or purpose.

Now, we want to find ways to fulfil that purpose, and to do that we can set goals.

When considering candidate goals, ask:

• Does this connect to my purpose?
• Do I actually care about achieving this goal?
• Is this a goal I can actually achieve?
• How will I know if I’m making progress?

Great post by Chris here on the double-edged-sword of our rapidly-evolving web standards, and how to stay sane. On the one hand the latest additions to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript standards are removing the need for many custom tools which is positive. However:

it can also leave you feeling like it’s impossible to keep up or learn it all. And that’s because you can’t! The field is literally too big to learn everything. “Keeping up” is both impossible and overrated. It’s the path to burnout.

Chris’s suggestion – something I find reassuring and will return to in moments of doubt – is that we focus on:

• a good understanding of the fundamentals,
• staying aware of general trends in the industry (such as important forthcoming native HTML elements; and the different approaches to building a website etc),
• problem-solving: being good at “solving problems with tech” rather than just knowing a bunch of tools.