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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Exactly.

So the take away is that in order to avoid burnout you need to mindfully develop the skill of 'stopping work'. While that is easy when you work on a factory line and you can't bring the tools home, and its really really hard when your job consists mostly about thinking about how to solve a problem.

I found early on that since I really enjoy programming I couldn't "stop" instead I had to shift to one of my projects so that it would be more enjoyable for me. That works a bit but not as much as sitting on the deck of a mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity does :-).

But the bottom line is figure out a way to "not work", whether it is by reading, exercising, or doing some hobby, so that you don't let the stress of work overwhelm you.

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>sitting on the deck of a mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity

As someone who often struggles to 'turn off' after work, this is my favorite way to disconnect. I try to make it out fairly regularly to camp deep in the backcountry–there's no better relief from work stress than sitting by a campfire in the forest, a full day's hike from the car, parked an hour's drive past the last trace of cell service.

The feeling of freedom is intoxicating–the feeling that there is literally no way that some work 'emergency' could crop up and demand my attention. It's something I used to get on airplanes, but with the increasing availability of in-flight wifi it's not quite so peaceful.

Since I live in a city where my ISP has a bunch of "public for customers" wi-fi hotspots (Vancouver), I've considered dropping my cell-phone plan and just using a VoIP provider for calls/texts. You can find the wi-fi hotspots near most places you might need Internet (e.g. when shopping), but they don't extend into public spaces like parks, and you can't use them when moving in a car/bus/train (or even when walking at a reasonable clip.) It seems like it'd separate life into connected and disconnected spaces, rather than forcing a constant decision (that's "on you") to disconnect—and I quite like the sound of that.

I sometimes feel like part of the problem is that we look at this too black and white, for example we never say to avoid death we should eat less sugar which is true but the more immediate thing that should come to mind should be less critical things like bad teeth or getting fat, which are in their own right very important. I think by constantly just saying we're at risk of burnout makes the problem appear easy to fix, namely just avoid burnout (take a vacation, etc., in the case of excess sugar just don't die, that's what I think a lot of donut lovers are thinking) whereas if the problem was many-fold then it'd be hard to trivialize it and therefore being on call just two days a week not being a big deal all of a sudden becomes a big deal.

Been working from home for the past 3 years and I've managed to pull this off with sports. It's unbelievable how tired I feel every evening when I "stop", go play football for 2 hours (somehow the feeling is just in my head, physically I'm pretty energized) and when I get back I'm actually in the mood for working again, feeling even better than in the mornings.

Sports in general are really effective against stress, it's hard to think of something else at all when engaged in the exercise. Make that a hobby and it's a long term recipe for a great career.

I've heard a number of people suggest that taking a break for physical exercise really helps. I also found that when I started taking the train to/from work the "break" of being on the train helped trigger the habit of switching out of work "mode".

Given my typical new year's resolution I'll have to try the physical activity trick as well :-)

For this vacation my solution was to go on a boat with no internet access. Unfortunately I can't really just do that at night. :/

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