Hey everyone! Almost missed this one, so better late than never, as I have a new years goal that I'm not gonna miss out on.
In short, it's been a hectic month. I haven't spent much time if any doing anything game dev related, and as I'm writing this finishing off a sinus infection that knocked me down for a few days. I have, however, gotten up close and personal with a topic that most, if not all, programmers may fight at some point: burnout. I'm gonna give a quick overview of my run-in with it, and give ya'll some tips for how I'm fighting it in this work-from-home age.
For the past few months at work I've been working on a project that I'm comfortable saying was biting off more than I should have. In doing so, I was trying to get it done in a timely manner, working longer hours, going in to work and working from home after dinner, and on slow weekends continuing to work. Needless to say, I was burning the candle from both ends.
I really started noticing this in October, and finally did something about it in November. I stopped being so hard on myself for not getting things done as fast as I would have liked them to, leaving work at work, started playing some video games again (yes, I stopped playing games...), and made it a priority to spend time not staring at a screen. All of this was starting to help, but the stress was still there, and unfortunately not making things any easier.
Then last week I got sick. It basically forced me to take some much needed time off and sleep. After about 5 days of almost nothing but sleep and recharging, I came out of it realizing that December is going to continue the trend: Focus on getting some good sleep, and do some of the stuff that genuinely makes me happy.
On that note, expect some fun stuff for Periodic next month. I'm hoping to take at least a week off, and I'm definitely going to be getting some fun stuff done in terms of game dev since that's WELL overdue.
Thanks for checkin in, and I'll catch ya in the next one!
-TJ
