Toxic productivity and burnout (Patreon)

For this week's video, I did something different: I recorded a conversation between me and my friend Andy Polaine, a leadership coach, about what happens when productivity gets toxic and turns into burnout. Some of you may recognize him from the interview with the Obsidian CEO or from the video about taking notes for RPGs in Obsidian.

Burnout has been on my mind of late because I've been dangerously on the edge of it for the last two months due to some travel for work-related conferences during which I delivered four talks on three continents. During that time, I still released 18 shorts, 11 livestreams, and 8 videos on this channel and on others-- while continuing to join meetings at odd hours due to timezone differences. It was a lot, and it made me really want to open up about the reality of producing at a high level. It's not always a good idea, even if you can physically do it for a short time.

So if you've been wondering why I've been more unresponsive than usual to messages on Patreon, Discord, YouTube, and Mastodon, that's why. Please bear with me as I ramp up again and attempt to fall back into routines.

Some takeaways from the video with Andy:

• We usually go through burnout as a result of increased communication channels, doing more work than we used to for sustained periods, struggling with the workload, and being unable to say anything to anyone about it.
• More people than you might suspect are struggling with burnout.
• One of the hallmarks of burnout is the feeling of being chronically depleted of energy to such an extent that a short respite, like a weekend, doesn't make a difference.
• Some ways to tackle overload in software systems can be used to tackle overload (burnout) in humans, too, like the Circuit Breaker Pattern.
• When you're in a state of burnout, or close to it, it's doubly important to set up lines of defenses against the flow of more work, such as by defending your calendar and setting boundaries for meetings.
• You can turn being bad at answering emails into a good thing. Andy used a vacation auto-responder even when he wasn't on vacation as a way to stem the tide.
• The Three-Column Filter (Must Have, Nice to Have, Never Have) can be a helpful tool in determining whether a certain bit of work is worth doing.

Note: This video will be unlisted until Friday, when I have to mark it as private shortly before it is published for everyone to see. If you try to watch it and get a "Private video" error, you've probably caught it in that small window. Wait a few hours and try again-- it will be published shortly.

Stuff you may have missed from the last month

Here are some things that went out in June that you might have missed (because I didn't )

• Here's a video on Espanso, my new favourite text replacement tool. It's opensource, and has completely replaced the tool I was previously using, Text Expander. You can copy my Espanso config here.
• I did a Patreon-only sneak peak of an early build of some upcoming frontmatter changes in Obsidian.
• One of my talks last month was about how I use Obsidian for work. I recorded my rehearsal video, including my attempt to play on the Continuous Integration/Continuous Development loop in software development for PKM: continuous note-taking.
• I started a sort of "Obsidian Tour" series that I plan to do every year, and the first two videos in that have released:Here's the video showing the different ways I structure my Obsidian vault
  Here's me talking about every single community plugin I've got installed right now (all 46 of them)
  

Project updates

• nvdh-vaultAdded a new workflow called Adding modified date to a note, which includes a script that adds a link to today's daily note in the date in-line field of a note. I have this hotkeyed and use it whenever I modify a note, so that I can see by looking at a daily note what I was working on. If you just want the code, here's the gist for the script.
  

To access these vaults, check out this list of Patreon perks-- they'll always have the most updated links and passwords for the vaults.

Have a great week ahead, everyone-- hopefully one with more meaning than meetings.