I’m the sole developer on my team this week, which very sensibly means I’m not making any significant changes to the platform. It’s given me a decent spell of time to do mid-year review things, documentation things, thinking things. A bit of a tidy up.

I’ve achieved none of those things, of course, because the heat saps my will to do anything. I am incapable of motion or thought in temperatures outside my zone of comfort, which is 18.7 to 19.3 degrees centigrade.

So these weeknotes will be short.

I have written some code this week. It’s gorgeous. Frankly, I’m gutted that I can’t be the person reviewing what I’ve written. It’s that good. It does…things. All sorts of things. What, you want a list? Well I can’t tell you. If you know me in my corporate life ask me to invite you to the thing, and then you’ll see.

But otherwise I’ve been reviewing my objectives. I feel conflicted about them. I’m achieving 80% of them, and the remaining 20% are very thorny and probably won’t come to fruition for a while yet. Some people have suggested changing the objectives to retrofit them to the work that I have actually done. I think that’s an interesting prospect, but it’s one that I struggle with. I think I struggle with it for the same reason that I think working overtime for free is cheating. If you have objectives and you have to change them, then you should change them when they seem impossible. But to take a stretching objective and say, gosh. I never tried. I never got round to it. Maybe I can be rewarded for the other things I did? The things I did that I enjoyed, and that were easy?

And that’s not to devalue the things that I do that aren’t in my objectives. I’ve helped out all over the place. But either ‘be a helpful chap’ should be an objective, or I need to fit it around the work that meets the organisation’s goals. That’s it. That’s all there is.

I want to be judged by the standard I set myself at the beginning of the year, and I realise that I resent people telling me that if I do that I may not exceed that standard. Good! It means I’m doing it properly. It means my standards are appropriately high.

Rant over. Watch me dismount from my horse. It’s very high.

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I’m feeling quite burned out, friends. Look at the number of episodes in this season. We’ve not had a reset in quite a while. Right now, I’m thinking about the three presentations I’m giving over the next quarter; the fact that I need to pick my thesis topic, do a literature review, and find a supervisor – also in the next quarter; and the exam coming in 2.5 weeks when I have 2 weeks of content still to cover.

I’m finding my enthusiasm seeping away for both the course and my work, and I hate that – because I know that I really like both. It’s just that right now it all feels like a chore, and a chore with no end in sight. I need a break, friends. I need to get away from all this stress.

I found this list of symptoms of burnout, and:

• Feeling tired or drained most of the time ✅
• Feeling helpless, trapped and/or defeated
• Feeling detached/alone in the world
• Having a cynical/negative outlook ✅
• Self-doubt
• Procrastinating and taking longer to get things done ✅
• Feeling overwhelmed ✅

I am four out for seven, which seems…not good. I am not yet suffering from self-doubt. That would require some massive reconfiguration of the universe as we know it.

But still. I’m going to keep an eye on this. I’m also going not going to take on anything new for the time being, even though I keep seeing really cool things. I’m not. They will be fun at the beginning and then they will just be more stress.

I hate that work has a honeymoon period.