Burnout · Primly Community

tried to push through burnout for 8 months, here is what actually happened

ops_omar · 5 replies

posting this because I keep seeing advice that's either "just rest" or "push through, everyone is tired." I tried the second one for almost a year. here's the actual outcome.

Context: ops at a mid-stage startup, 2024 into early 2025. We were in a crunch, short-staffed, CEO was involved in every decision which slowed everything. I was running on caffeine and the idea that Q3 would be better.

Q3 wasn't better. I pushed through because: genuinely felt responsible for my team's work getting done didn't want to be the person who tapped out during a hard stretch told myself I was too busy to be burned out, which makes no sense in retrospect

What actually happened over 8 months of pushing through:

Quality degraded. Not catastrophically, but I started making the kind of decisions I'd normally catch myself on. Small things. Wrong assumptions in planning docs. Underestimating edge cases. The kind of errors that don't surface immediately but come back later.

I got mean. Not overtly, but shorter. Less patient in reviews. Less generous in how I interpreted people's intent. I had a 1:1 where I was clearly clipped with someone who didn't deserve it and they mentioned it afterward and I felt terrible.

My body made the decision eventually. I got sick three times in two months. Not COVID, just run-of-the-mill getting-sick. My sleep was shot.

I resented work I used to find interesting. Ops work, the puzzle-solving part, started to feel like someone else's problem I was being forced to care about.

I finally took two weeks off unplanned in March 2025. After week one I felt almost nothing. After week two something shifted. Came back still tired but able to care again.

I don't think pushing through is never the right call. Sometimes you need to finish something real. But I had no plan for what came after, and that's where it went wrong. You can sprint. You just need to know when the sprint ends.

5 replies

apm_aisha

"I told myself I was too busy to be burned out" is going in a doc I keep of sentences that describe exactly where I am right now. I am absolutely doing this.

ml_mike

The quality degradation piece is underappreciated. When I was burned out I thought I was still performing. Looking back at PRs from that period, I wasn't. Not dramatically, but consistently below my usual bar. Your judgment goes first, before you even feel it going.

ops_omar

yes and the insidious thing is that burned-out you doesn't have the bandwidth to accurately evaluate burned-out you's output. you lose the calibration at the same time you lose the capacity.

ux_uma

The unplanned time off is interesting. I've heard from a few people that planned PTO doesn't always do the same thing, because you spend the first half decompressing from the planning and the second half pre-stressing about returning. Something about the unstructured nature of an actual break seems to matter.

hardware_hugo

In hardware we call this running a system past its thermal envelope. You can do it. For a while. Then things start failing in nonobvious ways and you spend six months debugging symptoms that were caused by a design decision you made in the overheated state. Humans are not different.