I've noticed this especially for inconclusive situations, when you need to make a call and you're not 100% (or even 90%) sure what's the right choice. These drain my energy more than anything. Combination of a need for prolonged high mental alertness and hight stress levels caused by uncertain outcome just burns through you. On the other hand some people, like gamblers, get an ultimate kick out of this.

I think, more than the outcome, it's the window of uncertainty that burns through you. Gamblers get a kick because the uncertainty window is fairly short. I'd bet that they'll flip when faced with an extremely long uncertainty window, like closing a corporate sales deal, or waiting for a job offer.

I'm guessing this must also have quite an effect on people who find themselves charged with a crime or even a civil claim. The snail's pace of most proceedings could keep you in a very uncertain situation for many months. Can't be mentally healthy, particularly considering the possibly severe negative outcome.

With something like a job offer, if you don't get the job you're no worse off than you were before. There's really only an upside potential. That has got to be less stressful.

As another guess at the difference gamblers feel: another aspect to the situation is whether the potential outcomes include a large reward, or if the best outcome is just 'less bad'.

A lot of times in the engineering situation we have to make these critical decisions which have a large impact on how the rest of some project goes. But the attitude generally seems to be about mitigating negative consequences, and not really hoping for or working toward some very positive outcome.

There is a similar analog in a lot of human behavior. Part of how I characterize it to myself is whether I feel that I'm, "digging myself out of a hole" or just striving for the highest gain possible (while lower gain is also fine). They two create vastly different experiences, the latter being far more positive.

I think you're right about that. I wonder if the best ways to avoid burnout, is to work on how you handle specifically these decision situations.

In other words, finding a way to deal with low certainty situations might be key, compared to just dealing with huge amounts of rote work.

This is a really interesting point. How would you approach this?

Some things that work for me:

- Cultivating a slight bias for making a decision; I remind myself that sometimes any decision is way better than no decision. Especially when a) time is a factor, b) managing people who want leadership.

- Prune the decision tree. When no option seems good, I switch modes and look for decisions that seem bad. Like SATs: rule out the bad answers and then guess.

- Calibrate expectations of information. Like Poker: Care about (and attach judgement mostly to) making the right call given the cards on the table, as opposed to winning any one pot.

When I find myself with a tough decision, I remind myself that it's tough for a reason: either the available options are similarly good, or similarly bad, or both. Therefore, the choice between them is not likely actually all that important. In poker you can bet the odds and be sure that there is a correct decision either way. In life you're probably lucky if that's true; it seems like the black swans are prevalent enough to sink almost any strategy.

There is a very rich man (forgot the name) who is making big decisions like this:

  * make a list of pros and cons
  * give each item an importance score from 0 to 10
  * if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons: do it

I believe you can do this for small decisions as well, without creating a list. Because most of the time you have a sense about the pros being twice as valuable as the cons.

Edit: Sorry, this comment is a little unrelated because the parent talked about making a choice. My comment is more about 'should I progress'.

> if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons

This is very obvious situation. But what if sum is not twice larger? Or if you are not confident in your importance score? This is where game becomes harder.

I wonder if energy drain is caused more by uncertain outcome or by brain working hard to find arguments to make decision.

Yup as the gp described, once you've made a decision the energy involved is all in implementation (and wasted worries). But actually exploring possibilities requires imaginging all angles and consequences as if they were real... at the same time. Can be very energetically consuming.

This has been my experience as well. What I've found helpful is to just take a decision real fast and move on. Sure, it might be a bad decision but it's a done deal nonetheless. I tend to feel less burned out even if the decisions turned out to be bad, vs spending an inordinate amount of time debating decisions. And I have gotten myself stuck in some real holier than thou decision wormholes, for instance, which programming language to learn now.

I seem to only be able to do this when I have a severe time constraint. I wish I could do it other times because it feels great to just decide and move on.

Set more non-cheatable time constraints.

Just In Time Procrastination.

If I set them, I'll cheat. Can you elaborate a bit?

Besides what you said of knowing what to do and the decisions part of the work there is one other thing, that at least for me, is(was) the culprit of most of my tiredness and irritability over the last year.

Changing contexts fast whilst taking decisions on these different contexts.

I was the only tech guy in this startup and I would handle basically everything on the tech side, working daily in three different languages and various "services". After a while as long as I had planned what I had to do for the day/week things were fine, but somedays I might be tackling this hard backend problem and I get asked to fix a frontend bug right now, I fix the bug, deploy it and go back to the backend stuff, couple hours later, I get a technical support call, again I must stop what I am doing to fix whatever needs to be fixed.

So, this thing of going back and forth between the areas in which I was responsible for would really take it's toll on my work, not necessarily in my productivity/hour, but in the amount of hours really worked, amount of sleep needed(which I found quite curious) and the chance of having some small anxiety crisis(which is something I kinda have to coupe with).

That's why decisive leadership is so important. It's really hard to work towards a goal while the people in charge keep changing their minds.

It's hard when the newest executive fad is not making any decisions at all.

"I'm just here to ask the right questions".

You ain't getting paid 2 million to ask the right questions. You're here to find the answer. I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions.

> I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions.

I doubt that. "Asking the right question" really means being able to identify which problems exist. From the anecdotes I read on HN about dysfunctional companies, this is sorely lacking.

Actually I find with products consumers use every day, they are able to ask the right questions fairly readily.

Yup. If I have a clear goal when I start the day, it is easy to get in the flow. But if I start the day with meetings, I become less productive.

And then you leave the meeting room, thinking "Well at least that killed a good amount of time" and you see you were actually only in there for 20 minutes.

Some days I have a lot of different tasks to accomplish and support items come at me usually at the wrong time (before vacation, at 5PM,...). For the last month I've been using kanban to manage my work (trello) with these columns

backlog on deck doing waiting impeded done

This has reduced my stress and gives me a place to put things to do as they come up.

I read Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry first. I found the book a bit overdone in explaining and justifying why. But maybe that is just me. I'm a scrum coach with 11 years experience as a scrum coach and 2 years as a product owner so I get the backlog, planned, doing, done thing.

I think the somatic marker hypothesis is relevant to what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

These managerial decisions have, by their very functional nature, a heavier body load.

It's analogous to code readability..

- No code reads easier than linear code.

- Linear reads easier than branched code.

- Branched reads easier than polymorphic code.

This. After being in a managerial position in engineering for a long time, I am (at 50) reconsidering transitioning back to an individual contributor role. Ever since I picked up a "leadership" role a couple of decades ago, I have been less approachable (per my family and friends) and need the weekends to just recuperate from a hectic week, rather than using this time to do fun things. And no, this is not because I am getting older. I have had a few stretches of downtime when I found myself doing fun things for days at end, and these were physically taxing activicites but were not "tiring."

I have the heuristic that I leave decisions for the end of the day, based on what I have done. In fact, this is one of my goals per day, when things are unclear.

One former colleague of mine would explain to clients that "Hard thinking is hard work, and hard problems need hard thinking before we put pen to paper" when explaining our pre-drafting billing.

In the case where you do not have to make decisions you probably have peace of mind. No worry so to speak.

„You know what the right thing to do is. Possibly due to experiene in the task and ecpected outcomes.“

Found the German (sorry for OT, but I had to say this).