I think of it as lack of motivation combined with low-grade frustration from not being allowed to shift to something worthwhile. Paul Buchheit is obviously a self-winding guy. But put him in a context where he's expected to do things he doesn't care about and is forbidden to do things he does care about and all the air goes out of him. That's certainly what it's like for me.
Companies should learn a lesson from this. When I'm managing I work hard to build close-knit, cross-functional teams that score well on Pink's Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose triad. Purpose is the foundation: you have to give the team something meaningful to do and then connect them to that meaning. Autonomy comes next: you give them broad long-term goals and near-term milestones and turn them loose. They should always feel independent but accountable. Mastery comes from letting them meet and overcome challenges, learning as they go, but it doesn't hurt to support them by providing them coaching, access to experts, and any training they ask for.
Buchheit is clearly exceptional, but I think everybody benefits from environments that support his approach to the world. Every child is curious and exploratory. Many have that beaten out of them by industrial-model education and top-down corporate workplaces. But I don't think it's ever truly gone, and I think businesses really benefit if they deeply engage their staff.
From an evolutionary point of view, if we're not inspired and excited about what we're doing now or what we expect to be doing in the near future, it makes sense to go into energy conservation/restoration mode and go to sleep.
Similarly, over the long term, if we aren't inspired by the life we see ahead of us, it's best to go into energy preservation and contemplation mode while we try to figure out how to get onto a better path (and if we can't find one, we end up in chronic/deep depression/despair).
I've overcome depression (and come off meds) by developing/learning techniques for finding optimism any time things seem bleak.
It's taken a while to learn it (indeed I'm still learning it), but it's powerful the more it starts to click.
But you're welcome to email me (address in profile) and I can send you some links and suggestions.
Comforting to see it written by another person.
In one the latter chapters, he has a rule about "summoning your own enthusiasm". The primary observation in that part of the chapter was that it's really hard to truly exhaust someone physically, and even harder to exhaust them mentally, if they're doing something they actually care about. He gave some examples, one involving special forces people, and concluded that the primary source of tiredness for most people is lack of motivation - lack of interest, or not being able to feel there's a goal to all the work one is doing.
While my opinion is that Carnegie was exaggerating a bit here, I won't deny that this rings very true to my experience. As a programmer, I don't get physically taxed by work, and I very rarely get mental exercise too (most programming on regular web jobs is just plain tedium). But I do feel really tired on the job very quickly, and - back when I was a regular employee - the feeling used to evaporate almost immediately when I clocked out for the day.
I can even give an example from yesterday - lots of work and a visiting a doctor made me really tired by the evening, but I decided to sit down and write some code for a side project. My tiredness was gone immediately, and after 2 hours of cranking out code, I had to force myself to go to sleep, in order to have any energy for the next day.
When I was young, apparently this meant I had ADHD (Throwing this in as a snide comment to expose my opinion of how my primary schooling treated this symptom in children EDIT: I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I'll admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD. The medicines I was given gave me ticks that took decades for me to get rid of and altered my mental state in terrible ways, and it meant that instead of inspecting WHY I felt this way, I simply got shoved chock full of pills and then booted/put with other misfits, which just made the focus problem worse. The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit for things that didn't matter).
I took issue with that, largely because I find the response to be eminently logical, and built coping mechanisms to let me succeed in spite of it, but the underlying driver is still there.
I realize this is such an insubstantive comment, but it's a topic I've tossed around in my head for many many years now, and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with doing your job like every other professional adult" and hearing others express the same root is somewhat reassuring.
(I realize this is tangential, but if you're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan, check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping mechanisms" when I feel this way.)
> I see in a side comment you were concerned about undiagnosed ADD, I'll admit I'm somewhat concerned with _overdiagnosing_ ADD.
I get it. Child AD(H)D seems definitely overdiagnosed in the west; from what I read, giving medication seems to be the easiest hack to get kids to survive modern school system. But personally, I just want to have an expert opinion on whether or not I might have adult ADD, simply because I'm running out of plausible hypotheses, and this one fits well. I was depressed in the past and worked through that. I had anxiety issues, but they're almost gone too - I don't generally feel debilitating background anxiety anymore, unless I'm seriously falling behind on my obligations. The only unresolved thing left is the anxiety and weakening I feel in context of working.
> The joke I used to make as a kid was that I only had an attention deficit for things that didn't matter
I still feel like this. In a better world, this would be fine. Alas, we're not there yet.
> and often haunts me with a "why do you feel such fundamental friction with doing your job like every other professional adult"
Yes, this is exactly how I feel all the time, and had since entering the workforce. I have decent skills, I don't struggle with technical challenges. I only struggle with this fundamental friction. I look at people around me - friends, coworkers - and they all seem so productive and relaxed. Hell, my wife is the exact opposite of me - she's so good at getting things done at work she puts David Allen to shame. So yeah, it's reassuring to know that I'm not alone in this state - so thanks for sharing!
> (I realize this is tangential, but if you're _at all_ a hip hop/poem fan, check out 9-5ers Anthem by Aesop Rock. this is one of my "at work coping mechanisms" when I feel this way.)
Not a fan, just a casual listener. But I'm always open to any coping mechanism for this particular problem.
Dr. Russell Barkley has a book on it and also several talks on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7QuWchHvOY http://www.russellbarkley.org/
But you should get screened if you feel it would be beneficial. Find a doctor that specializes in ADHD/ADD. The way most adults find out they have ADHD/ADD is when they take their kids in for screening, usually due to school issues.
Depression, anxiety are co-morbid with ADHD/ADD as well.
Here's a good talk on one women's experience with ADHD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiwZQNYlGQI
I would personally disagree with your "medications are not specifically harmful in a misdiagnosed case." I'm not encouraging people to avoid seeking whatever help they see fit, but rather to not whitewash over the very tractable impact it had on a rather dark year or two of my childhood, and the lasting aftereffects. I honestly don't want to start a heated debate about whether or not to medicate, moreso call out to others who had a similar negative outcome that they're not alone and that it's not impossible to develop healthy coping mechanisms without pills.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdia...
> Suppose that 3% of the population has ADHD.
> Suppose that of people with ADHD, 50% of them realize they have ADHD like symptoms and go to a psychiatrist to get checked out.
> Suppose that of people without ADHD, 10% of them falsely believe they have ADHD and also go to a psychiatrist to get checked out.
There's a similar problem with taxi bands, though it's been improving over the years (in particular, the new wave of pay-through-app taxis helping). It used to be that drivers would read full card data aloud to transmit it to the base - in-the-clear.
But as soon as I switch to another task, such as coding, my mind lights up again.
Task switching should be incorporated into your routine if you find yourself getting bored by your work.
At least for me, it's boredom combined with a lack of purpose. If you're doing something boring/mundane at home like doing the dishes, at least at the end of it you can see your sink is empty and the dishes are clean. It feels like there was some point to it.
At many companies it can really feel like you are just doing something because somebody told you do it and there's no other purpose in doing so. Sometimes you have no connection to the people using what you are building, and no idea if what you're doing is even really driving revenue or benefiting anybody.
If you're not learning and you're bored, the lack of purpose eats away at you slowly. Even if you build something that ultimately fails, if you can directly understand the cause of that failure you can learn something for the future. It can be harder to understand how what you did is related to success or failure at big companies.
I often get it myself, feeling like I can't physically write another line of code until I move onto one of my own projects, then I'm good to concentrate for another 6 hours. I have to work extremely hard to complete tasks that on the surface look very simple and involve solving no new problems. This also extends into my normal life, like cleaning a messy room.
Note: I haven't been diagnosed with ADD and am not suggesting anyone has it if they experience this, I've just looked into it a lot.
Work at least keeps me somewhat awake. Over years I have developed some coping strategies, for example when I feel sleepy I open a text file and start writing detailed notes about what I am currently doing and why. That way I can continue to work, because when I fall asleep for a moment and lose the current thread of thought, I just read what I wrote recently and continue. Also, the act of typing, and seeing changes on the screen help to keep me awake.
But once in a while we have a long meeting, often in dark-ish and not well ventilated place, and that is like feeding me sleep pills.
Back when I was in college, I used to go to raves and do drugs.
At some point, I started to chaperone my friends and I'd be the sober one, responsible for taking everyone home.
I noticed that there's definitely an "energy" that you feel in the room, even stone cold sober. Being surrounded by 2000 people who are high as a kite has a way of making you feel high... Even if you're stone cold sober.
I think there's something similar going on in offices. There's some kind of 'proximity effect' there.
Stress. (One of the smyptoms of)
In my career I think I've spent the majority of time at one extreme or the other. Feast or famine: overworked & stressed or underworked & depressed. When you can hit it just right in the middle, life is truly great. But rarely have I been able to sustain it for more than a couple months at a time. Let me know if you've found the secret :)
Stuff happens around you, but you are not really a party to it, and you don’t have to be.
Same for really boring meetings. You just get slowly lulled to sleep.
I once had a manager tell me, "Show up or be fired. We will judge if you deserve to go home or not."
Yes, one should look for a better job elsewhere, and lately the economy has found more room for all of society's laborers regardless of vogue credentials.
However, I can't pay the bills with interviews, and often times I lose value through interviewing.
If you have a manager who values you you'll often find you can get away with a lot more than you expect as long as you are still a strong benefit to the team.
Many. Especially smaller shops in laxer countries.
There could be 1m of X and 100m of y, for example
It's not a thing in big faceless corporations, chains, etc, for example (though it can be a thing in places like Google, MS, etc, with the right manager).
But on small businesses (e.g. 2-20 people) it's not uncommon in certain countries (thinking of Southern Europe that I know of) to have an understanding when one needs to leave. There are also practices like "siesta" where places close for a few hours altogether and people have lunch etc.
I was also surprised to see the hours kept in french towns (not Paris, smaller, but still big ones) that e.g. shops opened casually at around 10am, many were closed at lunchtime, and reopened again later, etc.
I'm pretty sure this is the case elsewhere without the "protestant work ethic" (or Japan's version of the same, instilled after lots of humiliating defeats on the hands of the west), e.g. Africa, Latin America, and so on.
But the reality is that most employers are far less friendly, to their own detriment of course... but only in the long term.
Not in the "real world land". Just in the part of real world that you've managed to negotiate for yourself.
Others are more (and others less) lucky.
Like, by definition, things which feel fake cannot be "real" in this sense of the word. Of course though, your reality and my reality are simultaneously happening at the same time.
Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curious if this has been studied at a psychological or neurological level. As in, why do we feel tired/sleepy in these kinds of environments (as opposed to say anxious or restless)? Personally I've experienced it at least some of the time at almost every desk job I've ever had.
I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way.
I also don't think it's the same kind of mental exhaustion you experience when working on something really challenging, like trying to crack a very hard math problem or something. Clearly in these situations the problem is that the tasks at hand, if any, are neither complex nor difficult.