My Overload conflict has been in play for the last few days. I got very burned out on a games jam project two days before the project was due and I still had a significant amount of work to do on it. I ended up dropping some project goals to reduce the workload so I could finish it to an acceptable level with what enthusiasm I could muster.
In addition to the last two days of the project for which I was burned out and still working on it I had another three days where I wasn’t able to motivate myself to do anything remotely challenging. So I didn’t read, study, learn, exercise or eat well. I failed to meet my weekly life choices project goal here on CF. So the price I paid for working on the project as intensely as I did (for the first eight days of it) was five days of mental burnout and not progressing any of my goals. I don’t think this is an acceptable price to pay.
I think there are three main problems behind this result: project scope, burnout detection and burnout recovery.
Project scope is the problem I think I have the most control over. Overplanning is a problem I’ve worked on a lot and one of the benefits of the games jams I take part in is practising planning for fairly small projects. I previously have started games jams (or at least spent the first day of a games jam) planning the parts of the game and goals, and splitting goals into primary goals that need to be done for the game to function and secondary goals which are nice extra features or depth to have but the game can function without.
An extra step I plan to start adding to these games jams is making a time commitment estimate. One part of this is making an estimate of how many hours or days each goal/feature of the project will take to implement. I’m not confident that I can estimate this accurately at the moment so I will conservatively over-estimate the time required. Another part of the time commitment estimate is deciding how much time I’m willing to spend each day as previously I’ve often spent 10+ hours a day on them, which I’m sure is a big contributor to burnout. I think aiming for 5 hours a day (leaving time for studying, self-care and other things I might neglect when working too much) is reasonable. The last part of the time commitment estimate is leaving 20-30% “buffer time” at the end (e.g. 2 days out of a 7 day games jam) and planning to complete all primary goals with that time to spare, so if the primary goals do overrun I expect to have enough time extra or if I complete the primary goals on time or early I can use the buffer time to complete secondary goals.
Summary of planned project planning improvements to reduce burnout risk:
- Conservatively over-estimate the number of hours each project goal will take.
- Plan to spend no more than 5 hours a day on a project (based on my current other commitments.)
- Allow 20-30% of the project time as “buffer time”; plan all primary goals to be completed with this time to spare.
(n.b. “buffer time” is a reference to concepts in Elliot’s Overreach Summary article)