The battlecry of burnout "experts" is don't be overworked, set boundaries, etc. What a stupid suggestion. Nothing could be further from the truth, and indeed your happiness is at stake if you listen to this naive drivel. While burnout is real, we need to talk about the realities of how it works and the actual options to deal with it.
What is Actually Burnout?
Put simply, burnout is a loss of meaning. The symptoms can be feeling overworked, lack of motivation, irritability, all the usual things we hear about. When we are burned out, we are in survival mode just trying to get through the workday, and on the weekends we feel spent so enjoying them is super difficult. If you don't work a Monday through Friday the effects are the same, just replace your days off with the weekend.
I've been burned out. I put too much into a company that then got sold to an Australian company (nothing wrong with Australian companies, just happens to be relevant that it wasn't local) that upended everything I had worked on over the previous 4 years. It's kind of funny now, but at the time, I sat in two different "sync" meetings, one with IT and one with Engineering (both groups I helped run) where the new CEO who was in theory technical stated, and I am quoting him word for word, "we don't need IT, we have Dropbox."
Up until that point I had worked many a 60 hour week, was up at all hours of the night talking with customers around the world every month, and was not enjoying life. Those words weren't a problem, but they illustrate an issue that you can probably guess undid the joys I was latched onto for this effort.
My problem was meaning, not work.
How Dare You, Tod!
A lot of people I've said this to get butthurt about it at first. I have yet to have someone deny this completely by the end of it, so bear with me. Even if you don't agree, you'll see the point and flesh out your own perspective to be greater. It will be a good time, I promise.
The reason I do this is not to be argumentative, but because I hate signing people up for misery. These fuckwit consultants and life coaches would like to sell you attention, get you on a therapists' schedule for the rest of your life and suck the life out of you slower in the hopes you don't notice because the pain level day to day is less. It's not malicious, they honestly think they have the answer and that this is the way. It's harder to escape a slow drug than one that results in a very compressed bad trip, but it's hard to argue that selling you a slow drug you don't think is a drug at all is better than the bad trip you were on.
Let's figure out something better, shall we?
How We Know it Is Not Overworking
The problem with psychology is that it's hard to see cause and effect because there's never one cause, and there's rarely one effect but we always see the one effect we want to isolate. Thought exercise: how many things are you hearing right now? How many things are being filtered out for you? How many filtered out things are playing into your psychology? That's just hearing, too. We're always getting hundreds of inputs all the time.
The bigger evidence is comparison. I know people that work 100 hour weeks, for years. Yes. Years. I'm not exaggerating. It's not even tech bros motivated by that get-rich paycheck. My grandpa would be up by 6 AM every day, working on the yard or the construction site and had to be coaxed inside by the evening times. He only slowed down on Sundays. The man just loved work, and if you listened to his coworkers on any job they would just wonder how he worked so damn fast all the time.
Where was his burnout? He did that for all 30 years I knew him. He worked twice as long and three times as hard as everyone in his own field and was fine. I know people that program for 12 hours a day as often as they can, only stopping because they eventually have to eat. For some it's fun and we can see that pretty easily, and for others it's not fun and that should cause us more pause.
The missing piece is meaning.
What is Meaning?
For some, this is most accessible as "a cause" or something related. A purpose maybe. That's not relatable necessarily, but many can understand the motivating power of zealotry to a cause. It's not necessarily religious, I've seen people be nurses and doctors that were devoted to the idea of helping people in emergencies. They tend to work at the ER in my limited experience, but I'm sure there's a lot more nuance and complication there.
Meaning is different. Motivation is useless. What's worth the slog? I'll tell you, if my wife fell ill I would be there, whatever that means in this case, as long as it took. I'm sure there's nuance there, but I would not abandon her. That's not universally relatable, but I happen to find a great deal I would endure for her sake. We all have things we would endure pain for. Maybe not any pain, and maybe not without reprieve. That's less relevant than the fact that there's something out there you'd be so enamored with that you'd endure more pain than average for it.
You know how I know? Most of us would do it for some form of drugs, because chemical addiction is real and biological. The mechanism is there. The psychology is something we'd like to pretend is different, but you have things you'd identify as worth working 12 hour days for, and you'd not only be satisfied but proud of the effort. It might not be worth finding it, but it's there.
We need to talk about what options and tradeoffs are really there.
Handling Burnout for Real
The ideal is to find the thing we do 12 hour work days for 6-7 days a week without breaking a sweat. The danger there is what I experienced, actually. You can't identify with the project, or the company. You have to identify with the effort or it's unsustainable. It's about the steps you take, the actions you work through. That's much more rare than we'd like to say. I don't necessarily recommend this, even though it's the strongest evidence that burnout isn't from overworking. You will "overwork" for something, but the right thing is rare.
Another option is to find something you can have meaning for over a reasonable amount of time. I think it's much more approachable to find something you'd work 8-10 hour days for, 5-6 days a week, and occasionally you'd do a 72 hour day for. There's a lot more on that list for a lot of people. A cause you will exchange time for in addition to money, but occasionally the need spikes and you can't just hire more people and make a 24/7 shift, so you stand up and take on the mantle of the need as an adult and do what's necessary. I think that's the right answer.
If you find yourself burned out currently, I'll tell you, after I got burned out from the buyout of that company, I tried a number of things. The thing that worked that I've since seen in many many others in various countries and fields might surprise you. Do something easy that you enjoy, fiddle with the thing that enamored you with the thing that burned you out, and find the joy again. For me, programming is about building shit and being able to talk to other craftsman about the work, both mine and theirs. For some it's writing a game, or design, or sitting with a sick child as they recover, or being able to make a loved one laugh.
The point is to find the thing that colors the high point in your life. You might need to find another kind of high point or a different color, but there are always, always multiple. Find the purity, and start gradually adding in the harder parts. It's like any kind of exercise. You find the flow first, then you start bringing in the next level of pain to grow from.
Form, then build the strength again. Just don't think the strength is what hurt you, it's what made you capable, it's what made you happy.