Identity and Collaboration to Avoid Burnout

Burnout
A state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion caused by long-term stress or having worked in a physically or emotionally draining role for a long time.

The topic of burning out is difficult because it’s so closely aligned to a lot of the things that are valued as positive in most of the current professional environments. “Work hard” can shift easily in “Burned out”.

I particularly liked these two parts from an excellent article written by Siobhan:

“Having other interests helps with your sense of identity. If your sense of identity and self-worth comes only from the project, then if you do crash and burn it’ll make it ten times worse.”

“Create a collaborative culture, one where individual and heroic feats of coding, writing, or organisation, are given less weight than participation in a team effort.”
— Siobhan McKeown (2014) Burnout in Free Software Communities

Read it all, it’s a great article and has good insight also in certain dynamics that can happen in Open Source Communities.