So you have two choices: Find somebody who does like sauerkraut and let them have it. Or, make a plan to eat the sauerkraut, and stick with it. If you can, eat the sauerkraut first, so you have the kassler schnitzel to look forward to, or divide it evenly, eating some with the taters and some with the schnitzel.

In programming terms, bugfixing is most people’s sauerkraut. But with a little versioning early on and continuous runtime tests, the bugfixing at the end of the project isn’t anywhere near as overwhelming as without.

Incidentally, I love sauerkraut and I haven’t had breakfast today. so. there.

What I would suggest to somebody so entrenched is to swap sceneries, even the entire life if necessary. I closed shop and moved 400 miles to start my new life as a graphic designer and while that was a rocky road, too, I feel much more empowered after I burnt my proverbial ships and cut my cords.

On the topic of happy burnout, in my opinion it’s important to spend a little extra time at work in a startup phase, but equally as important to take that time back, step away from the PC and go outside. We are social creatures, after all.

I believe I’ve experienced what you coined as “happy burnout”. Usually, this is when I have an new project idea and I go on my merry way trying to realize it – there’s nothing more fun than green-field projects. However, when I burnout, I find that I lose my enthusiasm, to the point that sometimes I don’t revisit the project anymore.

Regarding taking breaks, Pomodoro has taking regular breaks worked into the routine, so I believe it’s a nice technique to learn ideas from, even if you don’t do everything literally.

Also, after seeing Giles’ video on developing habits. I’ve recently started to use a regular weekly schedule – which I make known to my family – for doing my personal projects. For example from 6:30 – 8:00 on weekdays, I am working, but I take a day off on Thursdays, for example. Since unlike you, I actually have a day job, I now have homework in addition to work-work. This has been working pretty well, and has relieved my anxiety of always thinking about and working on those projects every second of the day, but when I AM working, I have good assurance that I get a good-sized chunk of time to do it.

What you’ve described feels very familiar to me – just like Kelly said: waves of intense productivity followed by…happy burnout.

I have a tendency to just keep on going as long as I feel creative and productive. Which means working long hours and through the weekends. Joyfully.

Until the cycle ends. And I feel all the symptoms of happy burnout that you wrote about.

While I can buy into the idea of taking regular breaks as a method of avoiding this…when I’m in a productive cycle, I’m afraid to stop. Afraid that come Monday, I won’t be able to recapture the flow – and I’ll have missed out on whatever I could have accomplished if I hadn’t stopped on Friday afternoon.

Right now, I’m working on recognizing the point where the cycle ends and actually taking the down time I know I need. Ideally, I’d just like to follow my natural rhythms. Easier said than done. Despite having complete control of my own schedule, something feels “wrong” about taking, say, a Tuesday off.

I actually solved the situation by developing a very sensitive intuition about when I need rest and recreation. This rest is actually about doing something that recharges my batteries. Go swimming, read a book, lie in the sun. It’s about smelling a forrest after the rain, about watching a sunset or listening to birds. Its about relaxing and turning your head off, without going into sensory overload mode.

I actually liked to play videogames and watch movies. I always tried to pick games and movies which looked very promising and which I thought had a lot of quality, but still this wasn’t the right way to turn my head off.

I can’t exactly generalize what works. I usually stumble upon it and some of it proves as working over and over again. But the biggest common factor for me is actually the lack of commitment and responsibility. To kind of drift through the day, but drift in a regenerative way. Not just doing nothing, but simple being and recharching ones batteries.

Lately I learned that this is especially hard when external obligations come from other directions then work. Obligations coming from family, partnership, etc. This can all combine to create happy burnout, as for me happy burnout is simply doing so many things you like, that you’re constantly so exhausted (albeit happily exhausted) that the quality of your decisions and doings is just very low.

So you have insane bursts of creativity followed by burnout?