October 3rd, 2020
Disclosure:
This post is purposefully rough and unedited because lately I’ve felt a lot of “expectations” from this blog, and feeling pressure to deliver amazing posts with “big takeaways” every day, but that's never what I intended for this blog...
As I said in my very first blog post:
I'd like to write every day, and I plan to make that a commitment going forward. It doesn't matter how long it is - I want to treat this more like a diary.
I can literally type two sentences, or I can write 3000 words, or I can record a YouTube video, or even a tweet. Maybe, it will often just be updates on what I worked on that day, really boring stuff :)
Anyways...
I think I might be burnt out.
The last few weeks have been a drag. I can’t get myself to work on much.
I’ll start my day with ambitious goals and todos, and then it will devolve into scrolling Twitter, writing this blog, and chatting with friends.
As I write this right now, I just have such a mental “fog”. I don’t feel that “energy” which I’ve often felt helped me work so hard over the past years...
I’m not interested in the idea of starting new projects.
Responding to basic emails and DMs feels like pulling my own teeth out…
Pieter thinks it’s “coronapression”, but I’m not so sure. I’m in NYC and surrounded by people and there’s a lot going on here…
After this post, I had a few other founders reach out to me and tell me they are going through something similar.
When the pandemic started in March, I put my head down and told myself I was going to work my ass off. I did that and it kind of worked. But now we are like 7 months into the lockdown and it’s still very bad. Still so much uncertainty about everything…
But I also went through a similar burnout patch in May. I did my think week and things got so much better. Is it normal to have burnout twice in one year? I don’t think I’ve ever had burnout before 2020…?
I know what I need to do to grow my business to whatever I want it to be. I just need to do XYZ and I can get there. But lately, it seems like I don’t even want it? If I did want it, I would be doing XYZ with motivation and volition.
This makes me sad because it seems to go against what it means to be an entrepreneur… to be successful at all costs. There are some opportunities I could take that could make me very successful, yet I don’t feel like taking them on.
So what’s exciting to me lately? Not much. I really like playing tennis. I really like this writing stuff, but even that has felt like a drag as of late…
I’m not sure if “taking time off” is going to solve my problem because, to be honest, I’m not even working that many hours lately. My life has been balanced. Also, I took some time off in May for the think week, and it seemed to work for a couple months, but here we are again..
I think I need to just keep talking and writing through it.
I know that moments and phases like these always lead to breakthroughs for me. Better to embrace it than run away from it.