Burnout revisited

What Startup Burnout Taught Me About Control, Recovery, and Doing Less

In late 2020, I was on the Talouselämä podcast, talking about my burnout experience.

I remember the first times. Later on, I realized that it was burnout, but it took years to manifest, and I would eventually admit that I was suffering from burnout. I don't often get sick. I've had a fever only once in the last five years. But over the years, maybe once a month, I would start "getting sick." It felt like I was getting the flu and needed to lie down.

But the symptoms would not turn into the actual flu, where the symptoms would go away in a few days of recovering. I took a few days off from work, which helped a lot. But then, once I got back to work, it didn't take more than a few weeks or a month to notice that the symptoms would come back.

I started to admit that I was suffering from work-related stress. I went to talk to a psychiatrist and got good advice from the visits. The things that came up from those visits were: If startup life is so stressful for me, should I look for other ways to be involved in startups? Could I spend less time on the topics that worry me too much?

After the visits, I still was getting stressed out, worrying, and getting the flu symptoms from time to time. I couldn't let go of my work — I was just chugging along.

In 2018-2019, I had the culmination of my startup burnout. I couldn't work anymore, I took two weeks off from work, but it wasn't helping. That was the final straw: I will start talking about my burnout. I won't stay silent anymore. But I also realized that I couldn't continue working as a startup founder. My mind and body had decided that I would leave the company that I'd founded in 2013.

Here are the main sources of burnout that I've identified.

1. Cognitive exhaustion: I remember early in my career in gaming, I'd be doing long 14-hour workdays. I'd do ten hours at the office and continue working at home until ten o'clock. I didn't realize that this way was unsustainable, and that I could physically burn out my brain. Continues, non-stop cognitively demanding work really can cause harm.

2. Overload: having more on your plate than you can reasonable handle. We are driven for action, that's why boredom feels bad. If we don't finish something, it feels bad (the completion motivator).

3. Risk of loosing it all. In 2017, we were at full speed working on the The Walking Dead: Our World game, which was a location based game, based on the Walking Dead TV show. The project was big, with also thirty people working on the game. I was talking to an games industry veteran, who knew about the project. This person told me that they'd never embark on a project like this, since it would be costly and it would basically bet the whole company on making it work.

I knew that the game was a moonshot project, since it required immense capital, and would most likely burn all the cash we had from the IPO. The risks were realized in the end of 2018 when we realized that the game didn't become a viral hit, it didn't grow to attract the masses and would most likely lead to layoffs at the company.

The risk of loosing it all was getting quite close to becoming a reality. My burnout was extremely bad at this point, and I decided to step out of the company in early 2019.

When looking back at the last three years, things have turned out well. I had to do a reset and decided that I needed to start a new chapter in my life. That's when I came up with Elite Game Developers, a service for the games entrepreneurs around the world, so that they wouldn't have to learn everything the hard way.

Take control

Since I've suffered from stress for the last ten years, for me the usual feeling is a sense of not having control over things in life and work.

Anyone can fall into the situation of being burnt out. Before that happens, you want to do what you can to get things in order. The easy place to start is to look at the things you have control over with.

Fear-setting: Through this exercise, you become more acquainted with your fears. First, you define each fear by writing them out, like “What if I lost my company?” or “What if I lost all my money?” or “What if I fail with my game project?” or “What if I lost my lead game designer?” I've written a full piece on fear-setting, you can read it by going here: Fear-setting

Allocating time for work: Look at your calendar for last week. What meetings were on the calendar that you could have done over email? Have you been practicing time blocking?

If you are in that mode that you could work a lot of time, you'd still want to have a schedule that you'd follow. Instead of working 14-hour days until you can't do it anymore, you'd plan it out for the following month. For example, for the next 30 days, I'll do 3 hours of intense work on Mondays, 4 hours on Tuesdays, 3 hours on Wednesdays, etc.

You can think of yourself as an athlete, where you are training for something. Note: you're not skipping training days, but not running 25 miles on day 5 out of forty days.

Here's a few pieces where I talk about your calendar and allocating time: Gaming CEOs calendar, Deep work

Take time off: As William S. Burroughs said, "Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer." The brain is like a muscle—when strained, it needs time to recover. Mix it up. Take one week of every second month. Get out of the house, out of the country. Read my piece on vacations by going here: Vacations

Final words

By having more control over work, I've eliminated several sources of stress from my life. I haven't had those flu symptoms for over two years now. Doing less has been amazing, like saying that it's OK for the podcast to not have new episodes come out during the summer. "More" is the least favorable option, and I'm fine with that.