Happy New Year! 🎉

I hope your holidays were relaxing, refreshing, recharging, and reinvigorating.

Now I’d like to circle back on something from last year… 😛 Just kidding! I saw more than a few people on social media joking about the pile of “circle back” messages that greeted them on their return from the holidays.

Hopefully your inbox wasn’t too atrocious this week. Joking aside, burnout continues to be a huge problem in our industry. I’d like to focus this email on ways to manage your energy this year.

Before we get to that, though, what are you most excited about in 2024?

I’m excited about engaging with teams and communities in the company trainings and conference keynotes that are coming up (you’ll hear about two of the public talks soon!). I’m finally starting to feel like myself again now that in-person events have returned on a larger scale. Also, if you’re still on the waiting list for the Assertive Compassion online course, I haven’t forgotten about you! Stay tuned.

Managing Energy

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, suggests that with the Great Resignation, the Remote-Work Wars, and Quiet Quitting phases behind us, knowledge workers now find themselves in a period he calls the Great Exhaustion.

That assessment comports with my anecdotal observations from working with various teams, mentoring people online, and having conversations at meetups. It seems like almost everyone is just tired, especially if Zoom is involved.

There are so many contributing factors. Newport focuses on the overwhelm caused by digital communication. That’s part of it, but I also detect in people the heaviness of leftover unprocessed—perhaps unacknowledged—pandemic emotions—grief, trauma, fear, anger, confusion, disillusionment.

Optimizing workflows alone is not going to cure what ails us.

As you may have realized, I like focusing on individual agency. So what can each of us do?

I really like the model shared in The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. They talk about managing four areas of energy—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

One of the main ideas is that to thrive, we need to balance both stress and recovery in each category. Another key point is that stress in one area sometimes helps us recover in another.

For example, exercise may be physically stressing, but mentally and emotionally—even spiritually—recharging.

We may physically relax while engaging in demanding mental work.

So, as a first step, why not do a quick energy assessment in your life in the four areas—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual?

What fills up each energy bucket and what drains it?

I’ve found that developers tend to get plenty of positive stress for the mental category, but for the physical, they often need to move their body more. For the emotional, they may need to invest effort in forming deep connections with others.

And as for the spiritual… well first, I realize the word “spiritual” turns off a lot of tech people. When I reference the concept in workshops, I often use an alternate term like “meaning-making” or “purpose-directed,” in order to meet people where they are. But there’s a part of me that wishes people would just get over the knee-jerk resistance and understand that the term means connection to something larger than ourselves, not necessarily something dogmatic or supernatural.

I liked this perspective from an article on the topic: “[A]t the inner table of human knowing we all have an empiricist, a logician, an intuitive, a mystic, and a skeptic. And the skeptic is very welcome, but the skeptic is not the bouncer at the door.”

In general, technologists seem to neglect their intuitive and mystic, perhaps to the detriment of their well-being. So yes, in terms of managing spiritual energy, they often need to find a way to open up to something larger—nature, a higher power, the connectedness of all life—whatever resonates.

Another model for managing energy comes from veterinarian and author (and my friend :)) Dr. Kimberly-Pope Robinson, who speaks of balancing sinkers, things in life that drag us down, and balloons, things in life that lift us up. It may help to make a list of each for a week.

Once you have a greater awareness of how your daily activities affect your energy levels, you’ll be in a strong position to set boundaries with others, seek new forms of nourishment, and create more joyful and vibrant days.

Compassion Around the Web

• Can we have too much psychological safety?

• I don’t love the term “developer productivity,” but here’s an overview of recent perspectives on the topic

• A beautiful fable about the impact one individual can have on big problems 🦜 [HT Jack Kornfield]

• Thoughtful post from Mala Mahadevan that led me to the Newport article mentioned above

Here’s to your most energetic year yet! 🎉
💙 April

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