COVID Burnout - and the small gift I gave myself to cope
I’m gonna come clean….I’m burnt out.
Early 2020 was a tumultuous time at my 9-5, then COVID happened. In the background, my personal life was and continues to be an intense and challenging rollercoaster ride, and my role on my primary project at work felt particularly unforgiving. I needed a release valve. I had signed up for the Figma Config conference because I felt a need to bond more with the software that has become my primary tool (it’s no secret that I have adopted it begrudgingly), but I was pretty sure I’d ditch because my sprint schedule really didn’t have room for a day off. As it approached, though, I realized that seeing that calendar block felt comforting instead of stressful- like a calm eddy in a fast moving current. So I decided to go.
I’m so glad I did. There was nothing remarkable about the conference - in fact, the format of back-to-back 30 min recorded sessions was probably my least favorite - but the break from my daily norm felt like medicine. It’s easy when we’re stressed and burnt out to stay in our rut, slogging reluctantly forward in the same patterns that are getting us down because we don’t have the time or mental energy to figure out how to do anything else. But switching up that routine, even briefly, is often exactly what we need.
If you haven’t attended a conference, taken a course, or just taken a day to read a design book in awhile, consider this your permission slip. The designers I know work really hard, often without the organizational support that other roles in their organizations enjoy (engineers, I’m looking at you!). And it is important, even critical, to take time to step back, re-engage with our creativity, and remember what it is that we love about this field in the first place.
If any of this resonates and you’re feeling burnt out, isolated, or even just ready to take a day and explore a new challenge, know that is an option. It can often feel like a privilege to step away for a day, but if you’re approaching burnout, it really is a necessary to demand space for personal professional growth in whatever format feels valuable to you.
Highlights of my day at Figma Config include:
Starting the day with breakfast and yoga instead of rolling out of bed to attend a meeting that is focused on entirely on engineers
Attending talks about improving team culture, making research more inclusive, and turning setbacks into strengths
Taking a mid-day walk to process and reset without worrying about missing a meeting or sacrificing my one free block of time to work for the day
Revisiting an old project to apply what I’d learned in a session and find new opportunities for more inclusive iteration