Not making time for yourself first leads to burnout


Don’t postpone your side-projects, hobbies, or anything else you are burning to do. You need to make time for yourself first. Minimize time spent on what you do not value.

I found myself doing exactly that, trying to finish all kinds of boring (school) work first. This led to me never really doing what I wanted to do. I was just grinding out boring stuff. And I was doing this for +10 hours a day.

This leads to burnout. Not just in the long run, but even after just a few weeks. Burnout does not come from quantity, it comes from quality: It wasn’t the number of hours that was the issue. It was what I spent those hours on.

If we don’t make time for ourselves first, if we don’t pay ourselves first, we’ll quickly become unhappy with what we’re doing with our time.

Ideally, you’dFind what feels like play to you but work to others and do that. This is how you can work insane hours but enjoy every minute. It’s how you work both hard and smart, without it ending in Burnout.