Procrastination is a very common thing for me but not burnout. The very first time I felt complete burnout was a couple of months ago. It was on July 2022. I am a high school student and I was having a month-long holiday then. Let's go step by step on burnout.
What I did on holiday⚒
At the start of my holiday, I attended an online hackathon, I built a project. Most of the technologies used in the project were new to me and I had a bit of trouble learning and using them. I have heard many people saying you should use the technologies/languages that you already know in a hackathon but in the case of an online hackathon, things differ, I mean things differ by a large margin.
To better understand the later part of the story, I think you need to understand the context really well. I mean the project which I was making and the technologies I was going to use.
The project
I was going to make a price tracker. Initially, I wanted it to be only for Amazon but later on, I tried to diversify it and also use it to track product prices on Flipkart and the stock price on CNBC.
Tech stack 👩💻
Reactjs -> For frontend
MongoDB Atlas -> For MongoDB database
Express.js -> For API
Linode -> Deployment
Puppeteer/Cheerio -> Getting Price
Nodemailer -> To send email
Functions:
It checks the price of the product specified. Not only it checks the price, but it also extracts the name and information of the product from the website. It gathers information at regular intervals of fifteen minutes and stores it inside the database. If the current price is found to be less than the specified price by the user then, the user will be updated with an email. And the user can also check the history of the price fluctuation through the nice little dashboard.
I have written a detailed article about it here, I later updated it in December.
Or there is a short video also.
The problem😞
What was the problem I faced during this hackathon? As I said earlier, I tried out many new technologies and languages during this hackathon. I didn't have much time to learn these things as I had just finished my exams. Yes, I only had like 6 days left for the hackathon. I had to do it all during this time.
I had to learn about web-scraping, using a Linode server to host a MERN application, making a bot that runs automatically in a fixed interval of time, setting up a domain to my app hosted on a Linode Linux server, setting up an email using your domain address and sending an email to update them about the price drop.
Believe each of these things was completely new for me. I already had some knowledge about Linux so the Linux commands didn't freak me out but setting up a domain, DNS configuration, and email setup was a thing that I never tried and I didn't have any knowledge about it.
The result🏆
It was a June hackathon, so I was expecting the result in July. Around July 20, I go the result. Guess what, I was among the 5 winners in the hackathon. It was one of the biggest moments for me that has happened to me in my entire life but I wasn't much excited.
By the way, the hackathon was conducted by Linode and Hashnode, and here is the result of the hackathon. I was among the top 5 winners in a total of 60 submissions.
The Burnout😔
I don't have an absolute idea of what caused burnout but I feel the intense amount of work I had to do in that small amount of time is the reason for the burnout.
I didn't have any interest to learn more. I was spending all my day watching youtube videos and also Facebook videos, surely not the cat videos but other videos. I completely wasted my month-long vacation. I had a long list of things I wanted to do during the month-long vacation but when the vacation ended up.
I didn't realize what was wrong with me. My school reopened, and I started going back to school every day. And after a few days, I sat down and I really had a good talk with myself about what is wrong with me. I noted down all of the things that were happening to me in the hope I could figure out what has happened to me.
After going through the list of problems I curated, I realized that it's the symptoms of burnout.
The recovery💊
After I found out about the problem, I decided to do something. Of course, I had to do it, right? So, I decided to slowly and steadily. One thing I do most of the time is that I don't jump straight into any problem or solution, I love going slowly into it.
Starting from that day, I reduced my screen time and eventually reduced my screen time. Since I live alone, I started cooking out some really good things, and just started out enjoying every moment. I went and met with some relatives, and spent good times everywhere. I even tried to do better in my studies but this is one thing I fail at every single time. Still, I am trying different ways to resolve these things.
It was just a matter of days and just enjoyment in every single thing I did, I was back at every single thing as I used to be back a month ago.
Conclusion
Burnout is not a good thing to have. I have had this thing only a single time and I don't want this in my future. As I can't control it but I can surely reduce a lot with the steps I took in the recovery stage onto the prevention stage.
If you have read through this then let me know if you had a similar experience or not. And if you want to know more about my recovery, my DM is always open here.
