E4 - How to avoid Burnout on "Death March" projects (2C's and a B-)

Software projects are infamous for the "Death March"...the ever increasing demand for effort to "catch up" a slipping project. More and more effort actually reduces efficiency and often leads to further slippage, creating a cycle that is tough to escape and can lead to Burnout. How can you avoid it? Let's talk about it...

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If you’ve been in the software development world for any time, you’ve heard the phrase “Death March” in connection with a project - and if you haven’t been in one yet, chances are you will. What do you do when you find yourself in the middle of a seemingly endless project, filled with soul crushing days, each one taking you further from any hope of project completion - how do you keep going and keep your sanity? Let’s talk about it…

[Intro Music]

Welcome to The Technology Sounding Board, I’m your host, Michael R. Gilbert and in this episode I want to take a different direction. I’m going to share a story with you, an episode from my own life that I hope will be instructive. Though this one isn’t strictly about technology or software development I think you may find it very relatable.  

At the end of the story we’ll touch on a real and and growing problem in the workplace, that of Burnout…how to recognize it and what to do about it when you do - whether it’s affecting you, or one of your colleagues or employees.

You know every good story needs an prologue, so let me set some background for you…

I didn’t start my career thinking I’d be in Technology, I had plans in a totally different direction. The organization for which I was destined required me to have a degree but they didn’t care what it was in - they were going to teach me every thing I needed to know to get the job done - the degree could be in knitting for all they cared. I chose Computer Science because I’d been messing around with computers since I was 8, I built my first one when I was 11…this was fun and easy for me - I figured I’d spend 3 years, er, socializing and expanding my life experiences and pick up a degree while I was doing it.  

Funny thing is, I actually did do quite a bit of study…and weirdly, I really enjoyed it. I met a few Grad students and saw the advanced research they were doing, discovering new ideas, designing new technologies and I began to dream a different dream…what if I didn’t hurry on to the real world quite so quickly, what if I stayed on a did a PhD too?

“Man makes his plans, and God laughs” - which if I am not mistaken, is the translation of an old Yiddish saying, which in turn is perhaps a cynical interpretation of Proverbs 16:9 - but in any case, for reasons that don’t matter for the purposes of this story, my life took a very different turn and I was left needing to choose a different career.  

Well, it turned out that quite by accident I had picked up a good degree in Computer Science and there was a market for those skills. I joined a company called EDS and started writing business systems in COBOL for various enterprises. I put University and all of my previous dreams behind me and got on with the process of building a life based on this new career.

Along the way I spend a decade with Microsoft learning massive scale software development, picked up an MBA, spent a decade in Industry as a CTO or CIO in various locations and finally ended up as a Management Consultant helping enterprises extract real value from all this technology.

Now I’ve done my best to keep up with the changes since I began (it’s my job after all), but the pace of change has been phenomenal in the last 30 years, and there are whole subjects that didn’t even exist back when I was that naive young kid at University. Things that I ‘know about’ - and I’m using air quotes here - but for which I had no formal basis - things for which I couldn’t necessarily separate the common, but misinformed, understanding from the real truth. That bothers me…it’s a weakness of mine…I am incurably curious and I simple have to know the why's and how’s of everything I work with.  

The feeling that I just needed to sharpen my saw, to quote Stephen Covey, kept growing.

The other thing that had been playing in my mind for decades was the idea that I had done so very well from the studies of others…and though I’d done plenty of deriving new knowledge myself, I hadn’t done in it a way that was being fed back into the general body of knowledge for all to benefit from. Sure, my clients get to benefit from it and I hope that this Podcast helps a few folks out too, but there was a quote from Sir Isaac Newton that I remembered from my youth…he said, “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. I may not be an intellectual giant of the type to which Sir Isaac alludes, but still, since those very early days, I’ve wanted to spend some time doing some formal research, get my Ph.D and publish papers. A personal madness perhaps, but there you are.

And then came Covid, and we all retreated to our homes, locked ourselves in our safe little bubbles and tried not to let cabin fever drive us all mad. A few months in, just over 2 and a half years ago, it occurred to me that perhaps now was the time to sharpen that saw. I couldn’t really just give it all up and do the PhD that I’d always wanted to do, but how about taking a step on that road and doing a Masters in Computer Science part time. There were great courses to be had, the one I ultimately chose being from UT Austin. It was online but taught by the same professors that I would be learning from if I were learning full time on campus. I could resharpen the skills I already had, learn about the new technologies that had arrived in the space of Machine Learning and AI and perhaps find an area of research that I might later pursue with a PhD. It was a brilliant idea! (Can you hear Covid talking?). I talked it over with my wife, Martha, and as supportive as ever, she agreed that it was a good idea…so I applied and started the long journey towards an MSc.

Now you have the context for the story, you may be wondering what this has to do with the fabled “Death March” of Software delivery project fame? Stick with me, I promise I’m getting there.

Fast forward two years and things had been going well. I picked up a B in my very first class…it was the first time I’d ever been introduced to the formal ideas behind Machine Learning and it involved a huge amount of Math that I hadn’t used in 30 years, not mention some I’d never heard of before. It was an effort to catch up with my fellow students (most of whom were 20 somethings, straight out of their undergraduate degrees). Most of them had a much more current view of this Math, but what I lacked in youthful agility I made up for with broad experience.  

Every class after that first one was an A…not an easy A for sure, but I got it done and I was learning so much…and having a great time doing it (well, at least mostly so). I had got myself to the point where I had only 3 classes left to finish. I had done all the classes I really wanted to master and was left with 3 very theory based, very Math heavy classes. They would be useful for sure, but likely to be a lot less fun and closer to that very first class in terms of effort for me.

To this point I had only done one or two classes per semester. Doing one was easy and two a lot harder (depending on exactly which courses we were talking about). I deliberately didn’t take classes across the summer - I liked to spend that time with my family, taking a vacation, catching up with jobs around the house that had to be neglected during the “School” times…so I had a choice…

take all three in this semester and be done with the degree before the summer starts, or take just two and finish with a one class semester in the Fall.  

The latter would mean a whole year more of class and that didn’t seem like much fun. I’d but a lot of things on the back burner while doing this degree and Martha had to pick up a lot of the load around the house to make it work. I knew she would support my decision what ever I did, but I began to feel that it was time to wrap this up and take the load of everybody’s shoulders. I also knew that doing 3 classes would make this the “Semester from Hell”. We discussed it together, as we do in most everything, and decided to bite the bullet and “just get it done”.  

Now this is where there is a difference between what I did and the typical “Death March” story…I made the conscious choice to sign up for this, and I knew (or thought I did), what I was getting into.  

In the more typical Death March scenario we have a project that had a planned workload that starts to slip.  The response is, of course, to increase effort more and more to try to catch up, which actually reduces average productivity, often leading to more slippage and therefore more demand for effort.  

In my case the “project” if you will, was clearly not reasonably planned and I knew it before I ever started…if you take the semester view of this. If you see the project as being the whole Masters degree, then it’s actually quite similar. I went in with a reasonable plan to get it done in a timeframe. I slipped in places where I only signed up for a single course when I would normally sign up for two…either lack of availability of the courses I wanted or too much demand on my time in that semester…and so I faced a choice. Give up on the ‘deadline’ and accept the whole year’s slippage, or add extra effort and bring it in on time. I made the latter decision, but I did it with my eyes wide open.

I’m going to tell you that those four and half months were the most effort I’d asked of myself ever. Now I don’t say this to ask for any kind of sympathy…many people have to more for longer and have little or no choice…I signed up for this. I didn’t have to and I could have quit (or just slowed down) any time I chose. No one’s life depended on it and I wasn’t risking my own life or liveliness doing it. But none the less I want to explain the workload so that you can understand why this compares well to the, “maximum effort”, Death March style workload of those runaway projects you’ve all heard of and perhaps been part of.

So I was working on a client project, running an SAP upgrade project for them. I would start my day at 7:00am on Monday, put a full day’s work in before Martha would drop me at the airport. We’d grab a late lunch together and talk through anything that needed to get done that week while we were apart.  

I’d get on a plane, head to the client’s site, grab a late night dinner (typically Nando’s veggie burger because not much else was open by that time and it was quick, easy and tasty). I be settled in the hotel by about Midnight.  

Tuesday and Wednesday start at 7am and we (that is the whole team) work onsite together until about 7pm, we’d grab some dinner together and then head back to the hotel.  

Between 9pm and about 1am I’d try to catch up with that week’s online lesson. Thursday was similar, except that at the end of the day I’d get back on a plane and head home.  

Martha would be waiting to pick me up at the airport…she didn’t need to, I could have grabbed an Uber, but she’d be there without fail and we’d catch-up on events since we last parted on the trip home. I’d grab quick bite before bed and the day would end around midnight.  

Friday was often a ‘lite’ day in terms of client work, starting at 7am and typically being done with the client by about 3 or 4pm…a quick cup of tea and then straight on to finish up any lectures and then starting on the homework for that week. I’d try to get the easiest one of the three done that night (usually ending around 2am).  

Saturday and Sunday were then available for homework from the other two classes - or exams if it was time for a mid-term or the finals. I’d work from 7am to midnight on Saturday, 7am to whenever I finished on Sunday - usually around 10pm but sometimes on to the early morning.

Then Monday comes around and the week repeats.  

For 4 and half months.

I’d hoped to start all this well rested after the Christmas break, but life didn’t work out that way for me. 2 days after leaving the client site for Christmas, I went down with the dreaded Covid. I wasn’t hospitalized, thanks perhaps to being fully vaccinated, but none-the-less I was completely offline for two weeks and it was astonishingly hard to do a full day’s work for weeks afterwards.  

Was I doomed to fail? Was this the point where I should just re-evaluate the plan and let the ‘project’ slip? The truth is that these questions are never easy, there are repercussions for any decision - there is simply no free lunch.

I talked with Martha. We were lucky to be in the situation where the decisions were ours to make and the consequences restricted to just us, so again this feels like it may be a difference between this and what may have been, or may come to be your situation in a “Death March”, but this is the first takeaway I want to stress.  

You are always the one in charge of making these decisions. You may or may not be able to decide what happens to the “project”, but you can always, and must always, weight the impact on you and decide for yourselves how much effort you can and want to put in. The consequence on your development, your career and your health are things that you have to weigh for you. Not easy decisions, but ones that you own - no one else does so don’t let them make those decisions for you!

The second thing I want to highlight here is that no one is an island. If you want to achieve anything significant, you need a support network to help you get there. I’ve mentioned my wife, Martha, several times already and that’s not a coincidence. There’s no way I could have done half of what I’ve gotten done without her at my side. At times it’s also been my friends, work colleagues, bosses, parents…even my kids, that have shared the load with me.  

Know who’s in your corner and include them in your thoughts, and your decisions. You can’t do it without them, let them know how much you appreciate them and let them help.

The last point I’ll make right now is that you have to be crystal clear on what the real goal is and then focus on that, every day.  

First and foremost for me is my day job. I work for clients who have real and immediate needs and they are paying me to get them through critical issues. I need to be present and I need to be 100% effective, everyday. If we need to drop anything, it cannot come from the client’s space.  

The other non-negotiable is my family…if they have critical needs, I will drop everything - and if that means withdrawing from the Masters without my degree, so be it.  

I really enjoy this podcast but it’s a luxury activity for me. Nobody’s baby dies if an episode doesn’t go out and so this was a casualty of the Semester from Hell - if you are a regular listener, you will have already noticed that.

Now a I have a strength, and a weakness, that I struggle to do anything at less than max throttle. If there is something to be learned, I want to learn everything that can be learned about it.  

It’s not that I care about getting an “A” per se, but it’s just that I am spending a huge amount of effort (not to mention cash), getting this learning in my head…I want to make sure I’m getting everything I can for my investment.  

But “A’s” are not the goal. Understanding what I need to in order to sharpen my saw and to find out what I want to know more about…this is more important than any particular grade.

That said, you have to pass each class with at least a C, you need at least a B- in at least one theory class and you need to satisfy an overall GPA requirement to complete the degree.  

Given my GPA being above 3.8 going into this semester, I couldn’t get at least a C in each of the last three and not meet the overall GPA requirement, so that wasn’t really an issue. I didn’t yet have an officially designated Theory class done, and all three remaining were in this category, so my target to finish is therefore 2 C’s and a B-, in any arrangement - hence the subtitle of this episode.  

This became a bit of a mantra for me. A way of reinforcing an idea, that if we are overdoing our effort given what is actually necessary then we are robbing ourselves somewhere else

…if 2 C’s and a B- is the target and we are trending way over that, perhaps we need to cut ourselves some slack…perhaps not everything needs to be perfect.

Now I am not advocating for mediocrity here…that we strive to give our best is a great attribute, but not if it will grind us down and prevent us from delivering what we really need to deliver.

My question for you is how does that apply to your situation? What are you putting too much effort into because you ‘feel’ like you should? Have you worked out what the consequence would really be if you dial it down, just a little? Would it help you make it through if you did?

People that know me well have heard me say this many times before, but sometimes we think we’re prioritizing when we list out the tasks that have to be done and put them in order of priority…1 for the most important and 10 for the least for example. But that’s not prioritizing…in our minds we are just going to work from the top of the list down to the bottom, but we’re still going to get to the bottom.  

Prioritizing is where you are building a list of the things you really should be doing, things that in a different situation you’d have said you really have to get done, but things you are explicitly telling yourself and those around you that you are not going to do.  

Not even going to attempt.  

Even though you acknowledge that there will be significant consequences because you don’t.  

The thing you are accepting when you do this is that you can do anything, but you can’t do everything.  

That’s what makes the difference between endlessly marching, ever more slowly, towards a destination that everyone long ago gave up belief they’d ever actually reach, 

…and making progress to a smaller goal, one that’s really tough, but one you know you can reach, will reach and do reach.  

One that will end, and will have been worthwhile when it does, even if it isn’t everything you hoped and dreamed of way back when you started.  

And this way, we don’t have that last minute abandoning of the effort with that feeling that it was all for nothing.

…which is a good segue into talking about Burnout for a moment. What I was feeling during this Semester was not burnout…it had many of the same characteristics, but it wasn’t. Why not?

Borrowing a definition from the American Psychological Association, Burnout is 

“Physical, emotional or mental exhaustion accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance, and negative attitudes toward oneself and others. It results from performing at a high level until stress and tension, especially from extreme and prolonged physical or mental exertion or an overburdening workload, take their toll.”

The Reader’s Digest version might be: “Too much work without purpose or meaning”

…and this latter definition might help to underline the difference. I started with a very clear purpose. When I knew the workload would ramp up to ludicrous levels I revisited that purpose and asked myself if it was still worth it. I allowed myself the option of bailing out if I needed to without guilt or recrimination. I still felt completely exhausted and there were physical ramifications from it that might take a while to recover from, but I didn’t let it get to me because I knew why I was doing it and continuously evaluated whether or not it was worth it.

My old friend and industrial psychologist, Jermey Borys, helped me clarify 5 causes of burnout in the work place:

Unfair treatment at work

Unmanageable workload

Lack of role clarity

Lack of communication and support from your manager

And Unreasonable time pressure

This leads to some clear actions you can take if you yourself feel like you are in this position:

Don’t be afraid to talk to your doctor about this…it’s not uncommon, and you aren’t “weak” because you’re burnt out, but you can get help

Seek social support…I’ve been clear about all the support I had going through this, reach out to friends and family, don’t try and tough it out on your own

Communicate with your team members - your colleagues are probably going through the same thing and may be able to help.

Communicate with your boss/management…they can’t fix what they don’t see

Set boundaries - block out time for meaningful activities - I know that sounds mad when you feel like there isn’t enough time in the day for everything you have going on already, but make time for fun things…even if it’s as simple as going for a walk, taking a minute for meditation or mindfulness, connecting with nature, finding something to give gratitude for every day.

Create routines and rituals that you can stick to…bringing order to the chaos helps tremendously.

If you’re the boss and you see this developing, you can help too:

Make time to talk to your team about purpose…do it often…give them meaning

Provide as much role clarity as you can…people need to know what’s on their plate and what’s not

Prioritize with your team (remember what I said earlier…that isn’t just sorting a list, it’s about collectively deciding what isn’t going to get done, even though it should). Doing this with your team helps relieve the feelings of guilt for not achieving everything and letting the team work on assigning the tasks can help alleviate some of the “it’s not fair” feelings.

To the extent possible, work to help them feel in control of their own destiny…help them renew a sense of efficacy, a belief that the task can be done and that it isn’t just more and more futile busy work

There’s no magic bullet…Burnout is a real thing and can destroy people and teams…but if you only take two things away from this, let it be that:

you need to be clear about (and believe in) the purpose - if you don’t, just stop and stop now… 

You need a support network, don’t just tough it out on your own…there are people around you that will support you, don’t forget to ask

So yes, if you want to know, I did finish the Semester from Hell. I walked the stage in my hat and gown - pretending to be Harry Potter - and my support team was there with me, cheering at my success, and it felt good. I’m getting back to my ‘real’ life…and taking time to pay back some of the support I received on the way.  

I’m getting my podcast back on the air and building plans for the next fun project (and no, I won’t be doing my PhD any time soon - I think I’ll wait until I retire before stepping back into that madness).  

In the end, I met my goal and then some…I needed 2 C’s and B-, I got 2 A’s and a B+, but much, much more than that I got the understanding that I wanted, and I know where I do want to do my research when the time is right for me to do that.

I hope that you’ve learnt something from this, or at the very least been entertained by my story. As always, the transcript can be found on the website at www.thetechnologysoundingboard.com and if you get a chance, stop by and leave us a review or a comment. Until next time…