Quick note from me
Every burnout post right now is about AI. But we were burned out before AI arrived. I’ve been questioning the position of a creative in the job market since I was an architect.
We use 1 word, AI, for different problems, then quit the job and take the burnout with us into the next one. What we need to do first is work out which problem is actually ours. So I’m sharing the different reasons for burnout I’ve had in my career, plus the 2 tracking templates I use to tell them apart.
Story outline
Cause 01: The company doesn’t want the work you want to do
Cause 02: The product you stopped believing in
Cause 03: The role is changing into something you didn’t sign up for
Cause 04: You’re worried about what’s coming
Cause 05: You’re just tired
Solution with 2 free templates 🎁
Cause 01
The company doesn’t want the work you want to do
They ask you to draw a mockup, but you wanted to work out whether the feature should be built at all. Both are design. Only 1 of them is what you’re good at, and if the company has never worked with a designer who does the other kind, nobody there knows how they could benefit from it.
What it looks like in reality:
You get brought in a process at the end, to make something look finished rather than to decide what it should be
Requests come in as solutions, e.g. design this screen, mockup, UI, not solve this problem
Your research gets approved, but changes nothing
You’re senior, and the work you’re handed is the work you were doing 5 years ago
The self-test:
Look at your last 10 tickets. How many asked you to decide something, and how many asked you to make something?
If almost none of them asked you to decide, this company has one idea of what a designer is for, and it’s execution. That’s ok for some designers, but for you this is a mismatch. Moving to a company that already works this way usually fixes it.
Cause 02
The product you stopped believing in
You open a project you can’t stand to look at and ship in it anyway. Nothing is going wrong though. You’re doing decent work on a product that doesn’t work the way you know it should for the people using it.
What it looks like in reality:
You avoid telling people what you work on, e.g. legacy products, ugly, broken
You’ve stopped suggesting improvements, because you don’t care enough to argue for them
The craft still interests you, but you can’t get better at it here
You’d be relieved if the project got cancelled
The self-test:
Imagine the same type of work at a company you admire, on a product you believe in, with a proper seat at the table. Would you still feel like this?
If no, the product is the issue. Change what you’re working on, and if the only product on offer there is the one you’ve got, that means changing company.
Cause 03
The role is changing into something you didn’t sign up for
The job is turning into design engineer. Visual work plus shipping code, own the whole thing end to end, prototype in the browser. Some designers have wanted this for years. If you’re not one of them, the trend isn’t good news.
This is the one that doesn’t get fixed by moving. Cause 01 is a single company with an old idea of what design is. This is the new idea, and it’s spreading.
What it looks like in reality:
Job descriptions for your level now ask for code and AI, and you’d rather get better at research or strategy
The people getting hired around you are the ones who ship, not the ones who make strategic decisions
You’re being nudged toward tools you don’t enjoy
You’re being asked to become a different kind of designer
The self-test:
If the design engineer version of this job became the only version, would you take it? Not could you learn it. Would you want it.
If yes, the tiredness is about the learning curve and that passes. If no, that’s worth knowing now rather than in 3 years, because it changes what you’re aiming at. Some of the strategic work is moving into product and research roles. So that can be a repositioning question.
Cause 04
You’re worried about what’s coming
Design is dead, Figma is dead. You can be in a decent job, with a manager who listens, on a product you like, and still feel awful, because you spend an hour a day reading about the industry collapsing.
This is your beliefs, and how your body reacts to working in tech, where things change constantly.
What it looks like in reality:
The dread is about the future, not about work tasks
You feel worse after scrolling than after working
You’re upskilling out of fear rather than interest, and none of it feels like enough
Your job is fine and you can’t shake the feeling it won’t be for long
The self-test:
How do you feel on a day you don’t open the LinkedIn feed? If the weight lifts, it’s what you’re consuming, not the job.
You can’t fix this one by fixing your career, because your career isn’t what’s causing it. What helps is cutting the negative intake, and asking designers who are still working how it’s actually going.
Cause 05
You’re just tired
Sometimes a holiday actually fixes it. This is the least fashionable thing I could say right now, but you need to verify it to not mistake it for something bigger.
What it looks like in reality:
Rest works. You come back and you can think again
A new project lifts it, even at the same company
You still care what the work looks like, you just can’t face any more of it this week
You’re sick of the pace, not the work
The self-test:
Take a proper break. No laptop and work for at least a week. Then notice how you feel about going back. Energise or heavy?
If it’s fine, you were tired, and you’ve saved yourself a job change you didn’t need. If the heaviness comes back within days, one of the other causes is underneath it and the rest only covered it up.
Solution
Build the self-awareness
Nobody can do this bit for you. AI can’t, a recruiter can’t, because they don’t know which of the 5 you’re in, and neither do you until you sit down and look.
It’s also the only part of this you control. Not the market, not the layoffs, not what everyone decides to use next year. This.
I do a daily CEO review, 5 minutes at the end of the day:
Energy - energised, stressed or tired
Wins - what I got done
Work satisfaction - which tasks were satisfying and which were draining
Lifestyle satisfaction - how close today was to how I want to work
Self-learnings - what I noticed about what I like, dislike, how I want to work
The draining tasks column is the one that answers this issue. After 3 weeks you can see whether what drains you is the product, the type of work, the people, or just the volume. A bad week isn’t a pattern, you need more data.
Most of us skip this, because we’re busy, we wait for motivation that never arrives. But 5 causes need 5 different decisions and action steps.
If you’re further down than tired, here’s the mood template I use, and go and see a therapist. They have tools for this that we don’t have as designers.
My Designer Toolkit 🛠️
Tools I actually use in my workflow. Some links support this newsletter.
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Keep designing ✨
Aneta
