As a 17 year veteran of Amazon, Steve understands seasonality. Q4, the holiday season, is crunch time. Thereâs a huge pressure on Amazon employees to keep up with demand, and engineers will routinely spend long hours to ensure stability and quality.
The key to doing sustained creative work is to lean in and lean out of periods of intense work, at the right times. Amazon employees know that Q4 will end, and therefore, the crunchtime will end within a few months.
Similarly, for content creation or writing code, itâs important to segment your schedule into chunks where you can create a deadline or âcrunch timeâ.
Another perspective is to think about quantity vs quality. For your side projects or content creation endeavors, itâs worth being rigid for a bit (âa commit everydayâ or âa video every weekâ), but itâs also worth changing the routine after some time.
Burnout happens when people donât see an end in sight from a stressful period.
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