Overcoming Burnout: Leveraging Boredom to Boost Productivity and Learn New Skills
Last weekend pushed me to my limits. We had to meet a deadline by Friday, and by the time Saturday rolled around, I was entirely burnt out. I ended up spending the entire day doing almost nothing, falling into a state of boredom.
During this idle time, I stumbled upon a video by BigBoxSWE titled “Outcode them all”. This video emphasized the importance of having fun while coding and also highlighted the significance of boredom as a catalyst to get us started. It posed the question: imagine competing with someone who genuinely enjoys coding; they’d undoubtedly have an edge over us in such a competition!
BigBoxSWE also shared a valuable nugget of wisdom in his video. He suggested that if you’re ever feeling unmotivated to code, just open your IDE and stare at it for 10 minutes. And If, after that time, you still don’t feel like writing code, then it’s okay to close it and do something else.
Taking his advice at heart, I did just that. To my surprise, four hours later, I found myself having learned the basics of ReactJS and TailwindCSS. I even managed to build a full page with dynamic data. It felt so good, and it reminded me of some advice my mother once gave me.
One day, I was feeling a little lazy to do my laundry. After sharing this with my mum, she simply told me to soak my clothes in water. “Wash one shirt, and you’ll see what happens,” she said. As it turned out, I ended up washing all of my dirty laundry. It felt like magic!
The idea here is that if there’s something you want to try or learn, just give it a go. Take a small jab at it, and you may be surprised by how far you can go. As a wise person once said, “We never really know how far we can go if we do not try.” ngl, i don’t know which wise man said this 😅
Anyway it’s not always about having the motivation, sometimes, all you need to do is take that first step. So, the next time you feel bored or unmotivated, remember — just start. You might be amazed at what you can achieve.
Here is the page I designed using ReactJS and TailwindCSS for a movie site while I was learning, it features Dune: Part 2, one of my favorites.
You can find the source code on my GitHub or here: https://github.com/jordan-jakisa/movie_hub. Please star the repo, as I plan on developing the site into a functional website and connecting it to a movie API.
Ciao 🤓
