One of the problems I’ve had to combat over the years has been boredom/burnout — that feeling you get either when you’ve been on the same project for too long or a you’re on new project that just feels like exactly what you’ve been working on for years. How do you breath life into work that you’ve done many, many times before?

In my experience, burnout can happen for a number of reasons: the work I’m doing isn’t challenging, the work I’m doing has little meaning, I’m not learning anything new, I’m doing something I’m not passionate about, or the workload I’m shouldering is overwhelming.

In Unhappiness is Good for You, Penelope Trunk says, “According to Leslie Martin, author of the new book, The Longevity Project, stress and anxiety that arise from working hard at something that is engaging and exciting to you is actually a more healthy way to live than in a regular state of cheerfulness.”

Unhappiness and burnout aren’t the same problem, but “working hard at something that is engaging and exciting” probably provides the cure for both. The trick is figuring out how to convert your mundane and boring tasks into work that is engaging and exciting. How do you do that? You do that by continually evolving as a technical writer, by trying new techniques, tools, and methods.

For example, I recently implemented the Semantic Mediawiki extension on my wiki help content. I’m going through all my topics to add metadata using the extension’s syntax, and then I’ll try to make sense of it with various queries. It’s interesting and complex. Sometimes I barely understand what I’m doing. But the possibilities intrigue me.

I’m also writing user awareness articles for a newspaper (if they ever get published). These articles discuss what my organization is doing with technology. I thought the articles would be easy to write, but so far they’re maxing out all my creative skills and proving to be exhausting. Despite the work, it’s precisely this challenge that engages me and keeps my attention.

I’m also trying to figure out how to involve community volunteers in editing and writing content for a technology blog. Community dynamics are tough. Sometimes volunteers get involved in ways that astound me; other times I feel alone. But trying to be a community leader to move forward a mountain of work is challenging, engaging, and as a result, just plain interesting.

To avoid burnout, then, I suggest trying something new, even if it’s really hard. What’s hard also tends to be engaging.

Do you have a response for this reader about avoiding burnout? If so, add it in the comments below.

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photo from Flickr

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Citing research in sociology, Penelope explains that “people who work are happier than people who don’t because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative.” Creativity, then, is an important factor in personal happiness and fulfillment. Most of us know that. But here’s how you measure the degree of creativity in your work. Penelope says,

How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative.

For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, you’re probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute.

In other words, one measure of creativity at your job is whether you’re solving challenging problems all day. If you’re not presented with these problems, then most likely you’re talking on the phone instead. (Keeping yourself busy with e-mail, Twitter, IM, and other online chatter is the equivalent of talking on the phone.)

Most people consider writing to be a creative endeavor, and in some situations, it certainly is. But creativity is not just associated with writing, art, and the humanities. Penelope broadens creativity to include problem solving too.

In many ways, even though technical writing involves writing, the writing can be less creative than coding a program or creating a user interface. Technical writing can even be less creative than designing the look and feel of the online help that will house the writing. Many times writing procedural information is not creative at all, in fact. Sure, there’s a need to figure out how the application works, but once you’ve done that, merely transcribing how to do tasks in the system can make you start yawning. There are no more problems to solve. It’s mere knowledge transfer. When knowledge transfer is what you spend your day doing, technical writing loses the power of creative fulfillment.

On the flip side, because technical writing poses numerous technical challenges outside of writing, with solutions not always apparent or easy, technical writing can also be engaging. The technical side of our profession is actually what engages me more than the writing, even though I was initially attracted to the idea of writing.

I’ve been thinking about this unexpected reversal a lot lately because I’ve noticed how consuming I find technical challenges in contrast to writing. I’m drawn to problem solving with web issues, especially WordPress sites, to an almost addictive degree. When I’m working on a WordPress project, it consumes me entirely. I can easily sit at the computer for an entire afternoon or evening working on problem after problem, ignoring everything else. Building websites often includes an almost endless supply of problems to solve.

Changing how something looks is only one part of the game. Finding the additional functionality you need, figuring out the best way to organize the content, designing the navigation with usability in mind, configuring new plugins — all of these questions and problems provide engagement with the mind. For me, coming up with solutions is a creative act that surpasses the writing of technical procedures.

Fortunately, writing only takes up a small part of the technical writer’s day, as Shanghai tech writer notes. Once you’ve finished the writing layer of a project, there are countless other technical issues to address, everything from single sourcing the content to designing the online help skin to figuring out relationship tables in Flare. I used to think these tasks were ancillary to the core task of the written content. But now I realize that as far as engagement goes, it’s the other way around. The technical challenges are the rewarding, creative part.

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• Scriptorium
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• Adobe Technical Communication Suite
• Congree

I am a technical writer from India. I just moved to the UK and find the scenario very different from India. Here technical writing jobs are not easy to come by – I understand this is due to the recession. I also have found my desire for technical writing waning away a bit. This could be because at my previous office, technical writing had been reduced to merely doing language edits of 500 pages in three days.

How do I rekindle my technical writing fire? Your guidance will be tonic to my current state of mind.

Your question about how to rekindle your enthusiasm is relevant to any career, but perhaps especially with technical writing. Let me reply with a story. At a previous company, one of my colleagues told me she used to be more active in the field, like me, but that her interests changed.

Several times I tried to get her to attend the local STC meetings and events, but without any success. When work ended, she left her technical writer hat at the door. Actually, she’d stopped writing technical documents altogether and had become our designated editor, resigning herself to marking up others’ content only.

Rekindling the fire

Her comment to me one day, “I used to be like you,” made me wonder whether twenty years down the road I too would hold her same attitude, looking at new, enthusiastic writers with a certain apathetic smirk.

The question of how you stay passionate in your field is a universal concern. Even if you’re a best-selling novelist, you probably have days where you wake up and think, I’m so tired of writing. No doubt the president of the United States sometimes finds himself thinking, I wish I could do something else. Maybe fighter pilots also think, on occasion while ascending, Not again, this is getting dull; what else is there for me?

In my initial response to you, I offered him five activities you could do to rekindle your fire. I wrote,

1. Start a blog and publish at least three posts a week about technical communication.
2. Follow the conversation threads on TECWR-L (or some other active listserv you like).
3. Attend one or more technical writing conferences a year (e.g., the Summit in Atlanta).
4. Get involved in your local STC chapter.
5. Experiment a bit. Try new things, new deliverables, methods, techniques, etc.

My advice seemed a logical quick fix to career apathy. But you later responded,

I have started trying to post content. But have not found it easy to write on technical communication. I guess it will require constant effort.

I have been following TECHWR-L, though have rarely made any posts.

Your response made me think more about my advice. I thought about what my father once told me when I was in the fourth grade. When I was about 10, one day I came home and complained to my dad that what I was learning at school was boring. I can’t remember the subject details –- probably math or social sciences.

My father made a big deal about my comment. He said (and would say on other occasions), “It’s not the subject that’s boring, Tommy. It’s the teacher!” That idea has stuck with me all my life. It suggests that you can potentially be enthusiastically engaged in anything, if you look at it from the right angle. Even if you’re nothing more than a bus driver, perhaps you can become fascinated with traffic flows, weather conditions, routing patterns, social interactions in public spheres — whatever.

Still, the question is how exactly you do this. With some reflection, I’ve come to a conclusion. Reading is a trigger for thought, but in my experience, writing is the core activity that produces engagement. So I would now change my advice to you as follows: To rekindle your passion for what you do, write.

The advice is simple, but everything else hangs on it. Writing involves thinking, analyzing, experimenting, researching, reading. Writing is the one key activity that gives rise to everything else. It doesn’t matter whether you post on a blog, keep a private journal, or write articles for a magazine or journal –- writing itself is what keeps your mind active and engaged. It gives rise to enthusiasm.

But you find it hard to write about technical communication, you say? That’s because you’re not writing about what’s relevant to you. Find an issue or trend in the field that you struggle with, or that you’re curious about. Read about it, think about it, ask yourself questions about it, and write out the answers. Eventually your muse will begin to speak.

When you blog about it, others will respond. Comments will enrich your thoughts and require your response. All this will contribute to your level of engagement. Writing lends itself to new ideas and transforms your world views. It encourages experimentation and evaluation. The mere act of writing leads to a more active involvement with life in general. This is probably why you became a writer in the first place.

You may not feel the muse speak initially. That’s okay. Keep writing and reading until you find some momentum. When it does occur, everything else will follow. You’ll naturally get involved in local groups such as the STC. You’ll naturally begin to follow listservs that interest you. You’ll naturally be asking your employer for funding to attend conferences.

To jump start your writing engine, try doing the following five activities:

1. Listen to a podcast, and then write a post reviewing the main ideas you hear.
2. Read a few articles from STC’s Intercom magazine and write a post in response to something that intrigues you.
3. Read a tech comm blog and write a post in response to something that caches your eye.
4. Try something new with your deliverables and write about it.
5. Attend an STC event (chapter meeting, webinar, conference) and write about your experience.

Let me know how it goes.