LinkedIn¹ is often used to share good news and happy goodbyes, but I feel that sometimes it should be deeper, which is why I have decided to write about burnout.

This week I stepped away from my position as a voluntary Language Coordinator (LC) and Translator for Portuguese (Brazil) and English at TED. It was my first contact with volunteering, I joined back in 2010 as a way of occupying my free time while also improving my English and some might even say that it was actually my first job. At the time I was only eighteen, with lots of energy and obsessed with giving attention to all volunteers and completing tasks.

Turns out it was actually my first time burning out as well.

The TED translation pipeline was divided into 3 stages: anyone could do the first two, but only Language Coordinators could do the third, approvals. There were tens of translators for a few LCs and we had a huge backlog of approvals to deal with, which was ever increasing. There were often questions of “when will my subtitle be online” or “I’ve finished my task some months ago, can someone approve it?”, so I set out to do it.

When I first started translating, I used to take videos with a theme that I liked, but as an LC I’d pick anything on the approval queue to get it over with. I’d also use every bit of free time I had to approve subtitles and it quickly became a chore, but I really wanted to get these out so that the translators wouldn’t feel frustrated and leave the community. Soon enough I wasn’t translating and reviewing anymore, just approving.

Worrying too much about the others and not myself was my demise.

Life is a very delicate balance of expectations which, if disturbed too much, will lead to frustration, upsetting, burnout. I set an expectation that I would be able to handle the approvals, that people expected us to approve things fast and that this would soon be a manageable situation had TED cooperated or delivered on promises. None of these were met. I was using all my free time and leisure time to work on this and it didn’t fare well.

So I burned out.

I’m not an expert to describe and diagnose what burnout is, but I’d tell you that it feels like a trauma. If you’re demotivated to work one day, feeling lazy or procrastinating, that isn’t burning out, but if you can’t imagine yourself anywhere near those tasks, then you’re probably really close, if not at it already. I didn’t want to touch the project anymore, and I hardly ever watched the videos I used to like. To this day I don’t find much joy in watching them anymore, which is disappointing, so I will reiterate:

Watch out.

• Be mindful of what your and theirs expectations are.
• Don’t forget to take your breaks and pauses, be them as long as they need to be for you to feel at ease again
• Know when to stop or to reach out for help, if it’s too late, then the joy on that activity might never come back.

If you feel like talking about it, I’m all ears. Stay safe, stay sane.