Crash-proof your workday: 10 tools to help you avoid burnout 📋✅

You have 24 hours in a day. 🕰️ 

Let’s say you spend at least eight of those sleeping and another eight or so working. 

That leaves a mere eight hours to do everything else we need to do as humans: spend time with friends and family, exercise, cook and eat meals, take care of errands and chores, practice hobbies, learn new things… the list goes on. 

It’s easy to see how trying to do it all (and do it well!) can lead to burnout, especially when you’re trying to keep up with rapid changes in technology. 😮💨

The implications are real. 

A recent report from JetBrains found that 73% of developers have experienced burnout at some point in their careers. The good news? Those who have suffered a crash are more inclined to engage in activities that support mental health.

We can’t do your laundry, stock the fridge with groceries, or go forest bathing for you, but we do have some ideas on how to tweak your approach to work to avoid crashing out. Whether you’re recovering from burnout, deep in its throes, or feeling okay but don’t want to end up there, here are 10 tools in Visual Studio Code and GitHub to take your workday from 😱 to ☺️.

1. Get into the flow: According to the JetBrains report, only 8% of responding developers say they “almost always” enter a flow state while working. Achieving flow state is a win not only for productivity, but also for your own well-being. Luckily, the VS Code IDE has a setting called “Zen Mode” designed to help you get there. Zen mode hides all UI elements except for the editor, letting you focus on your code. VS Code also offers a “Do not disturb” mode that reduces notification popups to limit distractions. Check out the VS Code docs for more on these features.
2. Filter the noise: Take alert fatigue avoidance one step further by fine-tuning your GitHub notifications. You can specify how and where you want to receive alerts (such as via email or in the GitHub app), which repositories you’re interested in, and what activities you want to hear about (such as all activity, at mentions only, and more).
3. Step away, stay connected: GitHub Mobile is your friend here, too. Feel empowered to step away for a mid-day walk or take a quiet moment on the couch while knowing that the important alerts you’ve set up—but no others—will still come your way.
4. Tag it and forget it: Star GitHub repositories you care about. ⭐ That way, you can close the tab in your brain (and your browser) while ensuring your treasures don't get lost. Updates from starred repositories and interesting related information will be waiting for you in your feed when you’re ready to consume it.
5. Go easy on the blue light: Working late, or using your evening hours to learn in your IDE? Try the Night Owl theme for VS Code to reduce the strain on your eyes when looking at a screen in low-light conditions.
6. Save your thumbs: Give your fingers a rest, and save time with saved replies in GitHub Issues and pull requests. Saved replies keep you from typing the same message over and over. LGTM! 👍
7. Organize for impact: Almost half of the developers in JetBrains’ survey who experienced burnout said that self-organization and time management increased their daily coding productivity. A whole 28% of the same group said that better organization of work and processes across their team or organization would help. If you’re already using GitHub at work, that’s exactly what GitHub Projects is designed for! Set up your project as a spreadsheet, task board, or roadmap, and use it to plan and track your work effectively. 
8. Goodbye, boring: Don’t hate, automate! GitHub Actions workflows can cut down on the time you spend doing manual reviews and other rote tasks, freeing you up to focus on creative or high-impact work.
9. Search smarter, not harder: Save mental energy by finding examples to inspire your coding projects with GitHub Code Search syntax. Even if you can’t remember exactly where you saw an example, you can use specialized code qualifiers, regular expressions, and boolean operations to track it down. (Oh hey, it was me, I wrote that five years ago! 😅)
10. Give GitHub Copilot the heavy lifting: If you want some coding suggestions for a project you're working on, ask GitHub Copilot. Or take it a step further and assign your issues to the new coding agent. Your AI pair programmer will iterate and open pull requests for you to review. This enables you to focus on the creative problem-solving that happiness is made out of.

Burnout doesn’t have to be inevitable, even in the fast-paced world of software development. Try out these tools and tips to make your workday more efficient and give you back time and energy to do the important work of being human.

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✨ This newsletter was written by Laura Lindeman and produced by Gwen Davis. ✨