Nodewood Year in Review - The Year of Burnout

2021 was a... weird year.

At the start of the year, I released Nodewood, my SaaS starter kit/boilerplate into open beta. I was pretty confident that in about six months or so, I could remove that label, hit 1.0, and start marketing for real.

Then I had a three month period where I thought I might have been burnt out, then a four month period where I definitely was burned out, and despite that, still managed to make six major releases for Nodewood, adding Teams support, Scripting support, a fully mobile-responsive design, and converting fully to Vue 3.

It's still not yet out of beta (there's one more planned release for that, adding a production deploy system), but it's in a much better place. It provides so many more features out of the box and it's a lot cleaner and easier to work with.

I think it's important to focus on that. Despite the fact that I spent perhaps half the year feeling like maybe this kind of thing wasn't for me any more, and like working on anything after my day job was an absolute slog, I still managed to get a whole bunch of work done in the year. No feeling is final, and feeling burnt out doesn't mean you'll never work again, just that you need to stop doing the thing that's burning you out for a while, until doing that thing doesn't make you feel that way again.

(Obviously that's not all there is to it, mental health is a complex subject that differs in so many ways from person to person, but I still think that taking the time to reflect back on a longer term can be helpful. If you asked me in September how productive my year had been, I'd have told you it was terrible, since I was in the depths then, and I expected to get nothing done for the rest of the year, too. Perspective helps.)

I have a full post going into all the work I did last year, including the surprising Black Friday sale (spoiler: I did basically nothing and still made sales), if you're interested in the details: https://nodewood.com/blog/nodewood-2022-year-in-review/

I'm interested in how everyone else is doing, burnout-wise, too! We're in year two of this pandemmy, and I know that's starting to get to people. Are you feeling it? If so, how are you coping? Got any tips?