While maintaining an open source project can be fun and fulfilling, it can also be very draining. Many maintainers struggle to get the support they need.

Common problems include:

  • being the sole maintainer for a project, and feeling unable to take breaks
  • having to take on unexpected roles, such as a developer who finds themselves acting as a licensing expert, community manager, and product manager
  • overwhelm due to community requests, especially those framed in an angry or entitled way
  • a lack of funding, which can limit the amount of time maintainers have for a project and lead to a sense of being taken for granted

In all of these cases, the maintainer feels forced to put the project above their own individual needs, such as their need for time off, their need to pay the bills, or their need to focus on the kind of tasks that give them joy.

It's actually not the sacrifice itself that causes burnout. Sometimes people have to put the needs of others before their own! But in healthy relationships, this give and take is mutual, and if the situtation is unsustainable for either side, both sides see it as an urgent issue to be fixed.

In other words: the core problem facing most burned out open source maintainers is not that they sometimes have to do things they don't want to do. It's that they don't have anyone they can bring these problems to, who cares enough about them to help find a solution.

How to find those solutions is a topic for another post. This post is about recognizing when you're starting to burn out.

It's important to catch burnout early on. It's tempting to "just push through" when things aren't so bad, but finding solutions to the problems causing burnout can take a lot of time and a lot of work—work that's hard to do when you're already drained and miserable.

(For men, who make up a disproportionate share of open source maintainers, this is especially challenging. Western society conditions men to ignore their emotions and never ask for help. They're even more likely to just push through when they should stop and assess.)

The following are signs of burnout in open source projects. If you answer "yes" to one or more questions, you may be on the road to burnout.

Open Source Burnout Checklist

  • When you see a notification that someone has opened up a new issue or PR in your project, do you feel exhaustion, dread, or some other negative emotion, rather than excitement to see a new contribution?
  • When someone asks you about your project, do you feel less eager to talk about it than you used to?
  • Do you find yourself hesitant about going to meetups and conferences where people might ask you about your project?
  • Are there ongoing issues with the project? Do you feel pessimistic about your ability to eventually resolve them?
  • How often do you enjoy working on the project? Are you able to lose yourself in the work, get into flow states, and emerge from a work session energized and satisfied? Or do you tend to spend your time on things you don't enjoy that much, and that you're only doing because you feel obligated to?
  • Do you feel guilty when you can't address an issue or review a pull request right away?
  • Do you feel like users/contributors are demanding too much of you?
  • Are there specific users/contributors/collaborators who you have to work with, but wish you could avoid?
  • Are you anxious that you're being asked to do things you don't know how to do? When you're working on the project, how often are you afraid that you'll get something wrong?
  • Do you feel like you could ever take a break (weekend, sickness, vacation, family emergency) from the project? Or can't you leave it alone even for a single day without stuff piling up?
  • Do you get paid to work on your project? If yes, does that make you feel like you're not living up to your obligtions or unable to focus on the tasks you most enjoy? If no, do you feel like your work is taken for granted?
  • Think back to what first drew you to the project, whether that was a specific technical challenge, the joy of problem-solving, getting into flow states, collaborationg with others, or participating in a project that had a meaningful impact on the world. Do you still feel that when you work on the project, or is it getting drowned out by other feelings?

More Resources

Here are some additional resources related to open source maintainer burnout: