Reasons to Prioritize Mental Health

Consideration	Agree?
Would you rather have a lead work non-stop for 1 month or have them contribute a minimum amount of work for an entire year
We need to prioritize work and team decision-making to maintain the wellbeing of members. We can’t prioritize timelines over members because then we won’t have any members to help work towards reaching those timelines.
It is impossible and not sustainable for anyone to build a car on their own. We need to make sure to ask for help and distribute the workload.
You should ask for help from someone with more knowledge or experience. It is a losing bet to try to solve things on your own and sink more time into it. A completely high risk and low reward scenario. It is better to forget your pride, ego, and arrogance to ask someone for better guidance on your projects.
Burnout likely occurs on a system level as opposed to an individual level since burnout happened to all of them. Robin, Shalin, Adrian, Kevin, Emily, SJ, and Jason. Note: This is considering only MS14. Burnout has occurred during past cars, too.
Do not trick yourself into believing there is no one else to rely on. Do not feel like you are back into a corner without any help - and that you are the only one responsible for your project. Reach out and ask for help from other leads! Bring it up privately or in a mech-leads sync-up
Midnight Sun houses a lot of ambitious individuals. Ambitious people tend to have a high tolerance to achieve their goals. The danger is that you have a very small window of opportunity to gain self-awareness of your situation, ask for help, and recover before you hit a mental breakdown. We need to become more well-versed in mental health so that we can create a sustainable system on a team-level, and also on an individual-level.
People tend to burnout because sometimes they are too busy to even have a moment of rest to reflect on their current health. We need to have a system in place to check up on leads or else people will feel forced into a corner and try to grind out the projects they own by themselves.
As leads with a lot of responsibility, we tend to downplay any signs of failure and be optimistic about chances of success. We need to be more honest and realistic. We need to stop downplaying the negatives and risks. We need to say it as it is. Then we will deal with it together as a team.
I (Tommy) noticed that if you ask me about my project, I will say it’s making progress. I will rarely get honest about how I am doing and my struggles. I have noticed that the only time that I am more honest is when I am talking to past mech advisors (E.g. Matt Suski or Kevin Bui) and they ask me, “How are you doing, really? How have you been?” This is when I jokingly share how I am burnt out and overloaded with all my work and how I am losing sleep to try to grind things out. This is also when the mech advisor tells me I’m going crazy and that it’s unhealthy.
Members, including leads, should have the right to take a break or vacation days when they are heavily stressed or burnt out.
We should have a stronger focus on member development and training so that leads can be more focused on project management and decision-making. Members would be making meaningful contributions to grunt work and research for the team.