Hi — I’m Masato, and I have been through burnout twice.
Note: this piece is from my personal-blog years, written down exactly as I felt at the time, and the body is left as it was. (2026 update: I have since moved my base to Sendai and run Webharu Inc., doing website production and AI development.)
It is an old pattern of mine: a sudden hollow feeling of “wait, what am I supposed to be doing?” It is not sadness, and it is not depression, but every so often I lose my grip on my goals and on whatever I am working toward.
Yesterday I switched our company site over to a format that shows my own face; before that, client work. So — today? Thinking produces no answer. Left alone that curdles into anxiety, so I do the work of reorganizing my thinking and remembering the goal.
Having gone through burnout twice on my own and come out of both, here is my way of living and the way I resolve it. There must be plenty of solo freelancers with no colleagues around them, and I am writing this hoping it reaches even one of them who is struggling the way I did. (I decided to write exactly what I am feeling right now.)
If “I do not know what to do today” sounds familiar, please read on.
1. Think about what you love — what feels good
The first thing I do is think about what I love and what feels good.
If I skip it, an unnameable anxiety and impatience quietly demolish my mental state. I ask myself: lately, what am I doing when I am enjoying myself? What am I looking at when I feel happy?
——— (thinking) ———
Here is the list I actually thought through and noted down, verbatim.
- Achievement at work, and the moment I land a big project (say what you like, work is fun)
- Time with friends, and drinks
- Sitting on the terrace of the neighborhood café, thinking, looking at the grass and the trees
- Walking around the beautiful pool near home
- Watching my wife struggle with some strange video game (she is so bad at it that it is funny)
- Newsletter subscribers ticking up (a notification of a new sign-up makes me happy)
- Listening to UVERworld live recordings when TAKUYA∞’s MC is at its best
- Writing, and pouring myself out on the page (I used to hate writing, and now I love it)
- Wearing clothes I think are cool (I made and bought clothes in my university days. Nomad life reduced me to Uniqlo. Since renting a place in Thailand I have come back to it. I really do love clothes.)
That is roughly it. It is embarrassingly candid, but this is how I find what I love and what makes me happy.
Incidentally, lately I have started to feel a rush in my head when I feel happy. It is a little different from the win of gambling or a game and it is hard to put into words, but I have come to recognize the sensation of my brain being wrapped in pleasure. (Putting it that way makes it sound alarming.)
There is nothing odd about it: when I think something is enjoyable, my head clears and my thinking sharpens. In that state, focus, ideas and drive all rise, and my work gets more efficient. That is why I put this step — thinking about what you love and what feels good — first and treat it as important.
2. Remember the goal
Next I remember the goal. Until a little while ago my goals were vague — “what am I even working for, what do I want to do?” — and I suffered at this step, so I built proper goals.
- Build a team and gather colleagues for the web production business
- Find just ten fans
Building a team and gathering colleagues for the web production business
Right now I run a Webflow production business; I find colleagues, and then I move on to the next venture. That requires publishing in articles and in video, which means putting out more articles on Webflow × SEO and spreading them through video and social media.
Right now I have only two partners I trust. I have not been able to hire anyone yet, and my income is not stable. Put that way there is still plenty I have to do, and the road there excites me.
How to build a goal that excites you is covered here.
Find just ten fans
One day it struck me: being cheered on by someone is a genuinely wonderful thing. Become someone people cheer for. Stay the kind of person who deserves it. That is one of my goals now.
I will not do what I find uncool. Even if someone else calls it uncool, if I think it is cool then I should do it. Count only the number of people who love you. If even one person loves you, you are happy. I want to be a person of consistent principle. That is exactly why I set this goal.
But I do not want to be an influencer. I do not much like social media in the first place. In the article on how to build a goal, I gave a brief tour of my values, and in the course of it I found that I prefer narrow and deep — that I like small teams. So instead of one-to-many social media, I am building out newsletters and community work, which have the stance of a letter from me to you.
3. Work backward from the goal and lay out the tasks (and if the mood will not rise, rest today)
From here I work backward and make the tasks clear. And if even then the mood will not rise, I rest for the day. Making a task list while the mood is not there just ends with the tasks undone.
I choose rest precisely because I have forced my way through before. Push on when you are not in the mood and you stay out of the mood, and the heat drains away. That leads straight back to burnout, so I take my rest properly.
—— 3 days later ——
My focus broke, so I rested for three days. Friday to Sunday I played The Legend of Zelda with my wife. I gamed so much that I started wanting to work, so here I am. Now, back to the article.
I work backward from the goal and lay out the tasks.
In the case of turning the web production business into a business
Broadly, there are two things to do.
- Grow the project pipeline
- Find team members
The steps toward systematizing the business go in the following order.
- Grow the project pipeline
- Find (and grow) members
- Become the director myself
- Find a director from among the members
- Concentrate on sales and marketing, leaving most of the production to the director
- Put trusted colleagues in senior seats and open up a new business
It is extremely rough, but the steps above are what I am aiming at now.
I am currently around step 2, finding members, with a long way to go. Members I find often fall short on quality and skill, so lately I pay to commission the work, fix it myself, and then teach through feedback on why I fixed it — an awkward arrangement, but it is what works for now.
When I was starting out I got cut without a word, which is exactly why I find myself wanting to teach people things. Still, since I cannot take anyone on as an employee yet, I tell myself the approach above is the only way for now. (I am thinking of releasing a product before long that supports one or two people over the medium to long term with the knowledge to live as a freelancer.)
(2026 update: the plans above for building a team and for a support product are from the time of writing. I no longer offer that service.)
