I'm in the fun dichotomy of knowing damned well that I'm at the end of my tether, burned-out beyond belief, and not having the time or energy to do a bloody thing about it. I work, from the moment I wake to the moment I fall asleep on my laptop, to the moment I'm woken 20 minutes later by a client phoning or raising a support request, I've pushed friends and family out of my life completely, and I'm slowly but surely becoming an aggressive asshole who views anyone who doesn't spend their entire life as working as worthless.
These aren't my values. They don't even remotely reflect who I am as a person, or who I was, at any rate, but I'm helpless to do anything about it, as someone has to do all this crap, and I'm not prepared to inflict it on any of the guys we employ, as I'd rather fuck my life up than someone else's.
It seems like you can't, but trust me. Step away.
If an organization rests solely on the shoulders of one man, it isn't running properly, and it needs to be fixed sooner rather than later.
Step away
I'm desperate for us to hire someone else to at least share the devops/project management/administrative/account management burden with me, however my business partner runs the design side of things, and therefore doesn't see the problems (I never get to sleep, I don't feel like it's permissible for me to do anything but sit in the office waiting for the next crisis), just the symptoms (me being snarky and irritable), therefore assumes the problem is with me, rather than the fact that I'm doing way too much.
Aware of the problem, aware of a resolution, no path to it, however, so I'll probably just keep on cranking until I finally, completely and utterly, unmistakably, lose it.
If the business is to survive (and continue to support you & your employees), you have something like these two options:
1) You continue at the existing intolerable grind until you lose it. The entire mass of work that you're currently doing will suddenly be thrown to everyone else, along with whatever else is required to clean up after your personal implosion (will they even know where you are or if you're coming back? will you start throwing servers out the window or screaming at customers?). Somehow with incredible difficulty they may figure it out and rescue the business, in spite of you.
2) You grind up this bitter pill and start giving it now, in little tiny doses. Hand out chunks of responsibility to others, and answer questions but don't micromanage; let them make their own mistakes (and clean them up themselves) until they've got it under control; shuffle things around as needed until folks are comfortable; repeat. Either you will make your way to a business that is sustainable, or you will find that this cannot be, in fact, a workable business that doesn't ride entirely on your back. Which means you should try something else.
It think it should be obvious which path is easier on your colleagues/employees.
If this were me, I think I'd just say "we're going to start having "X got hit by a bus" drills, and you guys have to handle something completely without me". It won't be as good as if you did it yourself, probably, but there's no way in hell they'll get any better without practice.
Hire some contractors or something to help you get things together to the point where you have emergencies once a week or less; This is a relatively low bar, but it will set things up such that you can sleep most of the time, which is key. Even if you have to pay full rates $150/hr or whatever, (and you should be able to get someone good enough to get you down to the 'failures once a week' bar fairly quickly at that rate.) do it. Have your hired gun bang on things for a week. Someone good and fresh should be able to get you down to 1 downtime-causing failure a week fairly quickly. (really. one failure every 7 days is an extremely low bar unless you have hundreds or thousands of physical servers. I probably get a bad disk a week, but those are 'fix as soon as you are awake' not 'wake up now' events. I get a downtime causing error maybe once every two months, and if you can only afford one sysadmin, chances are you are way smaller than I am.)
The important thing is to focus on bringing your failures down to reasonable rather than on making things perfect. Bring your failures down to humanly tolerable, recover, then start worrying about the failures that happen twice a year.
Next, you have a pager, right? sleep whenever you can. The caffeine makes this harder, but it's still possible. Sleep whenever you can. Set it up so that your pager wakes you, but also set up your alarms so that it only goes off if there is a /real/ problem.
Next, why are you staying at the office? I've bought one of those little verizon brand USB cellphone dongles for both my employee and myself. It's pretty great; you can be way out in the middle of nowhere, get a page, and you can do most of the things you could do in the office.
You need to set expectations. If you got woken up to fight a fire? you put out the fire, but then you aren't showing up the next day.
So yeah, first priority? sleep. Depriving yourself of sleep is false productivity. Next? make your system more reliable.
But not desperate enough to explain this to your business partner? A working relationship is similar a romantic relationship. You can't just hope the other person will "pick up" on what's bothering you. You have to tell them.
Seriously, he's only seeing the symptoms because you aren't showing them to him. Step away is exactly the right advice. Leave the office. Don't handle a crisis.
That should trigger a proper discussion about unrealistic expectations and the fact that you've probably been doing your job progressively worse. A single crisis not managed is usually better than an increasing number of crises badly-managed because you were running yourself into the ground.
I was once in a situation similar to yours. The harder I worked, the more work got piled on me. After about two weeks, I started coming in at 8 and walking out at 4:30. Yeah, it was awkward to walk out when the rest of the team was still coding away. But a funny thing happened. I actually ended up contributing more functionality to the final project than the rest of the team combined. Why? I disciplined myself and made sure that the stuff I wrote worked the first time through, because I had set limits on my time and that set limits on the amount of rework I could do.
These aren't my values. They don't even remotely reflect who I am as a person, or who I was, at any rate, but I'm helpless to do anything about it, as someone has to do all this crap, and I'm not prepared to inflict it on any of the guys we employ, as I'd rather fuck my life up than someone else's.
First, that's a terrible attitude to have, and it ensures that you'll always be in over your head. Second, I'm willing to bet $20 that not all of that work has to get done. If you're really burning out as much as you say you are, you're not doing high quality work anyway. It'd be better to meet with the client and have some very frank discussions regarding the status of the project than deliver something that's complete on paper but only half-works in practice.
Have you heard of saying that path to hell is paved with good intentions?
I have seen two major categories of "asshole bosses":
1. The ones who don't care. These are in it only for the paycheck and maybe they want to see how far they can take it before they get sacked.
2. The ones who care too much. They want to be successful, they need to be seen as good example and will work themselves to madness trying to prove a point. They are also trying to achieve some ideal of their own, for which they feel it should not imposed on others. They think that they are running the show, but they rarely realize they are riding the wheel. Until they just cant take it anymore and drive everyone away.
There have been many people in your shoes. Arguably everyone who is in charge of other people has to face this situation sometimes in their career/life.
Perhaps you have read this essay from Derek Sivers, if you have not it might help you open your eyes and he even offers a pretty good strategy for dealing with your situation (http://sivers.org/delegate).
You say that you don't want to impose on your colleagues. What if there are some that want to be imposed? Who will leave you just because you didn't give them a chance to go through what you are going through now?
There might be people among them, probably most of them, who are willing to help you and have no need to see you suffering. For mutual benefit. They might help you if you are willing to admit the situation you are in.
I really hope you will be able to work it out. Go take a break. The world can do without you. Really. It will have to deal with you leaving one way or another.
for what it's worth, if i could send a message back to my past self, i would tell him to stop. 10 years down the line the bad has outlasted the good.
