If it's Saturday and you won't be coding again until Monday, how do you get your mind off your current work?

I find myself lost in problem solving even though I can't do anything about it (and shouldn't). How do you go about shutting it off and picking it up again Monday morning?

Comments

[Richard Moot]

WoW Classic.. Helps me not think about work quite well.

[ckaotik]

Living in a big city, I tend to walk home when there's too much on my mind. It takes way longer but by the time I get home, I'll only be thinking about dinner 😄

[Oldrich Svec]

Recently I was playing with our two dogs and thought what would it take to be more like them. I realized that the main difference is that humans have the inner voice. Since then I try to block the inner voice as much as possible. I feel like it makes my life better - I now live more in presence than in thoughs.

[Guney Ozsan]

I do these at the end of every day, not just for long breaks. It helps resting my mind more frequently.

• I leave code breaking very short notes about what and how to do. This provides my brain security that I won't forget what I was thinking so it stops thinking about them.
• I take a short shower. The isolation helps my mind move further away and water provides relaxation and good sleep.
• I engage in other mental activity. Gaming, drawing or photo editing. Our brains are poor at multitasking. If you give it a busy task, it will stop thinking about the other eventually. This is why having a hobby is more productive.
• Related with the last one, a day long family time breaks my mind from everything.

[Fulton Browne]

I don't

[Kyle Johnson]

Watch TV (mostly sports) and play video games.

[Eric Donovan]

Before I leave work, I add a sentence right in the code that I'm working on, so that it breaks the project (I don't commit that obviously).

The sentence details what my current thought process is, what I am going to try next etc.

Because it stops the project compiling, the IDE now puts a bunch of red squiggles all around it, highlighting what I need to read whenever I get back to work.

Now that my thought process is out of my brain and written in the code, I feel more free to forget about it (unless it's some particularly exciting thing).

I shut the laptop, leave it at work, and don't have slack or work email going to my phone.

(If it's a really exciting problem, I will occasionally indulge myself and think it through in my free time, but with a pencil and paper - definitely not on my work laptop)

[Jonathan Boudreau]

GuitaaaAAaaAarr!

[Goran Paunović]

Hard training with my tennis coach on a Saturday morning while my kids are still in bed helps me clean my brain and prepare for rest of the weekend.
Also, work around the house always make me feel useful. And it's good for disconnecting from my job.

[Chinmay Joshi]

I make sure I close everything related to work before leaving my workspace. I think this is the easiest way for me to stay away from coding for weekends.