Accepting Your Lows and how to get out of Them

#motivation #watercooler #programming #productivity

You wake up with a headache hammering like crazy, feeling like your mind is trying to grind the coffee beans by itself today, or your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere just like the service you deployed last week? Everyone knows these days, everyone is trying to survive these days, and everyone knows these days will always creep up on you at some point. There are days or even weeks where you seem not to make your compiler happy, your threads won't act like they are supposed to act and eat each other up in endless dead-locks, and on top of all this - the coffee machine broken.

It is easy to slip of into a numb state on difficult days where you are just trying to survive the eight hours in office only to go home and worry even more about every single line you may or may not wrote today. Everyone is going through a phase like this from time to time, it is completely normal, it is human. Sure, the thing is that, if you are really stuck, like really stuck, sleeping till eleven on a Saturday and enjoying the well-deserved weekend may not be enough. And just going on holiday in the middle of an important project is also not on the table for you. So, what to do about all of this?

Well, what gets me out of situation like these is:

💪 Reminding myself of accomplishments
📖 Refreshing my knowledge by going over best practices or patterns as well as expending my horizon with new stuff (it does not have to be about coding all the time 😉)
🙇‍♀️ Not forcing myself to anything and always staying clear of the purpose of why I am doing something

And on top of all
Reminding myself why I used to love what I do and how I got where I am today.

As I said, I believe everybody has their lows from time to time, which begs the question of What are your to-goes when it comes to overcoming these times and maybe coming out of them stronger, smarter or even happier than before? 👼

Cover picture by Engin Akyurt on Pexels 🎉