Ever find yourself working when you shouldnt be? I know I do... Infact, I'm supposed to be a jobless bum sleeping all day, yet I'm still waking up at 8am, still working all day, even late into the night???
We as developers love routines. And that's a bad thing... We get into a 'flow' and just keep working, we get into the habit of working the second we wake up, or 'just 1 last thing' towards the end of the day and end up working 12+ hours...
So here's a call to arms for us all. Stop working when it's time to stop working...
Set yourself alarms, just-in-case. If you really want a wakeup call, set alarms... But then start a time tracker. That way end of the week, you can look at your time tracker and see just how much you did more than you were meant to.
Even side-projects and hobby projects, these arent unrestricted timeslots for you to expand till they consume your day! Budget your time, so you can rest, because I know that every single 1 of you are feeling a bit of burnout... I mean how cant you with how fast the world is running, it feels like I aged 10 years this year and it's just been 9 months!
Genuinely take a moment, everyday, to just sit and do nothing. Not scroll on TikTok, not play a game, not read a book, or browse Dev.to, genuinely nothing, dont even monitor your breathing, literally do nothing. I tried that yesterday and it was pretty infuriating how my mind kept trying to keep itself busy. That's genuinely a bad habit, since when did humans evolve and progress, so we end up with more stress and more busy? I thought technology was meant to make life easier, more relaxed, so we can do less in a day and still get more done? I mean look at a sink, sounds stupid, but the alternative is going to fetch water from a well and carry it back in, just to wash your hands? Simple, easy, it saves you time you never even accounted for, yet we take it for granted and waste it replacing what should have been rest time, with getting more busy?
Idk about you, but I barely have a second in a day where I'm not doing something. And it's insanity! Lets calculate:
wake up and wash face. - 15 min - sink instead of well.
make coffee - 30 min - kettle instead of fire
make breakfast - 15 min - pre-prepared goods in fridge.
Before you even start your day properly, you already saved an hour! So what do you do with that hour usually? Get some extra sleep? Or do more work?
That's the real messed up part, we split our day in 2, work and sleep, where sleep is our only 'rest'. Sleep isnt rest, it's a bodily mandate. You cant rest when you sleep, you need to be rested to sleep. That's why it's called 'restless sleep', because your mind kept racing and it couldnt sleep. Rest is meant to be when you sit down on a chair (or grass, that's always a nice 1), have a drink and just watch the world go by, like watching ants.
As kids, we all had that experience, nowadays, kids dont even rest... It's always a screen, or school, or homework, or practice, sports, etc. And that's arguably worse than us! A kid that cant rest, becomes a kid that never thinks unless prompted to. That innate curiosity is dying in us all, because we never sit still enough to let it wander, we're far too busy for it. Since when did enjoying live become optional? Did thousands of years of development really lead us to an age, where we finally have the means to live automated lives, yet we argue against it? Or is it that we're inventing new ways to stay busy, to keep us from resting on purpose? Feeling bored, here's a new tax you need to file for. Want something to do, how about maintain another social media account. And of course... TikTok... The bane of our existence, the single most counter intuitive thing ever made... Spend 5 hours, in 30 second sprints, watching people do stupid things just to be seen? When I was growing up, movies kept getting longer and I loved it! Now it seems kids want the opposite, they want 'shortform content'... No wonder AI summarizes everything, because modern man doesnt have the attention span to read a single page!
I cant tell you how to live your life and I wont even bother judging my own. We have a serious problem and it's brain decay from lack of rest and we keep making it worse. If you like, take 10 minutes today, just sit back and do nothing. And dont bother letting me know if you did, that's the whole point of rest, it's for you, you dont need to post about it, or give feedback 'yes, I myself had a very pleasant rest today', if you feel better after resting, start looking at your daily life and find rest where you can. After all, that's what our ancestors developed the world for?
Top comments (8)
Unit, the sink example is the one that stuck with me.
An hour saved a day and most of it goes straight back into more work instead of rest. I have not tried doing nothing on purpose yet.
I am not sure my mind would sit still for it either. Right now I am running two hackathons at once, so rest keeps losing that argument.
And that's the simplest of the examples and probably the shortest time saved in the day. Remember, resting, when you've already optimized, isnt taking away from work, it's allocating time where it's needed. So dont feel bad resting a bit!
Just curious, how many hours do you sleep per day?
Around 7 hours, even now... Yeah, I need to probably sleep more while I can π
Oh, that's not bad at all! I was expecting much less.
π till you consider I work from the second I wake up, to the second I go to sleep. With the back injury I'm stuck in bed, so it's laptop on and non-stop work till I put it down and go sleep. Definitely a bad habit I need to cut. All the public repos I have on Git are a direct result of that. But the burnout is too... Which is why I wouldnt recommend it. Somedays I did drop down to 4-5h but that's mostly when I'm artificially putting myself in crunch to get it done faster, even though there's no due date or mandate to finish at all for that matter.
Honestly, this is so true. We always do thisβforget to take care of ourselves, stay super busy with work all day, and completely forget what resting feels like. I'm in the exact same boat. I go to bed at 11 PM and wake up at 4 AM. And yeah, because of this routine, I end up falling sick 2 or 3 times a month, but I still keep working anyway. It's honestly such a bad habit. Now I just feel like taking an hour off to go out into the mountains, wander around, and have fun in the deserts like I used to as a kid. I know I really need rest, but I just don't know why I can't bring myself to do it.
It's a mental block, you feel if you're not busy, you're wasting time and falling behind. The sink example is proof that you're already ahead, you just arent acknowledging it. So take the time to rest, you already earned it!