Asklemmy

43831 readers

1138 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

124

How do people disconnect from work when they enjoy solving technical work problems? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by Greg@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm struggling to disconnect from work. I've been working on an interesting problem for the last couple of weeks (compacting change data capture events from sharded MySQL servers into BigQuery). It's an interesting technical problem. There are lots of optimization opportunities and novel patterns I can introduce.

I'm on vacation for the next two weeks but since starting my trip my mind keeps returning to the problem. I've even solved a few issues and come up with new patterns to try while daydreaming as we travel. Obviously I haven't implemented any changes, I deliberately didn't bring my work laptop with me. I emailed those solutions to my work email address so they get out of my head but that hasn't helped. I just visualized more optimizations while hiking today.

There is no expectations from my leadership to work while on vacation.

How do others disconnect from work when I enjoy the problem solving aspects of my work?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Meditation helped me discover how to let a thought pop up and pass through. I get into a very compulsive mode with programming and thinking in general, and find it hard to put anything down. Meditation helped me learn what it looks like when I'm mentally spinning and how to loosen my grip on that and let things settle. Then there's room for other things to become interesting, and room to function when I'm not in "finding something interesting" mode. So now I'm a little better at being focused and immersed for a bit but not going up the wall when I can't get back to it.

[–] towerful@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me, it was a notepad.
Not a note app or anything digital.
Just a book to scribble the random thoughts in with a pen.
It lets my mind release it, and if I circle back to it when chilling I can always re-read the notepad and make changes or whatever.

If I find myself super bored when trying to have a few days off, I can collate any notes into more concrete notes.
But always pen on paper, in a notepad.

Next time I'm at work, I can reread my notes and make more objective decisions on their quality/implementation

[–] cefadroxilthranduil@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

We want everything to be synchronized and accessible at all times which sometimes prevents us from letting things go easily. I agree with taking notes on paper.