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 (28)
Keep a tranquil and empty mind. The genuine qi follows naturally.
Conserve your spirit inwardly; whence can illness arise?
恬惔虚无，真气从之，精神内守，病安从来
More wisdom from master Xu! He has been enlightened by the mountaintop, where he experienced blissful (slightly salty) rain 😂
After drinking mountain spring water that day, I prayed to the mountain god, begging this rain cloud to drift all the way to Namibia for my good friend to taste. And sure enough, that cloud drifted westward. Was it delicious, haha 🤣.
I just picked a random quote from an ancient Chinese medical work written thousands of years ago. Haha, grateful to our ancestors for leaving behind such precious heritage.👏
I think the Mountain god needs to drink more water... And work on their aim... Cuz I think it hit the ocean and suddenly a bunch of fish washed up dead, so beach has been reeking for the past few weeks... But appreciated 😂 (I think the fish dying was due to the phosphate mining they're doing, last time was the same when they did their tests... all the fish is poisoned as a result).
Ah, I haven’t had dinner yet. Gonna order some KFC🍗
Wanna know the kicker? Announced today, FMD (Foot and mouth disease) outbreak happened... So cant get meat, cant get fish either... Guess I'm going vegan for a while 😅 atleast I would... If we didnt have a big freezer full...
Hahaha 😂 Treat it like a healthy vegetarian retreat. It fits perfectly with the theme of your post.
Right... I'll just chew on a carrot... Soon I'll be calling everyone Doc... 😭
🤣🤣🤣
This made me laugh 😹 I feel the same way. Was that really just one year? It feels like we’ve lived at least three.
I recently went to an island for vacation, left my PC behind, and disconnected from social media and the internet. At first, I felt so calm that I thought, “I could spend much more time like this.”
But that feeling didn’t last long. 😹
By day two, I already wanted to build my next OSS project. By day three, the cozy life was starting to feel a little boring.
So in the end, I think balance is the most important thing.
Exactly, we're too busy, so we take a break? 1 day of break and we're too bored to keep it up... That's why literally 10-30 min a day is more than enough. Just enough to keep you going, without giving your mind time to make itself busy again (so you dont fight your own mind)
Honestly, this is so true. We always do this—forget 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!
Yes, you can look at it that way, but the truth is that I know I am doing enough. But when you feel that the responsibility for yourself and your entire family lies solely on you, and your job's income isn't enough to meet their needs, you have to find different ways to earn money because you know you are your family's first and last hope. I really love sleeping, but I just can't sleep.
I know that feeling, though you have to make it sustainable, for yourself, so you can be sustainable for your family. It doesnt help you're burnt out, constantly sick, because that adds up over time too? First part to understand when people depend on you, is that to be dependable, you need to take care of yourself, else when something happens to you, you leave them all in hot water without an out.
Take me for instance, lots of animals and my fiance, single income (me), I left my job... That's an enormous amount of stress, because if I cant manage in time, then who pays the bills? But I had to take care of myself, so I can take care of her. If I kept burning out, I'd be putting her in a worse off position, because I'd be incapable of working.
It's not a privilege to be able to rest, it's a mandate, your body needs rest, your mind needs rest and sleep isnt rest. Sleep is a separate bodily function. You want to sleep, because it feels like rest, you cant sleep, because you didnt rest beforehand, so your restless sleep brings you nothing.
Think of a pot boiling, it starts to boil over... You turn the heat down, but it still boils over. The only thing you can do, that has immediate effect, is take it off the heat for a few seconds so it can calm down, while the hotplate cools down. That boiling over is you burning yourself out. Rest, so you can go back to the heat and manage it, else you'll boil over till you burn. You dont want to serve your family burnt food? So why serve them a burnt you?
What you’ve written is honestly so deep... I can’t even fully express it in words because I’m struggling to write, even though I’m trying my best. To be honest, a doctor once told me that I have low hemoglobin and really need to rest, but I didn't take it seriously and kept ignoring it. Because of that negligence, I often fall sick these days. Well, I’m starting to take care of myself now.
And that's another motivator. You need to take care of yourself, else you'll end up in the hospital and cost your family, instead of helping them. Health is first, everything else second.
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 😅
Oh, that's not bad at all! I was expecting much less.
😅 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.
Haha. Then we aren't that different. I work from the microsecond I wake up to the microsecond I go to sleep. And don't rest a single microsecond in between. I get exactly 2 hours after college. I don't like to spend that time studying for college, so I finish everything on the bus and during the breaks 😅
Good use of time, if you're doing nothing on the bus, great time to do work... But only if that means you take the time you bought yourself to rest when you get home. Atleast a portion of it? If you save 2 hours by fitting it in throughout your day, you can afford 30 minutes to rest.
Burnout is so real. On the marketing side at The Printing World, it's so easy to spend all evening tweaking packaging campaigns or logistics tracking instead of unplugging. Definitely needed this reminder to just log off for the night.
I wrote up a POC at a time for a local newspaper company, I finished the basic POC in a weekend, I spent 3 weeks expanding it, adding features, etc. It ended up not being a POC anymore and just a blatant product without a buyer. I thought of everything, Writers' assistants, Editor's assistants, Analytics, generated crosswords and sudoku, adblocker bypass mechanisms, even how to embed ads via webMCP, an ingest flow that automatically converts images to webP (they were using JPEG), literally threw the cupboard and the kettle at it. In the end, I never even sent it to them to demo... How many hours wasted, improving a system, that didnt need improving, now it's so overwhelming, that nobody'd understand it well enough to make a judgement call on accepting it, because it literally touches every part of their business, it'd be a complete swap out, which is too risky for an established company.
So definitely take that time to just rest, cuz the work isnt going anywhere, it'll still be there after you rested and you'll look at it with a sharper mind.
So true about the constant hustle. Doing marketing at The Printing World, I constantly catch myself tweaking packaging campaigns late at night instead of just logging off. Definitely setting a boundary timer today.