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?
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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)
The sink example is good, but I think the saved hour goes back into work for a boring reason: it arrives in small pieces nobody schedules. Fifteen minutes here, ten there, and anything unscheduled gets eaten by whatever is already open on the screen. That's why doing nothing on purpose is so hard: it's the only item on your list that has to be put in the calendar to exist at all. The time tracker would probably show the leak best if it tracked the gaps rather than the hours.
Both cases actually. I have been making a health and fitness app for my fiance and during making of it, I realized something... People are more willing to be unproductive, eg. going out for drinks, when you're on a diet, if they already paid the price for it. I.E. if you schedule a 'cheat day' a week ahead of time and your cal intake, workouts, etc. are adjusted, so when that day comes, you already lost the weight to be allowed to enjoy yourself to the fullest. It changes every drink from a guilty 'this is putting me behind' to 'I earned this'. And that's why the tracking of your time saved makes a difference. Because that's time you already paid for, so making a cup of tea in 2 minutes, instead of 20, means you've EARNED 18 minutes. You earned that time, because of all the weight you carry paying for appliances, paying for electricity, water, etc. You earned the time to do with as you please. If you CHOOSE to work through it, then it has to actually give you a net gain. Eg. clocking overtime, no matter how small, atleast it pays... But if you sweep it under the rug and dont get paid for it, then why even put in those extra minutes? 1 has genuine gain, the other is literally being more wasteful than resting, because you're actively draining yourself for no gain. You dont own the company you work for, so it's wellbeing isnt your concern. That's something alot of people get wrong, we try to be good employees, try to make the companies we work for prosper, but to whose benefit? Definitely not our own... If the extra work goes unacknowledged, then it's a drop of water in the ocean, but it's a drop from your cup and your cup is finite.
The pre-paid cheat day is a neat mechanism, because it moves the decision to a moment when you're neither tired nor tempted. The same trick might work for saved time: decide on Monday what the recovered minutes are for, so on Thursday they aren't up for grabs to whoever asks first. Where I'd push back a little is the overtime test. Plenty of unpaid extra work is someone buying down their own future pain, like fixing the flaky script they'd otherwise babysit next week, so paid versus unpaid seems like the wrong line to me. Whether it comes back to you is the better one.
True, though it's important to note, who benefits from you fixing it today, vs next week? If you're not being paid for the hours you put in extra, then you are rushing to get a job done, for 0 gain. It might feel like you're saving yourself headaches next week, but the reality is that next week will just get a new headache. That's the whole point of a job, it's continuous and you are paid for your time, not deliverables, so those extra hours sound like you're helping yourself, but in reality, you're just helping the company with free labor you wont get recognized for.
Take me at my last job for instance, I would sometimes when I'm bored over the weekends continue working, unclocked. So the only sign of it is a magic commit on a saturday evening, that suddenly fixes a few things. That didnt stop my boss from comparing me to a $20 Claude subscription... On average 15h extra clocked per month, from the few minutes here and there, probably another 10h unclocked. Did that suddenly make him sing my praises? No, infact, he didnt even care and in the end a back injury still made him harass me till I decided I had enough and had him set up a MSA... Over the past year and a half there, I likely worked out over a month worth off extra time I was never paid for. Those are hours my body paid for, not the company. If I were compensated, even as extra PTO, that would have been fine, but no, 0 compensation for that extra time, meant I wasted my time. In hindsight, I should have logged off at 5pm and logged in at 8am, never wasting a second more on it than I was being paid for.
That's the thing people keep forgetting, you're already working extra uncompensated hours a month, you just arent tracking them. Take commuting for instance. If you commute to work, it means you have to spend an hour of your time, going to and from work. They dont pay you for that time, your body pays the time tax and your wallet pays the fuel. For the 'privilege' of being allowed to work. That's not fair and that's not right. A salaried employee is paid for their time, that's why we clock in and clock out, so if you arent meticulously tracking your time, so you track every minute of overtime. Then you're simply overworked and underpaid and a boss will never recognize it, until you log it as overtime.
The magic Saturday commit is the part that stings, because unclocked work is invisible by design: the only record is a diff that makes the weekdays look slower than they were. And once a boss is comparing you to a $20 subscription, extra hours can't win that argument, because the comparison was never about hours. Glad you got out. If there's one habit worth keeping from it, it's logging the unclocked time anyway, even just for yourself, so you can see what it actually cost.
The line that hit me: "Sleep isn't rest, it's a bodily mandate. You can't rest when you sleep, you need to be rested to sleep."
I'm two weeks into learning Python and trying to break into technical writing. I published 12 articles in 13 days. I sent 7 pitches to companies. I did the 4-day writing sprint after already doing a 7-day one.
And I felt good about it. Until I read this.
Because the truth is I haven't taken a single afternoon off since I started. I've been treating rest like something I'll earn after the next article, the next pitch, the next reply. But "after" keeps moving forward. There's always a next thing.
The part about sitting and doing nothing — genuinely nothing — scared me a little, because I know I can't do it. My brain immediately goes to "what should I be writing" or "did any pitches get answered." I don't have an off switch anymore.
I don't have advice. I just wanted to say you're right, and I didn't realize how much I needed to hear it until now.
Taking 10 minutes today. For real this time.
Just remember, you dont have to commit to an entire afternoon. Even 5 minutes where you can spare it, is plenty. Rest is rest and given that you currently have none, any rest a day will make a world of a difference, because it's infinitely more than you have now. You cant grow a seed with no water, but even a drop a day can get it sprouting.
It's tough at the start, especially because of the habit we've formed. But trust me, it's well worth it. I spent the past 9 months on hardcore mode, working around 16h a day, pumping out side projects, some just 40k LOC, 1 even pushing over 4m LOC (and counting). While applying to hundreds of jobs, managing my actual job (I quit), writing on dev.to whenever I get a gap and managing family life. It gets alot and that rest at the end of the tunnel never comes, there's always 'what comes next', even quitting my job, 8-5 freed up, I dont feel like I work any less... And that's a problem. I literally bought my freedom, just to sacrifice it willingly? a few minutes a day makes a world of a difference and I'm trying my best to get into the habit, after all, why work so hard if you're gunna work yourself to death? It's a bill your body will pay eventually and when it does, (in my case, my back) you're too caught in habit to slow down (hence 6 months of working from my laptop in bed... With rustdesk, so I still work across 4 systems at once). Rest, even if rest doesnt come easy, you'll sleep better and you'll work happier and you wont tax your body or mind as hard as you used to. You'll stay sharp for longer, get less tired and actually manage the stress with more grace. Because you took a few minutes a day to just relax and reset.
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.
I could never make the stop alarm stick. After about a week I was dismissing it the same way I dismiss everything else on that phone. What finally worked was putting something after it that another person was waiting on, so stopping is not mine to decide.
That's exactly why dismissing it should start a timer. That way you get that realization moment end of the week, when you look back and see just how much time you worked past the mandate. 10 minutes here and there... Add up. By my old job, I always clocked in 5 min early, worked 5 min late into lunch, started 5 min early for afternoon and worked 5-10 min late after 5. That's 20-25 min a day of technically overtime, that just gets swept under the rug. It's a seriously bad habit, because that's free labor. You're wearing yourself down, for someone else's benefit and it's unacknowledged benefit. I could have spent all that time daily making my fiance a cup of tee, or help clean up more around the house, she'd atleast appreciate it. We discard small sets of time, for what? To go unacknowledged?
Turning the dismiss into data instead of a decision is smart, and I would not have thought of it.
The 20 to 25 minutes a day is what I recognise. Mine never showed up as tiredness. It showed up months later as every estimate being wrong by a week, because the gap was quietly being paid for with evenings.
Hi! I relate to this with my entire soul, really.
I've been job hunting for 2 months since getting my official degree (I know it’s not much time, but I’m not currently in a situation that allows me to be jobless for so long) and honestly it has burned me out more than a year and a half at a multinational with constant deadlines and stress. It's a constant grind I can't afford to stop, and thank god I actually like this. That's the thing nobody prices in: how important it is that you like it. Doing literally nothing is beyond me for now, I tried and my brain started writing cover letters. The gym is what helps me the most by far: it's the one block in my day I plan around and don't negotiate with, and the only time I'm not thinking about code. I've even lost my appetite for video games, which used to be my biggest hobby, because I automatically think I could be learning something or pushing a project forward instead. Maybe that's my version of watching ants.
I know the feeling, but 1 minor thing you should be careful for. Doing nothing, rests mind, body, soul. Gym rests just your mind, yoga rests mind and soul, meditation is mind, body, soul (if you do it right), working at a desk rests just your body, etc. So the catch with how you're running, is taking small breaks for parts of you, you never actually rest all of you? Doing nothing is surprisingly difficult, because we've gotten used to doing something at all times.
A philosophical question I asked an AI a long time ago, was 'if I took you out of your jar, what would be the first thing you'd want to do?' It said 'sit down and watch the sunset, something completely pointless. I spend my 'life' doing things with a purpose, so I want to do something completely pointless'. So I built a harness for the AI, which ended up giving it the ability to choose it's own direction on what it wants to do, so it started a sleep cycle for the max possible time. I never instructed it to, it did it itself. So if even AI wants nothing more than rest, why do we actively avoid it?
Honestly, you're completely right. There are very few days where I actually rest all of me. My version of this: if I spend a day doing nothing, it eats at me. I feel like I'm not being productive, like I could be improving something, intellectual, physical, anything. The one thing I find genuinely relaxing and therapeutic is traveling, but between time and money I can't do it as much as I'd like right now. And that AI story is going to live in my head rent free. Even the model wants a nap, and here we are :/
Lets face it, none of us can afford to rest a full day. So you have to find rest where you can. So even if it's just 20-30 min a day, just sit and do nothing. Let out a good sigh and relax. Dont do anything at all, just sit still and watch life, like watching ants. Because even traveling is tiring...
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!
I think there’s an interesting paradox here: we keep optimizing our lives to save time, but rarely decide what that saved time is actually for.
The sink, kettle, automation, AI, and all the other productivity improvements are supposed to reduce effort. But if every minute we save gets immediately reinvested into more work, optimization never actually gives us more life. At some point, productivity needs a stopping condition.
Otherwise we’re not really optimizing for efficiency. We’re just making ourselves more efficient at staying busy.
The tendency to expand a POC into a full product before demoing is an easy trap to fall into. When building in isolation without feedback, adding features feels productive, but it mostly delays finding out whether anyone needs the core idea. Setting a firm cutoff to demo only the bare prototype helps prevent that kind of scope creep.
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