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I typically spend a large part of the weekend and most of the public holidays resisting the urge to sit down and do some work. That is obviously a terrible state of affairs and it is not a lot of fun either, so what’s up and why not give in? The answer to the second question is simple: I have first-hand experience where giving in can lead to and I am quite certain I don’t want to go there again. So, instead, I resist and try to distract the monkey that is drumming up a storm in my head. But before we get to how I manage to do that, let’s discuss the first question: “What’s up?”
It is probably not a great secret that our profession attracts some pretty “non-standard” people.
The first time I took the lovely Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom (a banker) to my place of work, she looked around and said: “Oh my God, it’s the island of the misfit toys!” I agreed and proudly declared myself one of the misfit toys… Join me! 🙂
I will freely admit that we are a more diverse lot these days, but the real nerds are still, well, real nerds. Nothing wrong with that, really. In secondary school I was bullied and beaten up for being a nerd, but I am pretty certain that were we to have a school reunion today, I’m going to be among the richest and happiest people there, thanks to big tech RSUs and lots of very necessary therapy.
People who have a natural talent for focusing for long periods of time on minute details tend to do well in our profession and so it attracts these kinds of people in droves. Once, many years ago now, I came home and my girlfriend asked me how my day had been. “Great”, I answered, “I spent most of the day looking at a single screenful of code that contained a bug and after thinking about it very deeply for about six hours, I figured out what the problem was and solved it.” For many people, that would be the worst day in their working life, but for me it was a great personal success and not particularly terrible. I pitted my brain against the machine and I won! What is there not to love about that?
Here’s the thing though: If you are a problem solver, problems tend to burrow their way into your brain and run in the background continuously.
Many years before the events of the previous paragraph, I was playing a phenomenal text adventure (Snowball, by Level 9 Computing, if you must know; you can play it here) and I was stuck trying to pass some robot that was guarding a door I needed to go through. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to convince the robot to let me pass. I thought about it for days, during school, during work (I worked as a sous-chef in my dad’s restaurant), and apparently also during my sleep. One night, I woke up at about 2:30am with a flash bang of inspiration as my sleeping brain had figured out the answer! I got out of bed, started my home computer (which took 5 seconds courtesy of the operating system and BASIC interpreter being in ROM), loaded the game (which took about 5 minutes courtesy of the cassette player and a data transfer rate of 1200 bps), loaded my save file (which took another minute and a half), solved the puzzle, and got my virtual ass through the door. Total win!
A lot of my work is exactly like this. I need to design a system, develop a procedure, debug some problem, or “invent” an optimal data structure and algorithm. Like Snowball, these problems burrow deep into my brain and occupy a large part of the processing capacity there. Unfortunately, when the weekend comes, my brain does not support taking a checkpoint that I can save and then restore on Monday. Problem solvers become obsessed with the problems they are solving and it is hard to take a break.
The second part of the problem is that I am incredibly busy. Obviously, every organization has an infinite amount of work and henceforth there is always a most important thing that you are not doing, but in my current job that most important thing is actually still somewhat important. As I wrote in a recent Wednesday Wisdom: On Monday morning someone ties a rope to my feet and then they pull me right through the week so that on Friday I am thinking: “WTF just happened and what did I do this week?”
To help answer this last question, I keep an open file on my desktop in which I write down everything I am doing as I am doing it. That’s really handy come perf time, when I can send that file to ChatGPT which will then write my self review for me.
The problem with an engine that is going at full speed is that you cannot just shut it down, because the rapid decrease in temperature leads to something called “shock cooling”, which can lead to stuck valves, excessively worn or cracked pistons and cracked cylinders and cylinder heads. It’s why we don’t practice power-off stalls in Massachusetts in winter, because that involves pulling the throttle to idle and that would bring about the aforementioned shock cooling. It’s also why you need at least two weeks of vacation because you spend a large part of the first week slowly ramping down before you can start enjoying your much deserved time off.
Here is a somewhat tangentially related example: In the 1990s, I suffered from terrible headaches on the weekends. It became so bad that, during the week, I would stick wet washcloths into the freezer, to be used on my forehead while lying on the couch during the weekend. I later diagnosed the probable root cause of these headaches to be the sudden withdrawal of caffeine: My ex-wife did not drink coffee and so neither did I on the weekend. A sort of shock cooling.
Compounding the problem is that I am an ambitious overachiever. That is also not unique in our industry, as it is really hard to excel in this field unless you seriously misspend most of your childhood. The people who do well in tech are goal-driven self-starters who love tackling new and complex problems. The tech industry capitalizes on these traits by giving us ambitious goals and all the tools and reasons to work always from everywhere. We all have laptops with VPNs, cell phones, hotspots, and whatnot, allowing us to work whenever, wherever. This makes the barrier to working really low, as really the only thing I need to do is open up my laptop and, courtesy of Tailscale, I am immediately “in business”. The employers in our industry also compensate us incredibly well for reaching these ambitious goals, which further lowers the barrier to throw in a few hours of work in the weekend and on holidays.
What we have here is quite the explosive cocktail: Ambitious overachievers, with all the tools to work at their fingertips, working on things they enjoy, and with an enormous ability to sit down and “get on with it”. No wonder that the brain is incapable of stopping when it has been put into that high a gear with the throttle fully open.
Here’s the problem though: We didn’t evolve to be operating at this intensity for very long periods of time and so we cannot. I know people who are boasting about working 80 hours a week for months on end, but I seriously doubt whether a) these stories are true and b) (if they are) if every hour of that 80 is spent effectively. The vast majority of people cannot maintain that intensity without performance enhancing drugs and they cannot do it for long without serious health consequences. I am speaking from some experience here, which is why I don’t want to get back into that mode.
Obviously, during my long and storied career I have worked evenings and through many a weekend. Often, actually. And here is the thing: It does not really work well. I inevitably find that, if I power through the weekend, my performance during the week that follows drops significantly. I still make the hours, but I don’t get as much done because I am just tired. So, instead of giving in to the monkey brain and opening my laptop to do some work, I resist.
The problem with resisting is that it is incredibly hard because the monkey is making it very difficult to ignore it. It often seems to take more effort to resist the monkey than to just give in to it. But, whatever you do, don’t give up! Go do something else, it doesn’t matter what. Preferably something relaxing, but something, anything, that isn’t work. You need to beat that monkey up and show it who’s boss.
To help deal with the monkey, I recently took up Yoga. Yes, I know, it’s me and an army of good looking and fit young people so I look ridiculously out of place, but the benefit of yoga is that, if you are my age and want to do it well, it is so hard that you need to focus and that drowns out the monkey. It’s really hard to get into crow pose while trying to figure out some inane computer problem in the back of your mind. But don’t read this as an ad for yoga: Do whatever floats your boat: Jump on the Peloton bike, walk around the park, go spear fishing (though not spear phishing), whatever.
But, whatever you do, don’t give in to the monkey! No good will come from that in the end.
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