
How do you resist working when you shouldn't? - michael_forrest
I&#x27;ve got a weekend to myself and I&#x27;m struggling not to fire up Xcode and work on the app I&#x27;m trying to finish. I know if I work now, I&#x27;ll pay for it it later in the week. I&#x27;m trying to keep burnout at bay so I need to protect my down-time.<p>What do you do when you don&#x27;t have any plans and your laptop is calling you?<p>I know, I know; leave the house, go for a walk. But how can that compete with the allure of PRODUCTIVITY! PROGRESS! GETTING THINGS DONE!
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eesmith
I agree with others that you should do something further from your main work.
Since you struggle with that, what about working to complement your
development efforts?

What are your long-term goals beyond releasing the app?

Do you want to have many people using it? Will they pay? How do you want to
market the app? Do you want to hire or join a dev team? Do you want to manage
a dev team?

Technical sales, coding for a team (instead of yourself) and management are
all learnable skills, but they don't seem as time-critical to an engineer so
they seem like they can be pushed off.

However, you need to start somewhere, and if you focus on shipping something
out the door then you'll never get off that near-term treadmill. So, read up
on those, listen to podcasts or videos on the topic, etc.

Or, are you working on the weekend on your off-time to develop software for
your employer? In which case, I'm sure your employer is happy with your free
donation of part of your life, and won't do hardly anything in return.

Or, are you worried that co-workers are also working on the weekend and you'll
lose your job if you don't keep up with them? In which case, you're in a race
to the bottom. Start learning about labor-management relations from a pro-
labor perspective.

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michael_forrest
Working for myself which I think exacerbates the situation since I have full
ownership of any success I can achieve.

I actually have ended up thinking about my marketing efforts and watching
videos about that instead of tinkering with the app (or other appealing ideas
that inevitably emerge during down time).

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eesmith
Here are more not-programming things.

Do you have early customers/friendly users? Have you done any UI testing?
Paper prototypes? Do you have a clear idea of your users' goals?

While dated, read "The Design of Everyday Things" and "The Inmates Are Running
the Asylum".

If you don't have users even to the level of being able to provide early
feedback for non-functional UI designs, then you are probably doing too much
coding and not enough user testing.

(That's easy for me to say, but there's a decent chance I'm wrong.)

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michael_forrest
Some sort of divine intervention answered my panicked cry for help by
disabling my laptop soon after I posted this. It had just finished a backup
when it went into some sort of “kernel task” CPU overdrive which stopped the
battery charging and now it refuses to turn on. (2018 MacBook Pro - it
exhibited this symptom when I first got it so I’m pretty sure that the worst
case scenario is a trip to the Apple Store and a little time to work on things
away from the computer). Fingers crossed it miraculously recovers tomorrow
morning

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dangus
If you’re this attached you could literally go on a short weekend trip or day
trip leaving your computer behind.

Also, generally, don’t forget to take vacation time. Especially solo trips!

But I actually have the opposite problem, I struggle to do any sort of
computing work, even leisure projects, after my work day is over. For me, work
has ruined the hobbyist aspect of computing.

Sometimes you need to get yourself in the mentality of the employee who knows
that they’re just selling precious life to the employer. I absolutely don’t
stay past 4:59 and usually work something closer to a 9:30 to 4 day (nobody
really notices).

On the bright side, at least you’re motivated by your work.

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ThrowawayR2
Find another hobby or passion outside of technology that you also enjoy and
pour you energy into that on weekends; you can have productivity, progress,
and getting things done there instead. Even leaving the house and going for a
walk can be gamified to quantify progress by tools like Fitbit or some other
step counting / heart rate monitoring gizmo.

