How do you resist working when you shouldn't?

eesmith · on Feb 8, 2020

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.

michael_forrest · on Feb 9, 2020

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).

eesmith · on Feb 9, 2020

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.)

michael_forrest · on Feb 9, 2020

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

dangus · on Feb 8, 2020

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.

ThrowawayR2 · on Feb 8, 2020

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.