I’m struggling to disconnect from work. I’ve been working on an interesting problem for the last couple of weeks (compacting change data capture events from sharded MySQL servers into BigQuery). It’s an interesting technical problem. There are lots of optimization opportunities and novel patterns I can introduce.
I’m on vacation for the next two weeks but since starting my trip my mind keeps returning to the problem. I’ve even solved a few issues and come up with new patterns to try while daydreaming as we travel. Obviously I haven’t implemented any changes, I deliberately didn’t bring my work laptop with me. I emailed those solutions to my work email address so they get out of my head but that hasn’t helped. I just visualized more optimizations while hiking today.
There is no expectations from my leadership to work while on vacation.
How do others disconnect from work when I enjoy the problem solving aspects of my work?
many technical jobs are vocational in nature as it’s impossible to turn it off after work. As long as it’s not affecting your personal life & work life balance (and not affecting your friends and relations) then you are very lucky. Most people don’t enjoy their work so you’re in a good place. Importantly though, don’t feel obligated to do work problems on your own time and don’t let management expect it. Only do it if you want to.
I like the saying “give a man a job he loves and he’ll never work again”. it’s been true for much of my working life.
I’m lucky in that my job doesn’t require me to produce known results on any particular schedule. That gives me the fantastic freedom to work on these kind of problems during the evenings until I feel I can walk away from it, and then turn around and work on personal stuff during business hours. There are some short tasks I occasionally have to focus on right away, but that’s like a 1 or 2 day task, then I’m back into the relaxed schedule again.
Unfortunately, like OP, I too get deep into an interesting problem and then I can’t turn it off. “Oh I’ll just add this quick line of code” and two hours later it’s time for bed. What I HAVE managed to accomplish over many years is finding a stopping place where I can let it all go, and then drop it until I get back in the office again. I have to do that with personal projects or research too because I’m always working on something new that captures my attention and it really tends to put a halt on casual conversation. “That’s cool about last night’s game, but have you heard about this theory of a hydrogen haze obscuring the view of the early universe for the first few hundred million years? Well, I don’t know shit about sports, so now you guys know how I feel.” 😀