Asklemmy

43777 readers

877 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

124

How do people disconnect from work when they enjoy solving technical work problems? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Human minds can readily jump to try to solve technical problems like the one you have to solve at work. Sure, it's abstract in many ways, but it also is an external problem.

However, human minds are not very good at solving emotional problems. Trying to deal with thoughts and emotions like external problems usually leads to experiential avoidance. And avoidance creates even more suffering.

I'd recommend you check out ACT, to deal with your thoughts effectively. Russ Harris and Steven Hayes are both good sources, one being less technical than the other.