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?
I usually have to either pivot a personal project (which can be hard as private projects rarely seem as interesting as the puzzles work can provide) or lean hard into a good multiplayer game with RPG elements. When I can land a personal project that fills the same space, that’s an easy enough fix. Otherwise, I find that a good RPG with friends kinda helps me transition to using maybe another side of my brain that eventually drones out the hungry curiosity from the work project
I find personally that it’s gotta be solved before I go to bed that night, though, or else I end up debugging in my dreams all night, and that never helps anything. Just wastes time (sometimes hilariously: “of course! I’ll just write my own version of json for that”) and breeds restless sleep