Ask HN: How to not bring emotion from work back home?

If possible, buffer your time at work from your time at home with a physical activity which allows you to viscerally expend energy and possibly rage.

A workout could be good. Martial arts class, intensive cardio, something allowing you to express rage and get physically exhausted in a controlled, harmless, socially acceptable way.

work less.

I built a shed in my garden. I sit in it and listen to classical music for about 45 minutes when I am stressed after work. My family and I both benefit.

I've found an interesting divide amongst contractors on this - some are happy to treat it precisely that way, complaining a little about the crap they have to produce, but mostly content with the fact that it's not forever, maybe the next contract will be great, and the money really makes up for whatever crap you have to deal with. (Let's face it, if you're contracting and you're not making good money, you're just doing it wrong.)

For others, and this was very much me, the better contracts are those that last longer and are, really, much more like a full-time job, except it's typically just one project (and yes, there's the money aspect again).

The best contracts I had were greenfield projects where I was the team leader, had a lot of responsibility, and saw the project through from start to finish over the course of a year or more. The worst contract I ever had was three months - or, at least, it was that long until I quit - where I was paid better than I'd ever been paid before to produce total crap with a team of perms who were angry and aggressive and hated contractors, a horrible manager who hated everyone, and fellow contractors who either didn't care, weren't really up to the job, or were also miserable and quit - three in the space of a week at one point. I remember buying myself a sandwich one day, eating it, thinking to myself that the time I'd spent eating it had earned me more money than the sandwich had cost, smiling grimly to myself, and still being miserable because the job was so hateful. (In all fairness, I left at 5 every day and didn't give another thought to the job until the following morning, apart from a general sense of misery on the commute in. I'm sure I did complain bitterly about the job to anyone who would listen...)

For me, the key is to decouple my personal emotions from work. Now, I still get angry about mismanagement here and there, but I also set things up such that I can easily remove myself from the situation if things get to the table-flipping point.

The two main practical steps I'm taking right now are (YMMV):

1. Save/invest 50% (or as close to that as I can manage) of what I take home. This is about more than just living jobless for a month for every month I work. Barring catastrophic expenses, if I keep investing this money over ~14 years in a fund that averages 7% return a year, I will make around enough money to support my lifestyle passively, at which point a salary stops mattering and I can financially afford to leave any job, any time.

2. Build my resume with "extracurricular activities". In my case I'm earning an online master's degree on top of work (years of step 1 helps me afford this, and my program is relatively cheap). This makes it easier to find new, interesting work in advanced fields (and it's also just fun to constantly learn new things).