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Take a break

robinrendle.com

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Re: Take a break

#11

Post by 6stringmerc »

Heck I can’t even go a full day without taking breaks every hour or two so I can move around. I am built for action, not to be sedentary like some others. So I have to find a balance - water breaks, bathroom, vape outside, go to the chiro during office hours, etc.

It really works for me. Letting my brain organize things to come or solve things in process isn’t always an active thing. I let the runtime process operate in the background while I enjoy the outdoors. Not everybody has this fortunate tool, but since I do, I use it extensively.

Re: Take a break

#12

Post by [deleted] »

ArjenM wrote: post #9
calrain wrote: post #7

30 years in the workforce 2 years starting a new startup 5 years after it was acquired Total burnout... I resigned and am 10 months into a break, it's the best thing I've ever done!

Twenty years, two months into the second burn out on top of long term depression. I'm going bankrupt for a second time because I can't work 100% anymore. I'm yet to find a psychiatrist. Wish I could have a break sometimes.

[deleted]

Re: Take a break

#13

Post by calrain »

ArjenM wrote: post #9
calrain wrote: post #7

30 years in the workforce 2 years starting a new startup 5 years after it was acquired Total burnout... I resigned and am 10 months into a break, it's the best thing I've ever done!

Twenty years, two months into the second burn out on top of long term depression. I'm going bankrupt for a second time because I can't work 100% anymore. I'm yet to find a psychiatrist. Wish I could have a break sometimes.

Sometimes radical changes are necessary.

A good doc can help a lot, take care of yourself

Re: Take a break

#14

Post by greymalik »

> small hurdles spike my anxiety, my anger flares at the slightest confrontation, I notice fewer jokes, fewer attempts on my part to make people laugh. My memory goes to all hell too and I can’t seem to concentrate on prolonged amounts of anything. Books fall off my radar, I stop listening to music. My phone is in my hand at all times, scrolly-anxiety-inducing apps become impossible to avoid.

This describes me perfectly. Unfortunately I can’t take a break because it’s entirely due to being the parent of young children.

Re: Take a break

#15

Post by idontwantthis »

Take a nap too. How have I only learned to nap in the past year (I’ve been an adult for a while)?

I used to feel brain fog and “procrastinate” constantly. I was tired.

Re: Take a break

#16

Post by GrigoriyMikh »

ArjenM wrote: post #9
calrain wrote: post #7

30 years in the workforce 2 years starting a new startup 5 years after it was acquired Total burnout... I resigned and am 10 months into a break, it's the best thing I've ever done!

Twenty years, two months into the second burn out on top of long term depression. I'm going bankrupt for a second time because I can't work 100% anymore. I'm yet to find a psychiatrist. Wish I could have a break sometimes.

10 years in. I started to have panic attacks last year. Took a a few 2 weeks vacations. They help only temporarily. Now i'm out of vacations, trapped in a foreign country without usual citizen rights to take a many-months break from work and without an option to return home(because of war). Feel trapped without any light ahead.

Re: Take a break

#17

Post by pavlov »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

May I suggest a purely rational, evidence based take? The trap is your belief in a linear relationship between effort and outcome. Working harder and longer produces more productivity, right? That's false. As you say so yourself, your memory goes to shit. It's not just a law of diminishing returns. For coders, past a certain point, exhaustion leads you to start undoing your work. You are into negative productivity. I…

There was a time a dozen years ago when I was working alone on my (over-elaborate, uncontrollably sprawling) graphics software product. One time I wrote a multi-thousand-line refactoring of existing code into a new class and felt very happy about getting it done. The next day I discovered that I had already done the exact same work the previous week, just as a slightly differently named class.

That wasn’t an isolated memory loss experience in those days. I ordered lunch, sat down, then five minutes later just stood up and left, assuming I’d already eaten. An hour later I realized what happened.

Long-term productivity is impossible without proper rest, including regular vacations where you’re truly out of work mode preferably for a week at the minimum.

Re: Take a break

#18

Post by nik736 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

May I suggest a purely rational, evidence based take? The trap is your belief in a linear relationship between effort and outcome. Working harder and longer produces more productivity, right? That's false. As you say so yourself, your memory goes to shit. It's not just a law of diminishing returns. For coders, past a certain point, exhaustion leads you to start undoing your work. You are into negative productivity. I…

I am not sure about that. There are always tasks that can be done without having to think too much about it. The more time you put into them, the more of those small tasks you can complete. I wouldn't start building new features or change important parts of the code base after a 10hr day for sure, but there is a lot more that can't "break everything".

Re: Take a break

#19

Post by WA »

calrain wrote: post #7

30 years in the workforce 2 years starting a new startup 5 years after it was acquired Total burnout... I resigned and am 10 months into a break, it's the best thing I've ever done!

What do you do on a typical day?

Re: Take a break

#20

Post by kqr »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #8

May I suggest a purely rational, evidence based take? The trap is your belief in a linear relationship between effort and outcome. Working harder and longer produces more productivity, right? That's false. As you say so yourself, your memory goes to shit. It's not just a law of diminishing returns. For coders, past a certain point, exhaustion leads you to start undoing your work. You are into negative productivity. I…

But it's not strictly false! Not without qualification.

Outcome is a sort of quadratic function of effort, so with very little effort you improve outcome a lot. Then as you go on and put more effort in, you continue to improve outcome. As you put a lot of effort in, the size of the improvement declines, but the outcome is still improved.

Then at some level of effort there's a plateau, after which additional effort really does make things worse. But that plateau is a surprising amount of effort away! When researchers talk about declining productivity with increasing effort, they mean this first derivative of outcome, not declining outcome itself.

And, to get to my point, a line is an excellent approximation of this quadratic function for most of the range of it we see normally. So it's no surprise people try to extrapolate using it.

I think you have to acknowledge the complexity of the problem to help people understand the mistake!

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