We're all guilty of it - not letting that thing go that happened at work on Friday. But by giving it only partial energy over the weekend, we are likely not going to improve how we deal with it on Monday, and we degrade our rest and recovery time over the weekend. How do you deal with this? Consciously choose to stop.
We're all guilty of it - not letting that thing go that happened at work on Friday. But by giving it only partial energy over the weekend, we are likely not going to improve how we deal with it on Monday, and we degrade our rest and recovery time over the weekend. How do you deal with this? Consciously choose to stop.
Happy Friday everybody, you're listening to another Friday refill episode of Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. This is a Friday refill episode. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. But I have a slightly different goal on Fridays. That is to help you go into your weekend and rest with intention. Rest with intention. What this means is that sometimes people go into their weekends and they're totally worn down. Then all they do over the weekend is lay around like they're injured from the week. More commonly, especially right now, as people are in quarantine and life is in such a strange stressful state for most people. A lot of what we see in our weekends is just kind of floating through it. So before you know it Monday arrives and you look back at the weekend and really all you can say is that you lived through it somehow. But there wasn't anything necessarily that stood out about it. So my hope is on Fridays to energize you. This seems like a paradox, but to energize you for your rest so that you can rest with intention. Rest with your head up in your eyes open. Looking forward, not dreading Monday. Looking forward to Monday. Not dreading it. So in today's episode, I want to talk about a very simple idea. Many of you go into the weekend and you carry your work into the weekend with you because something that a coworker has said sticks out to you. It's possible that it's causing anxiety or frustration or maybe you can't quite let go of that piece of work that you were doing. Maybe they reminded you of something that you're going to have to do on Monday and you're kind of trying to mentally prepare yourself. First of all, I want you to take a moment and intentionally, once again, we're using that word, choose to work on Monday. Intentionally choose to work on Monday. This means stopping what you're doing and don't just assume that your brain understands this. Our brains are very primal instruments. So they don't always understand our implicit intentions. We have to explicitly maybe even say it out loud, tell your friend or tell your spouse or tell your dog, whoever needs to hear this, that you are going to stop thinking about work and you're going to work on Monday. Part of the reason why it makes sense to do this is because if you're just thinking about it as a background process but it's taking away time from your weekend, then you're not really doing either thing with your full energy. I'm not talking about subconscious process and you don't really have control over that part and that wouldn't really be taking up your thinking energy anyway. This subconscious processing is happening whether you wanted to or not. I'm talking about the conscious kind of side processing, this multi-processing thing that we try to do and that we fail at on a regular basis. Intentionally tell your dog that you're going to stop using up the bandwidth that you have for the weekend because it can wait. It's not urgent. There's nobody who's going to applaud you. Nobody's waiting on you to think about something. Your brain being occupied over the weekend is not going to earn you anything and when Monday rolls around you likely will not be in a better place because of this halfway thinking or even 10% thinking. So set it aside but do so on purpose. Thanks so much for listening to this Friday refill of Developer Tea. I'm excited about next week's episodes and I'm excited about next week's Friday episode already. So hopefully if you're not yet subscribed to this show you go and subscribe right now. Also if you want to take part in the Developer Tea Discord I'm in there and there's quite a few other software engineers like you that are sitting in that discord we're asking questions we're talking about our work we're talking about our lives and we can discuss things like what we talk about on this show just in a conversational format head over to developertea.com slash discord take it started with that thanks so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea.