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?
Personally, I get invested in technical hobbies outside of purely IT-related lanes, things that let me exercise my problem solving skills but outside of the daily grind. Over the years I have invested time.and money into things like cross-country running, scuba diving, brewing beer, making mead & wine, cooking (many stove-top styles, but also sous vide, baking, charcuterie, fermentations, smoking, BBQ, etc), and most recently home automation & radio projects.
Truly, my brain never stops so I just steer it to different problems to gnaw on when I need a break from the daily grind.
Also, that fella who said excessive drinking? Not wrong.
In the line of slightly dumb but low key valuable options, buddy should trip on it. Going on a solo trip really helped me learn to practice mindfulness and to just slow down and enjoy what’s going on around me.