I struggle maintaining healthy work life balance, and I suspect that this is true for many other software engineers.

Recently, joining back work after an extended holiday break, I felt this disruption acutely. I actively need to tackle this problem, as otherwise I slip into an unhealthy pattern of constantly ruminating on work concerns. This leads to affecting quality time spent with family, and ultimately making performance at work suffer.

Reasons why work life balance requires active management, and what I do about it:

  1. Writing computer programs is purely a mental activity, with little or no constraints. This means that problems can be thought continuously and for people like me who have a sense of program and data structure elegance, it is harder to feel satisfied.
    • When I actively code, I keep reminding myself of DRY, YAGNI, and KISS to help my expectations from my own code grounded.
  2. New technology, distributed systems, and layered architecture makes it harder to troubleshoot and diagnose failures. Many times, things do not work correctly either because of misconfiguration and or because of not understanding event rules for a distributed system. These problems are infuriating, and often turn out to be solved with simple changes in configuration.
    • Pair programming helps to some extent in debugging, analyzing, and concurrently addressing some of these concerns.
  3. My current job is about helping multiple teams succeed in related business areas. This translates into lots of context switching between people management, project coordination and blockers, and navigating technology decisions. Also, in the post covid-19 world, adjusting to hybrid work place makes certain decisions easier (typically single threaded) to make, and others that require cross organization alignment more challenging. Any given day, I have no shortage of interesting and complex problems to think about. I have caught myself thinking about these problems deep in the night, or even at meal times with the family.
    • Writing my thoughts in a journal, making TODO’s, and meditation techniques help me uncover my information gaps, and gives me back valuable space and time to think better.
  4. I am a first generation immigrant in the US, and my extended family is back in India. On a daily basis, very little changes or new concerns bubble up for my small family in the US.
    • I call into family back home some times just so that I can learn about very different concerns, and that provides distraction.
    • I also distract myself with different hobbies of planning travel, and or hikes to take my mind off of work.
  5. My dominant hobby is also technology, and I read, browse, and skim, linked articles and blogs on hacker news, and other social media sites such as reddit voraciously. Even though many of the articles are interesting, they tend to take me back to work concerns, as invariably there is a comparison that starts to emerge.
    • Lately, I have been playing around with a concept of building a personal ROI on tech media consumption. I am trying to record my time spent browsing, and useful information gleaned. My hope is that this data will help temper this habit.