-- slide 0 http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshan427/1357602101 by pshutterbug
I am an addict, my drug is solving logical problems. Writing software is a simple, powerful, never ending delivery mechanism of that drug.
It's a mesmerising, hypnotic drug. In 2012 I went into a frenzy of it. Writing software became almost my only reality at times. From working day after day I started working nights too. Then week ends.
Sleep was getting rare and difficult. My body started to complain : I got fat, my back started to be painful and ended up totally fracked up. My mood was constantly bad, I was on edge all day long. I was tired and miserable. People would keep their distances from me.
Friends and family convinced me to do something. I did, I was relieved but, still, the crash came.
They say that for those who have been through a burnout things are never the same again. It's true. I am not passionate as I was. I am glad of that.
-- *slide * http://www.flickr.com/photos/generated/6313491064 by jared
In such a bad shape and state I had to decide to change or continue to stumble into a dark pit.
But where to start ? What could I do ?
I decided to do what seemed to be the most urgent things : get some rest and start to move more.
I took a vacation. A contract was just finished so I jumped into my car and went to a family house. And I slept. The very next morning, I started to run. Oh it was difficult, I could only run a couple of hundred meters.
I spent the next 2 weeks or so sleeping, eating, walking, swimming and running. It was difficult but on vacation you don't have anything else to do. Getting into a new schedule is not easy and vacations are a good time to do that.
Then I went back to work. I took breaks when ever I felt the need for them. I kept that going for some months : running, walking, working, having breaks.
I also read about the Paleo diet. As it awoke the cook and food lover I had left sleeping for some years I started to cook better food, taking time to eat properly, selecting healthier food, discarding bread, pasta, rice …
Bit by bit things were getting better. What I was doing was working somehow. It's seems logical : moving more, eating better can't go wrong.
Happy to see improvements, I started to reflect on what went wrong in order to avoid doing the same things again.
-- slide 2 http://www.flickr.com/photos/dynamosquito/4265771518/ by dynamosquito
I asked a psychologist and a retired HR person about my experience and they pointed both to myself and the culture I was evolving in.
-- slide 3 http://www.flickr.com/photos/8525214@N06/3236824478 by antony chammond
I am lucky to do a work I like. I not only love it, I need it and crave for it. It's a passion. I told you before : it's my drug.
Passion is one of the best thing we can have. It what differentiate the craftsman from a code pisser. Passion drives us to get better. It's what drive us through hours of work, reading and writing.
Passion drives me, it drives me blind : once I start, my mind quickly turns to "the zone" and I forget about the rest of the world.
Passion can drive us into such madness.
My passion consumed me : I grew intensely addicted to solving the bugs, and adding features. I could not stop. Or could I ?
As I started to understand how my passion was pulling me into the zone and the sweet blur of it I also started to see that there was another force at work.
-- slide 4 http://www.flickr.com/photos/40701092@N08/3839575697/ by Karl Raats
Passion drew me in, Cultures kept my head under water.
Culture is an important factor in my mess : culture from my family, culture in the industry I work in and culture in my country.
My Dad was a work addict. My mom, my brother and I didn't see much of him when my brother and I were young. Of course he provided us with everything, including the idea that work is a very important part of our lives.
In most countries and companies there is also that idea that we are supposed to work (or to be at work) a lot :
- In France you are seen as a slacker if you leave earlier than 6PM (regardless the hour at which you arrived).
- In Japan you are seen as a traitor to the company if you leave early (before the boss).
- In Japan still, falling asleep out of exhaustion is seen as a great sign of commitment to the company
- In the startup culture, spending just few hours sleeping everyday is seen as a warrior badge and a must do.
All those, each to some degree, influenced me. And I now understand that these points, added on top of my passion, locked me into a vicious circle.
Feeling a responsibility, an honour binding, I could not pull out, or I had perfect excuses to not pull out.
-- slide 5 http://www.flickr.com/photos/jixxer/4507232875 by Kristofer Williams
So I started to see a bigger picture and some reasons. My body was not a pile of rubble alone in the desert, the ruins had a complex story attached to them.
Fuelled by passion and culturally induced stress, I ignored the nature of my body and brain. Just like a machine badly maintained rusts and breaks my body sent some alarm signals, started to run on emergency protocols and crashed.
So I started to understand what not to do, what to avoid in my way to work. I also started to grow interested in why my body failed and how I could continue to bring it back to an healthy status.
I remembered what one of my doctor (physician) told me some time ago, as my body was closing on 95kg. From his point of view my main problem was my hyper sedentary life, in front of a computer in (almost) his own words "your body was not designed for that, it evolved around walking, not seating".
What if I had something to learn from there ?
-- slide 6 Walter Bishop / Fringe
I looked into evolution, how it happened and what it forced upon the bodies of our ancestors.
Turns out that up to very recently, our ancestors spend most of their time walking or running. It was necessary to survival : finding food, fleeing predators, finding new places to do that.
Yep, no seating there.
I looked into how our brain work.
Turns out :
- physical activity helps with moods and brain capacities by pushing the release of several chemicals. Without those, you grow unbalanced, depressed and on edge.
- sleep not only let the body rest but allow the brain to re-order data and improve connections
- naps in the afternoon are good for us (NASA found so)
- stress is good in spikes, to improve learning or survival : hunting run, predator appearing, etc ..
- chronic stress scares tissues and damages the heart
- the brain cannot focus for long spans, it needs breaks (yep, those studies saying we can't focus for more than 4 or 6 hours are right)
Yep, no 10+ hours of work there, no all nighters, no continual stress.
This told me how my body and brain where designed to work. No surprise, improvements happened as I started to go back on those tracks.
-- slide 7 http://www.flickr.com/photos/helga/4598074787 by Helga Weber
So where did I go from there ?
Comforted in these changes I decided to push on and articulate a new schedule upon my findings. I could hope to find a balanced way to live that would allow my passion to stay inside safe boundaries, my body healthy and my brain fully functional.
I needed to fit proper sleep, proper physical activity, proper food, proper relax time and proper work time. Somehow along the past months I had come up with something including all that. Just like Mr Jourdain I was already doing prose.
-- slide 9 http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/3049152556 by Ed yourdon
I kept running and seeing it was getting easier I pushed myself and from 2 or 3 km a week I doubled that. Now I am able to do 5km twice per week.
Each run is now a boost for the rest of the week, I feel not tired but energised after each of them.
-- slide 10 http://www.flickr.com/photos/chanc/2558304478 by Christopher Chan
After all the reading I did reading is now part of my daily routine. HN, Medium and a load of articles grabbed here and there. Ruby, python, clojure, psychology, history, … everything and anything. It takes me hours but it's given me some very interesting ideas, solutions and inspirations so far.
-- slide 11 http://www.flickr.com/photos/walker_ep/3086674683/ by e_walk
(Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde, Sylvain Tesson, 978-2266167598)
When I traveled I read books from several travellers and photographers. In one of them there is saying : Sylvain Tesson "how would I know what I think if I don't write it ?"
And I find it quite true. Writing ideas down, forces you to order them and trigger more thinking and ordering around.
I started writing down simple thoughts and longer posts. Publishing them or not. Writing them allowed me to get them clearer.
-- slide 12 http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/3376506512 by stuck in customs
Having read and written, my thoughts were cleared, I became less stressed and pre-occupied. Yet sometimes it would no be enough to avoid focusing on a problem for too long. So I started to inserts walks and other musings in between work sessions to avoid becoming fixed on some problems.
Turns out that most of the time I would find the solution to my problem while walking or when I came back to the laptop.
This process is quite known in fact. Probably referred to as the Eureka moment. By switching to a totally different context, the brain relaxes, re-orders some things and EUREKA !
-- slide 13 http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/1063556470/ by The US Army
Doing all those things is intended to keep body and brain sane and working properly. Such a schedule reduced the amount of hours I can sit down and work. So I make those hours count.
-- pomodoro http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucamascaro/4975166968 by lucamascaro http://www.pomodorotechnique.com
I use Pomodoro technique : it gives me a finite set of time to work, then to relax, then to work again. I slice down tasks so they can fit one or half a pomodoro. Then I define a group of tasks to be done and group them. Those are the basis for my topic branches for example.
-- sucking at things / hAlp http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirigentens/4663779089/ by Dirigentens
I have learned and accepted to suck at some things. Some people love to do some things that I hate : so I pass the ball to them if I can. If I can't then I try to take the proper time to learn a fix or get help. It's ok.
-- automation http://www.flickr.com/photos/studiobeeldruis/2662703996/ by Arnoooo
Automation is key. I spent some pomodoros defining what can be automated, what are the tools I could use or write to automate things.
No more deploying by hand, no more quality check of the code by hand. I use semaphore and code climate.
-- slide 14 http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathankosread/6250327997/ by Jonathan Kos-Read
So, starting from a crash and tons of questions about why and how it happened I managed to get out of the dark pit by changing slowly my way to live. Through reading and research I understood why those changes (walking, running, taking breaks, eating proper food, having proper sleep) worked.
I ended up with a leaner way to work, and those few hours of work got awesome, rewarding hours. Now, I am not spending 10 hours a day working without a plan, on a rush, adding bugs instead of features, eating junk food I can plan head and then power walk through a set of features and steps for few hours every day. In the free hours I take care of my food, body, friends and family.
But more importantly I see that these changes helped me to find a balance in life, to find a better mix. And after all this is all what is about.
This is not a recipe, these are not rules. This is just a story about how I decided to change my way of doing things and the reasons behind this change. If it can avoid one of you the trouble of crashing psychologically or physically it would be worth it.
Check your body, check your life : are they healthy ? Do you think you can go long like this ?
Check the science, check how others do. Does it make sense to you ? Would it benefit you ?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickharris/43143523 by Rick Harris
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshan427/1357602101 by pshutterbug http://www.flickr.com/photos/jillclardy/2566241384 by Jill Clardy http://www.flickr.com/photos/evocateur/8526297616 by evocateur http://www.flickr.com/photos/evocateur/8525231349 by evocateur http://www.flickr.com/photos/dynamosquito/4265771518/ by dynamosquito http://www.flickr.com/photos/8525214@N06/3236824478 by antony chammond http://www.flickr.com/photos/40701092@N08/3839575697/ by Karl Raats http://www.flickr.com/photos/jixxer/4507232875 by Kristofer Williams http://www.flickr.com/photos/smazurov/3850874803 - Stepan Mazurov http://www.flickr.com/photos/black_friction/5628331511 by Nick Bramhall http://www.flickr.com/photos/helga/4598074787 by Helga Weber http://www.flickr.com/photos/generated/6313491064 by jared http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/3049152556 by Ed yourdon http://www.flickr.com/photos/chanc/2558304478 by Christopher Chan http://www.flickr.com/photos/walker_ep/3086674683/ by e_walk http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/3376506512 by stuck in customs http://www.flickr.com/photos/soldiersmediacenter/1063556470/ by The US Army http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucamascaro/4975166968 by lucamascaro http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirigentens/4663779089/ by Dirigentens http://www.flickr.com/photos/studiobeeldruis/2662703996/ by Arnoooo http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathankosread/6250327997/ by Jonathan Kos-Read http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickharris/43143523 by Rick Harris
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com
- Brain rules , John Medina
- Petit traité sur l'immensité du monde, Sylvain Tesson (not translated)