A camel has two humps because life is a struggle. With fatigue, stress and procrastination

Today is a little off topic. We will not discuss planning, development, and other testing. Let's consider a problem that is not directly related to IT, namely the problem of fatigue, stress and procrastination at work. Everything is based on personal experience. Maybe it will be useful to someone.

My name is Sultanov, and I am a team lead (heavy sigh). I'm trying to fight fatigue. Sometimes it even works out.

Why did I combine three concepts – fatigue, stress and procrastination – into one article? Because they are closely related. When you are tired and stressed, you don’t want to work; you want to watch videos on YouTube, that is, procrastinate. And when a person procrastinates, he does not rest, as a result, fatigue and stress do not go away, and there is quite a good chance that he will sit all day watching roller skates, finish his work at night, crookedly and incompletely, and get up again in the morning tired and in a state of stress , and start a new circle. And this can go on for weeks. Need to do something.

Morning

The hardest thing in the morning is force yourself to start working. To make it easier, you need to turn on bright lights everywhere and ventilate the room. If you suddenly want to check your email, read Zen, watch YouTube, you need to pull yourself together and, albeit through force, but start doing something light for warming up. I usually start with a plan for the day, it helps a lot to write it down and follow through point by point.

During the day

It often happens that I work quite well in the first half of the day, but difficulties arise in the afternoon. I don’t feel like working, I want to turn on my favorite YouTube and procrastinate. If you don’t catch this state in time and allow yourself “just one short video,” you may wake up at the end of the working day. The plan made in the morning must be carried out, so welcome to the night shift.

To avoid such a scenario, it is very helpful to lie down and look at the ceiling, or take a walk. But it is very important after this force yourself to start working. In general, it’s simply impossible to stop me if I can start!

The lethargy trap

This has happened in my life, after a couple of weeks of nightly vigils, when I needed to immediately deliver the required rather large functionality.

Of course, I managed it and delivered the functionality, then I slept for a couple of days, then rested for another day, and seemed to get to work. A day or two passed and there were no commits from me. On the third day, I realized that I was just sitting in front of the monitor, looking at the code and doing nothing. I'm kind of working.

The project was still far from finished, and there was no talk of vacation. It was necessary to somehow get out of this state.

The main thing that I realized at that moment is that nothing will change on its own. Something needs to be done. As always, movement and switching types of activities helped. Washing dishes was especially important, I don’t know why.

It was a rule to go for a walk twice a day and from time to time get up from the computer and do something around the house, then come back and definitely start working. And of course no night shifts.

In about a week I was completely back to normal and continued to work productively.

Vacation

Well, one last thing. Don't neglect vacation, at least once every six months, even if it seems that you are not at all tired. In general, the idea that you don’t need a vacation is extremely harmful and always leads to a state where you find yourself in complete prostration for the third day, staring blankly at the monitor instead of working. Don't do that.

Rest regularly and be productive!