The relentless feeling that slowly has over taken my waking life. The feeling that if I am not coding, learning or becoming better at coding I am wasting my time. I can't even watch movies anymore without reading articles. This is the worst thing about being a Dev, how when you are a dev you are nothing else.

At least for me, not sure how common this feeling is.

Oh yeah... I know that feeling... Been teaching my self cloud architechture, cloud native, hyper scaling and such for a few years now in my spare time, of which I have precious litte. Every moment away from the computer not doing productive stuff evolving and refining my understanding of that, coding in general or some new shiny topic that peaks my interest to see if I can have use of, really feels like a waste of time. Exception being quality time with the kids of course.

i can relate too. i think you need to deliberately allocate (even if little) time for socializing and some other art/sports whatever hobby.

I feel you, whenever I go on YouTube for other stuff than CS related and if I unnecessarily go out, I feel like I'm wasting so much time.

I find that this more psychological problem has more effect on developer lives than any specific problem. At least it does for me.

So true. If I'm not coding, I feel like everything is a waste of time if it isn't even remotely related to coding.

God damn 😀 didn't ever think that so many devs have the same problem 😀code is life 😀

I learned how to turn that off. I read articles and study something new when I feel like it. But I value my time spent watching movies, playing games and overall socializing. Trust me, it is not good to think about programming 24/7. Some of the best I ideas I get when I get to unwind correctly. :)

@arekxv how did you learn to do that? I've been trying recently by doing things that are out of my comfort zone but none seem to work. The only thing that stops me working is actually alcohol... Which I guess means sense to an extent. Can you share how you moved into a more balanced life, because I agree with you that the best ideas for from unwinding but I don't know how to get to that point.

I have the exact same problem and it's really annoying. Before I could watch movies and tv-series without feeling bad, now I quit my Netflix and never watch anything (besides YouTube), and when I do I always play guitar at the same time.

I love learning and I don't feel like I'm learning from doing a lot of stuff, so I don't do them. But I want to be able to. Like gaming for example, I only game with friends, otherwise I get bored after 20 minutes and switch to my IDE. At first it was nice but now I'm sick of it.

It's like a drug, where you have to learn and get your creativity out. God damnit.

What do I do??

@simeg Perhaps, writing down (pseudo-)codes and documentation of what comes into your mind and placing the paper somewhere where you won't be distracted from and only see when getting into coding.