Something I struggle with on a day-to-day basis is switching off from work when I leave the office. It’s not due to not finishing a piece of work or thinking I’m over-running while I’m in my work hours, it’s just I enjoy coding and that’s something I’m sure many of you can relate to. I blame this on my experiences at university though where I was always working on cool new Windows app projects that kept me occupied in between studying.
This becomes a bit of a problem when you work in a professional environment though, especially ones that work in an Agile way as your work is estimated and planned for a sprint which is set. When you start doing your sprint work outside of your working hours, you mess with the velocity and burn-down for that sprint. So what should you do instead?
I’ll give you a recommendation that I was given for the same problem, come up with a cool project and work on that. Learn something new that you haven’t learned in your skill set or start learning a new programming language! The great thing about expanding your coding knowledge is that you’ll most likely end up using it later down the line in your day-to-day work in a future project. You could also pay attention to some of the other projects your company works on as its an indicator as to what the current trend is and work on your own projects around that or you could even look for projects to contribute to on GitHub. Showing you’re committed to doing something above and beyond what you already know will come across well with your current or future employer.
Ultimately, you’ll also want to take a break from work. I’m bad for this and spend a lot of time just sat on my computer working on either office work or my own projects and it’s easy to lose track of time. Give yourself a break or you’ll end up burning yourself out and that won’t look great with the office. Trust me, I know…
Keep coding!