Rui CarmoAllergy season is finally fading (at least for me), but today was the first time I had to turn on the AC in the office, and it was great to realize that despite the recent Wi-Fi changes and almost four years of potential HomeKit foibles, my ESP32 hack is still working perfectly.
Those minor joys aside, I’ve been actively trying to get out of the house to do some exercise at least one hour a day and it is clearly not going to happen at lunchtime anymore–well, not every day, at least, so I’m starting to get cabin fever.
All of this to say that I’m feeling as if I am starting down the slippery slope to both physical and mental burnout again, and this time I’m backing off as early as possible.
For starters, I am currently profoundly annoyed at my current working arrangements, since my days of wall-to-wall meetings with completely random 15 minute breaks are both utterly destroying my health and eroding my ability to focus. Sometimes, and despite being remote for many, many years, I would really prefer to be back working at an office, if only because I miss walking about and using stairs to go and talk to people.
Turns out my closest project team are now in Madrid (plus Belgium, Sweden, Canada, etc.), so that isn’t going to happen. And, truth be told, online meetings are now so stupefyingly more productive (as meetings go) that actual work is still best done remote–as long as you can cut through the tremendous amount of AI-augmented cruft that a meeting now entails.
I, as usual, have been pragmatic about it and crafted my own agent to summarize meetings the way I want them, and to craft terse, minimalist works of corporate obeisance that avoid the walls of text I get by default and focus on the stuff I need to do instead of spouting corporate cheerleading (it has become a surprisingly popular hack).
Anyway, my priority is now, again, my well-being. But I feel like my entire lifestyle is in dire need of an intervention, and the obvious life hacks most people suggest like exercising in the early morning (when I am trying to do my daily reading and research) or at the end of the day (when I am just bog tired) just don’t work for me, so the upshot of all this is that I am currently trying to carve out slots throughout the week to just get out of the house for 30 minutes.
Which is completely stupid.
This has to change (somehow). In the meantime, part of that carve-out is also going to be about mental health–I’m phasing out Twitter/X again, as well as a bunch of other “social” distractions and hypefests like HN.