Comment by austin-cheney

First, read this about focus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43715347

Now, it’s only a matter of what you want. When I went through burn out after being laid off the first thing I did was define what I wanted:

* Never again write JavaScript for work.

* Watch TV

* Play games

That became my life goals, basic burn out leisure stuff. What’s important is not the absurdity of the goals, but just knowing what you really want.

When I was at peak burn out I really did not want to write software, but I was really good at writing personal applications. If I really wanted to watch more TV and play more games then I would need a place to store these things free from subscriptions, advertising, analytics, and all that shit we hate. So, I created a home media server with custom media software to make it play from playlists in my IPhone.

After changing careers I realized I could do the enterprise API management way better than the enterprise, so I wrote a dashboard of web servers and docker container management that included a better way to proxy traffic for the home file server.

If the goal is still to maximize time for watching TV and playing games then I need to automate this shit out of the new career. This means adapting this personal dashboard tool to doing job related things. Now I can test and analyze traffic better than the other available tools at work. I still need to write agents for the dashboard tool to run a list of transmission tasks with assertions to close that loop though. Now I have more time for my life goals even at work. My productivity at work appears high.