Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Category: Spiritual Programmer

Why are You Working?

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Are you one of the oppressed workers of the world? Even if you were not out waving red banners and calling for the workers of the world to unite, you can still use May Day to reflect on your job.

There are only so many minutes left in your life, and you are spending many of them on your job. Some people are fortunate to have a job that makes them happy. I’ve loved my work as a programmer, IT architect and now as as consultant and mentor. I have colleagues who are not as passionate about IT, but who use the money they make as fuel for their life outside work. Flying small planes is an expensive hobby, and needs a solid income.

You can choose either path. But if you’re not in your job for fun or for money, what are you doing there?

Reflect on Your Life

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Do you think about your life? Today is Great Prayer Day here in Denmark, and other countries have similar days. Even if you are not religious, you can take this reminder to spend some time reflecting on your life.

It is easy to get caught up in the little things we need to do to run our lives. We are so busy that we do not have time to think about the longer term. But if you have not decided where you want to go, you have no guidance in your life.

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice asks the cat: “Which way should I go?” The cat asks where she wants to get to, and she says: “I don’t much care where.” The cat replies: “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

Spend some time today, or this weekend, thinking about where you want to go in your life. What do you want your life to look like in one year, in five years, in ten years? What legacy do you want to leave?

You might think you don’t have an answer, but you do. You simply need to give your brain space and time to think. That’s why religious people pray, and others meditate. You don’t have to do either. You just need to turn off all your devices and spend several hours doing nothing. You know the answer. Let it come to the surface so you can act on it.

Restart Your Health

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If you weren’t out of shape already, you surely are after the pandemic. If your exercise routines was centered around going to a gym or participating in a team sport, it’s been dormant for a year now. Very few people have had the willpower to implement a new solo regime, so that’s why we’re all out of shape.

With gym reopenings beckoning and team sports starting up again, you need to prepare to go back. Start doing a little bit of exercise every day. If you’ve been taking a complete break from exercise, start with ridiculously small amounts of exercise, but add a little every day. Keep a record in a spreadsheet and make sure you do just a little more each day. If you jogged for 100 yards yesterday, jog 150 yards today. If you did 3 pushups yesterday, do 4 today.

Movement is crucial for both your physical and mental health. Start building your exercise routine back.

Don’t Let Your Devices Kill Your Brain

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Have you outsourced your thinking to your devices? That’s not a good idea. Surveys show that spatial awareness and the ability to read a map are both declining rapidly as everybody uses navigation apps to go anywhere. Now Apple is offering to similarly damage your short-term memory with AirTags. Since you will no longer have to remember where you put your keys, your ability to remember will atrophy.

If there are parts of your brain you are not using, the brain will repurpose that capacity for something else. You might not need to store a lot of facts because they are available at your fingertips at any time. But you should not let your ability to remember and find your way around disappear. Your mind knows that you are no longer able to survive on your own, and it weighs on your self-image.

Try going a few days without your gadgets. You will find that it is harder than you thought. And you will experience a sense of primal accomplishment by being able to live your life unsupported by a smartphone crutch.

Fight for your Time

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During lockdown, knowledge workers has increased the amount of time spent working by one whole hour. The average meeting is now 10 minutes longer. Clearly, fully remote working is not working for most of us.

It used to be only managers who spent their days in back-to-back meeting, but that is now the reality for many of us. A lot of the casual coordination that happened at the coffee maker or in the corridor now requires a meeting.

One way to fight back is to start scheduling shorter meetings. No online meeting needs to be a whole hour. If you schedule it for 50 minutes, you will get exactly the same amount of work done, and you will have 10 minutes to decompress before your next meeting. If you can’t get that through in your department, start putting a dummy 10-minute appointment into your calendar every hour from 10 minutes before the hour until the hour. In that way, the scheduling function will be unable to fit whole-hour meetings into you calendar, and the scheduler might get the hint and schedule only 50 minutes.

Celebrate Success

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Here in Denmark, we are celebrating our Oscar for “Best Foreign Movie” today. Well, most of us didn’t really contribute anything, but we can all enjoy Thomas Winterberg’s success with “Another Round.”

You can also celebrate other people’s success. It’s easy to celebrate when your favorite sports team wins, but it can be harder to feel happy that someone else got the promotion that you think you deserved. However, feeling resentful of other people’s success simply drains you of energy and makes it less likely that you will succeed in your next endeavor. Make a point of celebrating successes – other people’s as well as your own.

Read a Book

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If you’re not completely happy with your life, read a book. There are literally thousands of books with important tips and techniques you can use immediately to improve your life.

I’m currently reading “The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holiday, and I have a long list of books to read. Celebrate World Book Day today by picking up a book. It just might change your life.

Are You Too Cautious?

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Do you always play it safe? We all have our personal risk profiles. Some people climb mountains without safety ropes, while others won’t climb more than two steps up a ladder. Being very careful to follow all the recommendations might be a good strategy in a pandemic, but being over-cautious also means you miss out on opportunities.

Researchers in the UK have found that teaching children chess made them more willing to take prudent risks. In chess, you need to be able to take prudent risks and sacrifice a piece to gain a decisive advantage. Chess was a safe environment for the children to experiment with risk – the worst thing that could happen was that they lost the game.

If you are being over-cautious in your life, find some place where you can practice taking small risks. You might even take up chess.

Track Your Sleep

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Do you track your sleep? New research from the UK has added dementia to the long list of diseases and health problems associated with too little sleep. After controlling for many other factors, they found that 50-year-olds who slept six hours or less per night had a 22% increased risk of developing dementia. For 60-year-olds, the risk went up by 37%.

Keep track of your sleep for a few weeks to get an idea of whether you are sleeping enough. The Apple Watch and many other smart watches will register your sleep. You can also get a sensor to place under your mattress or even a Google Nest with radar to track your movement during the night. But even without a device, you can simply write down when you started your evening wind-down, when you went to bed and when you got up. Spending some time winding down (without devices or TV) and spending enough time in bed is the first step towards better sleep.

If you don’t get enough sleep, it is very hard to improve your life.

Create Your Sound

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When you work from home, you can create your own sound. You are free from the hellish soundscape of the open-plan office, so you don’t have to wear your noise-cancelling headphones. Since you probably don’t live in the countryside where you only heard birdsong and the buzzing of bees, you will have to create your own sound landscape.

You might have traffic noise, neighbors, barking dogs, and maybe even our partner speaking too loudly on a Zoom call. The antidote to this is to actively add sounds that mask out the annoying sounds. Consider a small indoor fountain to create the soothing sound of running water. You can get a white noise machine to create a neutral background that masks other noises. Or you can play instrumental music at low volume through your computer speakers or a separate speaker connected to your phone.

Sound affects your mood and your productivity. When working from home, you gain the ability to create your own sound.