Alternatives

Howdy!

This week I feel like everything has been catching up to me and I am so tired. I consider myself to be a control-freak and a perfectionist which when I’m in the right mindset this works for me perfectly. I plan my days out down to the second and I’m able to get all of my work done. I stay organized and I feel very productive even though I pile too many things on to my days. However, when I have an off day/week I feel like I’m not accomplishing anything and that I’m wasting my time. I have been struggling this week to study so how do I overcome this without exhausting myself and forcing myself to overstimulate myself too much? There are three things I have to do every day: my morning yoga, work out, and crochet. I also walk my dog at least three times a day and I cook myself a good lunch.

Audio

During these times when I‘m already away from my computer I have started listening to podcasts. This allows me to not have to be strained over my computer doing a Udemy course but still gives me the enrichment so I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time. I have Spotify and I’ve been going through Javascript Jabber. They have so many topics from asynchronous programming to SQL and NoSQL. They also do discussions on things like “What every JS developer should know”. I’ve always been the type of person to be like “Well, why am I going to listen to a podcast when I have music”, but as I become the type of person who actually likes to study this has been such a whirlwind of discovery. The podcasts move at a perfect pace to keep me engaged and interested. As I go deeper into this, I look forward to other podcasts I can share with you.

Reading

Even though my problem comes from not wanting to really be attached to a computer screen, it’s more so I don’t have the attention span to do an hour and a half section on JS algorithms and data structures. So, what else do I do? I love reading other blogs! As you can see I solely focus on JavaScript, so many blogs posts I read about are pertaining to that. I don’t have a specific blog I like to read, I usually get recommended posts and I read those. I think I’m averaging two to three blog posts a day. One blog I just read talked about how maybe it’s time to move away from React. They go on to list some of the downsides of using the framework like RAM usage or how it’s best to use “alone” since it’s such a free-form framework in that because you can build it however you want to, everyone has different ways of creating a React app and these differences can come back to haunt you when you’re working in a group. Blog posts like this also give me a different perspective to what I do and allow me to look at my work differently and see if there are ways I can enhance how I work, or if theres something else I can check out. Like in this blog post they suggest that Angular should be the new framework of choice, which has made me interested in checking it out and seeing how different it really is compared to React.

Talking

Another thing I love to do and I have the opportunity to do is just talking about coding. For me I get the privilege to have not only have really good friends in the tech community but I also have amazing friends outside of the tech community who support me and love to hear me talk my problems out. For my friends in the tech community we talk daily and have a weekly phone call with to go over things we’re working on. We’re all working on different things. One is focusing on Ruby and the other is focused more on fullstack but is going through a Python course. Since we’re all working on different things we can all share our problems that we face each week and help one another overcome it and in the process we all learn something new. The two also work with Javascript but since I work with it more sometimes I have something new to offer them but at the same time they give me a different way to look at things. I know the basics of Python but my friend always has something new to tell me about it which I think is amazing.

My friends who know nothing about coding have been such an amazing support to have the past year, I don’t know how they still like to hear me talk about it. Whenever I have a problem with my code or theres just something I want to share with them, they may not understand it but they let me talk to them about it. It may not seem like much but this also allows me to retain information better because if I can’t explain it to someone who has no experience than I really don’t grasp the concept. Even hearing my best friend tell me “Cmon on buddy just study for an hour and then we can go get boba” is a huge motivator for me to keep pushing and working.

In Short

There are many other ways to keep yourself engaged and learning other than studying x amount of hours on the computer. You just have to find something that works for you. That being said, there are days when you can’t do any of this and that’s okay. At the end of the day the brain is a muscle and just like a rest day is important in between work outs, it’s important to give your brain a rest day too or else you will burn yourself out faster than needed. Go for a walk, crochet a sweater, go to the beach, go to that new place you’ve been wanting to try. Let yourself rest. You can always study tomorrow.