Your Body And Brains Need Attention

Last month I’ve worked on the health of my body and mind. The goal was to lose some weight, but feeling good was a thankful side effect of it.

In this post, I want to give 5 tips for developers to get healthier. The health of your body is important, but your mental health is equally important.

We do so much work in our heads, so let’s take care of our body and brains right ☺️

Take Breaks

Taking breaks is one of the most important things to do during our work. I know that awesome feeling that you dive into the rabbit hole and came out 4 hours later. But the side effect from that is, that the rest of the day your brain is almost fried. Especially if you do this a week long.

Some employers will maybe say you have to work full 8 hours a day. But if you try to be productive for full 8 hours, your work quality will not be as good as you would hope.

The famous Pomodoro techniques could help you.

I found this technic very hard. Since I mostly build new stuff I don’t know what things I will encounter. So I divide my time in focussing for 50 min on a task. If it is done, it’s nice. If it isn’t I will continue in the next block.

After that focused block, I will stand up for 5 minutes, grab some drink, go to the toilet, or take a sniff of the fresh air outside. Taking a sniff outside is very good for your body. Especially in this current pandemic, we are in right now.

My Apple Watch 4 is also helping me standing every hour. I get a subtle reminder that I need to stand or take a break. I guess other smartwatches can help with that too.

Do Exercises Before, During Or After Work

Next to taking breaks, doing exercises before, during, or after your working day can be very beneficial for your body and mind.

I do running twice a week. Mostly between the 3-5KM. I do this with a good dose of trance music. I don’t wear my phone but listen to it on my Apple Watch.

Since I work from home a do push-ups a few times a day. And no, I’m not a pro with that. 15 push-ups on my knees are the max. But I don’t do this to get strong. I do this just for the breaks and exercise.

When I do these exercises I don’t think about work. I’m just thinking about other stuff and motivating myself to push it through. In those moments I’m fully focused on myself, just me, nothing else.

I don’t think that this is selfish, I am very confident that this is good. If you don’t think about yourself, your mind, or body, who will do it? How will you be successful in other areas of your life? Take care of yourself, then take care of others ☺️.

Don’t Drink Too Much Caffeine

This tip is equally for me as for others. But I had a time that I should quit energy drinks. I to be honest I was more energetic, I didn’t have blood sugar drops after my lunch.

I won’t say that everyone should quit drinking caffeine drinks. But you have to conscious about drinking it. It can make you depend on it. (like me right now, a Redbull light a day 🙈)

Stand Regularly

We have a sitting job. And we humans are not made for sitting for so many hours on a chair behind a screen. It is not good for our bodies.

So it is a good idea to stand regularly. I get a reminder from my Apple Watch to stand once every hour.

If you have a desk that is height adjustable with a button or handle, you can switch things up very easily. You have very affordable height adjustable desks at the Ikea. (I got one myself)

Using these kinds of desks will help you think about your body more carefully.

Don’t Work Hard, Work Smart

We developers tend to do a lot! And sometimes too much. But we have to remember ourselves that our job is mainly about problem-solving.

We can only solve one problem at a time. So we don’t need to be focused on working hard. We have to work smart.

Smart in the sense of bringing focus to our tasks instead of doing a lot of things together. That’s why the Agile framework Scrum is so nice because it forces you to divide your work into smaller pieces instead of picking big chunks of work.

I love to work that way because I can easier plan my work and focus only on the thing I’m currently working on.

Don’t try to multi-task, it will fry your brains in the long term. Focussing on 1 thing at a thing will also help to achieve more with better quality.

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What I Used In Tech 2020 👨‍💻

He, I’ve written a list of what tech I used in 2020, go check it out if you would like to know