| I get into these modes every once in a while, now that I have been a IT guy [1] for 12+ years. Here are a few suggestions that might be worth thinking about. Of course you are not me, so YMMV a. Get a new hobby. I have realized that having an out-of-work hobby helps your work life immensely. I don't mean a hobby that you'd go to only when bored or on the weekends, nor something 'easy' -- so listening to music, or watching movies or reading a book don't qualify for what I am recommending. It has to have a steep learning curve if you want to get a high enough level of satisfaction from the process that it improves your overall sense of well being. Learning to draw/sketch, learning to play a musical instrument or juggle or scuba dive would qualify. b. Teach. The easiest way to get into this is get involved in your local User groups and share what you already know. Do it for free. I assure you this too will indirectly have a phenomenal affect on your work life. Also checkout http://software-carpentry.org/contrib/training.html ...which leads me neatly to my next point... c. Challenge yourself and get involved in a writing software for a completely different domain. I see way too many software engineers limiting themselves to writing code and creating products that are consumed by other software engineers. That gets boring after a while. Write code (or quite your job and join a firm that writes code) for scientific research (think physics, phrama, genetics ...etc) or for automotive companies or for hospitals ...basically move out of the domain where software is the central/critical component (eg: web or software solution providers ...you know what I mean ?) d. Just take a break. I don't mean a long sabbatical. Just a break. You don't even need to do something special with your break, ie: you don't need to travel to exotic locations -- you can just take a break to seriously pursue (a) above. Hope this helps,
cheers, [1] translation: I've held positions in pretty much every aspect of delivering software - userspace programming, systems-level programming, web dev, Level 2 & 3 support, system administration and ^devops^ (whatever that is) |