As a software engineer, I often work on big tasks that require hours of continuous and focused work. However, we have plenty of meetings, colleagues asking us something in Slack, and lunch breaks. Add a colleague who comes to you and calls you for a cup of coffee if you work from the office.
And usually, we don’t really have such a luxury as hours of uninterrupted time.
Nevertheless, sometimes we catch the flow of productive and focused work at the end of the workday. Imagine you come up with an elegant solution to a problem you’ve been tackling all day, or maybe even the whole past week. You can’t wait to implement and test your solution. And of course, you are so driven by your idea that you decide to continue working despite your working day being over. “20 minutes more and I will finish it,” you think. Obviously, this is not the case; some edge cases and new issues will inevitably arise. You come to your senses only 2–3 hours later—tired, hungry, demotivated, and still struggling with your problem. You just wasted your evening, with nothing to show for it. Worse, you overworked and didn’t recover that night. Thus, you were already exhausted when you started working.

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Software engineers often get caught in productive flow at the end of the workday, leading to overwork and wasted evenings. Instead of pushing through to completion, write down your next steps and action plan before leaving work. This practice clears your mind, maintains work-life balance, and allows you to return refreshed with a clear plan the next day.

The Simple Habit That Saves My Evenings

I once called this phenomenon ‘chasing rabbits’ alluding to the expression ‘going down the rabbit hole’ when advising coworkers against such overextension. These days I keep a markdown file to serialize my state of mind at the end of a day. More often than not, however, I must force myself to take this/my own advice…

Not later than yesterday/today I experienced that. “Bro this will take like 30 mins and we can continue with something else”. From 9PM to 2AM I was not able to finish to solve the issue. I decided to stop and come back. Sometimes it is the best thing to do. I have to start taking notes of what progress have been made and what I need to do too.

Then the next day, I don’t feel like doing any work at all. Is this just me?

I created a GitHub action that will turn <code>todo</code> comments (or lines in <code>todo.md</code>) into issues in whatever repo I happen to be working in for stuff like this.
That said, I still find myself working on things after work hours…simply because I can’t let things go… 😂