Turns out quitting a job is not unlike quitting alcohol. As both of them tend to make your brain dull, removing them from your system will cause a rebound effect, which includes the following symptoms (good and bad):

• overexcitement and/or agitation
• sleep problems
• shakiness
• having more energy than you can expend
• mood swings

Those symptoms do subside after at most few weeks, fortunately.

Over the last week I received many useful life & work suggestions from my friends. Somehow, a clear division line starts to appear: the best ones are invariably from people outside the IT industry.

Please don’t misunderstand me here: I don’t mean to say that IT people are dull and/or unimaginative. What I want to say is that while spending most of your time in one professional circle is nice and comfy, it’s not good for you in the long run.

I read an excellent book on junk food recently and thought: really, it can’t be that bad, right? Yet, the book caused me to cut down on chocolate greatly, and I discovered a pattern. I used to have this habit:

I’m hacking on something and I get a bit hungry. I eat a chocolate bar. I’m still hungry and my thoughts start to drift away from the work and towards the next chocolate bar.

Things have changed a bit since I stopped eating chocolate bars and drinking soda. Now it’s much more like this:

I’m hacking on something and I get a bit hungry. I eat an apple. I continue to work.

And yet, today I strayed from the usual course of things and I ate a huge pack of chocolate chip cookies out of boredom. And you know what?

I simply couldn’t focus for the next two fucking hours.

This translates to: no work done for two hours. No rest during the next two hours since I was now terminally bored. And boredom kills all opportunity to get any real rest.

Sometimes you have to quit something just to see how much unnoticed harm it causes in your life.