The True Cost of 'Always On'
Being a good developer is often framed as a quest to keep pace with the latest technological trends and to churn out endless lines of code. But what many developers miss is the single most important aspect of the job: maintaining and honing the capacity to perform at a peak mental level whenever the opportunity arises.
Early in my career, I did what most people do. I focused intensely on technology and raw output, working long hours because I genuinely enjoyed it. But it was not sustainable.
My personal life fell into disarray, and soon, the quality and quantity of my work began to deteriorate. I couldn't maintain focus, productivity ground to a halt, and I felt compromised by the quality of the work I was producing. I resigned. That was my first burn out. I learned firsthand the steep price of treating my personal life as secondary.
Re-defining Work-Life Balance: A Performance Tool
People mistakenly think work-life balance is just a nice way to package laziness or make excuses. It’s not a soft requirement; it is a performance prerequisite.
It’s about proactively managing your life so that when it's time to work, your brain is the sharpest tool in the room.
Balance as an Investment
Think of the "life" side as investing in your work capacity:
- Physical Health: Regularly seeing doctors and dentists, and setting aside time for the gym, ensures your body isn't distracting your brain with low-level aches and energy dips.
- Social Stability: Spending quality time with loved ones keeps your social life in order, preventing turbulent drama from hijacking the critical thinking you need to bring your A-game.
- Mental Reset: Time away allows your brain to fully reset from a potentially wrong track of thinking, allowing it to rewire connections and find a better, more creative solution to a complex problem.
When I truly realized this and put it into practice, the results were clear: the hours I spent on work became exponentially more impactful. I achieved higher quality results in a significantly shorter amount of time.
The Critical Link: AI and Focus
I am not against working late into the night or over weekends when a critical need genuinely arises. The problem arises when the support system—the part of your life that sustains your career—begins to crumble.
When that support system collapses, your ability to make sound decisions goes first. You end up wasting hours, if not days, trying to correct mistakes made from poor judgment.
With the advent of Generative AI, this capacity for sound decision-making and critical thinking is more important than ever. Generative AI allows us to amplify our productivity by a factor of 5x, 10x, or even more, getting so much quality work done in a short amount of time.
The output from AI is only as good as the prompt we provide and the judgment we apply to the result. Our new role is no longer the producer of raw output, but the editor and director. This means the strategic, high-leverage tasks—asking the right questions, spotting flawed assumptions, and making the final architectural decision—now carry the most weight.
This saved time is not a license for idleness. It's a mandatory investment. We need to invest the time saved on honing our mental capacity and ensuring we are performing at our peak the next time we need to provide the strategic direction or creative solution that the AI amplifies.
Our balance is not a distraction from peak performance—it is the prerequisite for it.