Background job runner
I try to run almost every morning. I like hearing what’s going on around me so I leave my phone behind. Getting out the door is really hard, especially when it’s cold outside, so I just have to convince myself to go. Some days it’s easier than others.
But by the time I get home, I’ve already done one hard thing, and that feels really good. Whatever else happens that day, I have that hard thing I did, and I feel more capable to take on the next hard thing.
This weekend I moved a big pile of dirt. Shovel, shovel, shovel. Fill the wheelbarrow, push it, dump it, bring it back. I sweated while listening to the birds and the wind. I kept going until I couldn’t go anymore, then took a break.
All this is very meditative. The task is simple, even when the work is hard. With running: get to my turnaround point and come home. With the dirt: fill the next wheelbarrow, repeat.
When I was first learning to build systems, I kept hitting Heroku’s 30-second request timeout. I was trying to do too much before sending a response back to the browser. When I asked a mentor why it kept breaking they told me I needed to do that work in the background.
I hadn’t considered that before. You could hand a task to a computer in the background and let it take the time it needed to run whatever process it needed to do. That way, the foreground process could keep responding while the other work happened separately.
I think my brain works like that, maybe yours does too. You can spend time with a problem, load up on context, and decide to leave it alone for a while. Then, when you’re doing something physical (like running or yard work), your brain will autonomously start to put together all those missing pieces. Sleep does the same thing.
There are more things I want to make than I can actively work on. So lately, I have been trying to give something intense focused attention, then consciously file it away in the back of my head, and go do something else.
Moving my body seems to help: running, laboring, sweating, feeling exhausted from physical work. The type of stuff that just isn’t compatible with sitting there in front of a screen, talking to a computer. There’s something useful about having a physical job to do while letting my mind wander. I get the work done, and I give the other stuff some time.