Dear ideas, please let me sleep

Sincerely, Pim. It is 4:43am as I start writing this. I just finished designing the first draft data model for the new Webstruct version, which has been murky and foggy inside of my head for weeks and decided to reveal itself more clearly.

There are some really great features we’re hoping to put in the new version that require some serious thinking on my part, but that is a-ok. This is my zone, this is what I love doing. All sorts of data management techniques, design patterns and useful tools flow through my mind as I try to make out what it’s all telling me.

No wait. I wasn’t trying to get on this thought train. I was trying to sleep...

Working hours

I rarely do any real thinking work at the office. Most of my problem solving skills come from somewhere deep down my subconscious mind and not from this active, arrogant consciousness that likes to think it’s so smart. It’s not. It ain’t sh*t compared to what I can achieve when I’m (trying to be) relaxed.

From what I understand of psychology and biology, we like to believe that this everyday life we experience and the active thoughts that we get is ‘it’. But there is only several thousand years of evolution supporting this process, whereas the subconscious has been evolving for ages.

So my real working hours are when I´m relaxing at home, riding my bike, showering, cooking or doing anything that doesn´t stress me out. Thát´s when I make the difference.

Once I learned to trust on my subconsciousness to solve my problems for me, I never faced issues I couldn´t handle for a long enough time to cause scheduling problems. Especially after we created a CRUD generator in Webstruct 2.99 life has been particularly easy. But this causes boredom as well, because the current version of Webstruct makes things so easy for us that there is little challenge left for me, personally.

So now building websites is back at menial labor with little thought process involved. That´s excellent, but it´s not for me. So my mind wanders and thinks of ways to automate the automation. Which is fine, but why does it have to do that in the middle of the night?

Providing the circumstances

Because I have no control over what comes out of this vast abyss that is my subconsciousness, it comes out when it has to. All I have to do is provide the problem and relax. Well, I guess I could have relaxed a bit more before going to bed. Instead of playing minecraft and tinkering with this blog…

And I know this, I do. But it’s easier to feel frustrated at these untimely ideas than it is to take care of myself and take responsibility for myself.  This makes me sad and I hope I will be more able to cope with this in the future.