I have, what many would say, an extremely unhealthy work-life balance.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that I think I enjoy my work a little too much.

However, for quite some time, I've also struggled with insomnia, driven by a hyperactive brain at night.

If there's a work problem that bothers me, it's nearly impossible for me to find sleep. This meant, fortunately, that I've always been doing quite well at work.

A while back, I've been diagnosed with ADHD. It was quite surprising, because to me I've never really struggled with having focus. In fact, a lot times, I'd say that I am extremely focused to the point that nothing else matters.

I have, since then, been told that this is exactly what ADHD is. I recently read this tweet that explains it much better than I can.

ADHD-ers usually have an interest-based nervous system. Meaning that a task needs either novelty, urgency, competition or interest for them to be motivated or focused. Learning this and adapting boring, everyday tasks to fit into one of these categories can be life-changing.

I always wonder how different my life could have been if I didn't enjoy my work as much as I did.

How lucky.

I am not the best at estimating how long a feature would take to be developed. I have been told that I am far too optimistic. I thought about this a bit and I realised that this is absolutely true.

I spend quite a lot of my free time thinking about the various problems we're attempting to solve at work. It is, of course, a real privilege to be able to do that in the first place and I don't take this for granted.

What this means is, I carry out a lot of experiments while obsessing over these problems. Some of these experiments eventually get to a point where I can polish them enough so that we can use them.

However, a lot of these experiments lead to nothing. It's not a time-waste in itself. Most of the time, this would mean that I've probably already evaluated why something may or may not work for us.

This helps me personally to estimate a bit more optimistically but doesn't paint an accurate picture for the rest of the team. A lot of times, I also estimate far more conservatively because my weekend experiments have led me to believe that the problem is not as straightforward as it originally seemed.

My wife recently pointed out to me that I should have started documenting my experiments years ago, so that at least the companies I work or have worked for are aware of the amount of effort I put into my work which should help with feedback, reviews and potential promotions.

I am also not entirely sure how I can make the work I do, outside of work, for my work, more visible. I have long thought about keeping a hype doc. Maybe I will start it now.

I rarely talk about my work but, at least in my eyes, I'd like to think that I am doing okay.

It took me a long time to stop comparing my career path to others. Especially in tech, it seems like every other smart person I encounter nowadays are a lot younger than me. However, I always try to remember the environment I grew up in and growing up in Mauritius was not easy.

That being said, I was able to find opportunities that allowed me to move out of the country and that really helped my career. If anyone asks me my secret (and nobody does), I'd say that I have always tried to do things everybody else refused to do.

If, like me, programming is a hobby that turned into your job, it'd always be nice to work on things that interest you. A nice problem, a greenfield project but, I've found tremendous value in doing the small annoying things that nobody else wants to touch.

I really enjoyed this podcast episode between Ali Abdaal and Rory Sutherland.

The doorman fallacy, as Rory describes it, is when an organisation assumes that the notional role of the doorman, that is opening doors, is all the doorman does.

In reality, a doorman does so much more. Replacing the doorman by an automatic door in an attempt to save on costs and be more efficent, for example, could very well backfire.

It got me thinking whether this could also be relevant for organisations who notoriously try to optimise their customer support team to be as frictionless as possible with the help of chat bots or self-help desks. The underlying reason being, of course, that more friction leads to less scalability.

While that is true and I do think that a very busy customer support team is probably also not a good sign, I still have the overwhelming feeling that, more often than not, organisations tend to underestimate the real value a human being as customer support brings on the table.