Just to preface this, nothing in this blog will be about UX or even design. This won’t reveal how doing nothing inspired me to be better at understanding end-user needs, or detail how a period of downtime led to some profound realization about my job. This blog isn’t LinkedIn, after all.
This weekend, I decided to do nothing. No extra work for my day job, no tinkering with my personal website, not even scrolling through the endless job alerts that flood my inbox daily.
Obviously, I didn’t just stay in bed, but I also didn’t pressure myself to apply for jobs or work on something to “improve” my life. For this weekend, I was just going to be happy where I was and with what I was doing.
And, you know what? It was probably the best thing I’d done in a while.
I’ve been playing Ghost of Tsushima. I hadn’t played it before, but I saw it in the Steam sale the other day and thought I’d give it a go—see if it could quiet the noise of life a little.
I promised no UX thoughts in this post, but I’ll follow up soon with a videogame UX-oriented post, because the opening sequence in this game is something worth writing about.
Speaking of noise, I don’t mean literal noise—I don’t live next to an airport or anything—but just the noise of existing.
For me, that noise is mostly my own voice telling me I need to prove I can be better than I am. I’m never satisfied with what I’ve done, and I don’t mean that in a show-off LinkedIn way—I mean that in a sad, Barry from EastEnders way.
LinkedIn has taken a bit of a bashing in this post, but I think that’s fair. It contributes a lot to the noise, giving me endless access to unrealistic perfection to compare myself against.
I know this, and yet I still do it. And here I am, writing a blog that’ll end up on LinkedIn. At least I can post about what a hypocrite I’ve become—that’ll keep my numbers up, won’t it?
I’ve made a lot of this problem myself by coding and writing blog posts on weekends and evenings when, in my day job, I’m already coding and writing blog posts. So, really, I only have myself to blame.
It was nice to have some quiet before the noise starts up again on Monday.