How do people disconnect from work when they enjoy solving technical work problems?
I'm struggling to disconnect from work. I've been working on an interesting problem for the last couple of weeks (compacting change data capture events from sharded MySQL servers into BigQuery). It's an interesting technical problem. There are lots of optimization opportunities and novel patterns I can introduce.
I'm on vacation for the next two weeks but since starting my trip my mind keeps returning to the problem. I've even solved a few issues and come up with new patterns to try while daydreaming as we travel. Obviously I haven't implemented any changes, I deliberately didn't bring my work laptop with me. I emailed those solutions to my work email address so they get out of my head but that hasn't helped. I just visualized more optimizations while hiking today.
There is no expectations from my leadership to work while on vacation.
How do others disconnect from work when I enjoy the problem solving aspects of my work?
For me the saying "work on your passion and you won't work a day" is very true. Why would I not experiment with crazy code in the product when I don't have time in the day. Or trying out new cryptography and see how it absolutely beats current protocols.
With that said. It's also important to have time with you family/boy/grilfriends. They are also important