When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
Viktor E. Frankl
Many of us, after a long hard day of work, seek to “unwind” by doing mind-numbing things: watching videos online, playing games, or endlessly scrolling social media. Our jobs and our work do not provide us with a deep sense of meaning, and so we crave distraction at the end of it.
At work, I was trying to figure out performance issues in our application. To aid in finding out the root cause, I analyzed our monitoring tools and found that our application transaction times had “spikes” throughout the day.
These can indicate potential problems such as:
Our team was tasked to create an embeddable script (widget) that displays functionality from our web application. When released to the public however, we found that the interface was not looking right in some cases. It turned out that some pages that embedded our script was able to affect the styles of our widget with its own CSS declarations.
Our resident front-end guru recommended that we use the Shadow DOM for the widget implementation. This will essentially shield our widget’s styles from being overridden by the page that embedded it. I have not used Shadow DOM previously so this piqued my curiosity. Back in the day, we would use iframes to implement something like this.
Human beings are rational animals. Our scientific name, Homo Sapiens, literally means “thinking man”. Being a logical thinker is part of who we are. An irrational human conveys something negative in our minds.
We think logically in order to solve problems. To make this complex world easier to understand, we label things in black or white instead of different shades of the same spectrum.
More than seven years ago, I wrote my experience about the mirage of free time. In that story, I thought I had all the time in the world to do the things I needed to do, but I basically did nothing in the end. It was a confounding paradox that always proved true from my experience then on.
I find that the more my day is restricted, the more I was able to do the things I needed to do. And the more the day is laid out for me like a blank canvas, the less productive I become.