left a 9 to 5 for this two years ago and genuinely happier, but the one thing the old job had was an off switch. i left at 5 and it wasnt my problem till 9am. now the site is up 24/7 and so is my brain. i check it on holiday, i check it at dinner, i dreamt about a 502 last week. hows everyone drawing a line between running the thing and being owned by it, or is that just the deal we signed up for
the thing that fixed it for me was good alerting. i check constantly because deep down i dont trust that id find out if something broke. once i set up proper alerts that i actually trust, i could stop looking, because id know. the compulsive checking is usually a trust problem with your monitoring not a discipline problem with you
Roy is right and I will go further. The checking is an illusion of control. The site does not care that you are watching, and almost nothing you see at dinner needs action at dinner. I put my phone on a schedule that physically cannot show me the dashboards after a certain hour. Removing the ability to look was the only thing that worked, willpower never did.
oof that actually lands. i dont fully trust my alerts so i self insure by checking. maybe the fix is making my monitoring good enough that i believe it rather than trying to white knuckle not looking
i burned out hard enough to quit for a year, thats how i learned this. the site survived every outage i wasnt watching. not one of them needed me in the moment the way i felt it did. your presence at the dashboard is not what keeps it up, your engineering is. build it to survive your absence and then actually be absent sometimes
The on call world solved this ages ago, have hours where you are responsible and hours where you are not, and make the system page you only for things that truly cannot wait. If everything is an emergency nothing is, and you never rest. Define what is actually worth your dinner being interrupted, it is a shorter list than your anxiety thinks.
twenty years in and ill be honest, you dont fully switch off, you just get better at knowing what actually needs you. most of what felt urgent at year two i wouldnt get out of bed for now. experience is mostly learning what to ignore.
What helped me was separating the business from my identity a little. Early on, the site being down felt like I was down. Once it was just a thing I run and not the whole of who I am, a bad night stopped feeling like a personal emergency. The phone habit followed the mindset, not the other way around.
sancho that might be the actual root of it for me. i tied my whole sense of being legit to this thing working, so checking it is really me checking that im ok. thats a bigger fix than better alerts but probably the real one.
physical distance worked where willpower didnt. the site isnt on my phone at all anymore, if i want to check it i have to go to the desk. turns out most of the compulsive checks just dont survive having to get up and walk to another room. made the bad habit cost something.
I coach performers through exactly this and it is the same for operators. The brain treats constant vigilance as responsibility, but it is usually anxiety wearing a work costume. Trustworthy alerts plus a hard rule about your hours is not laziness, it is the thing that lets you still be doing this in five years instead of burned out in two.
The thing that finally worked for me was a hard rule that the phone does not come into the bedroom. Not willpower, just physical distance. The site is always on but my eyes do not have to be. I still slip when something is actually on fire, but the baseline of not checking it at midnight out of habit made a bigger difference than any app or schedule did.
took me way too long to learn that always available is a choice i was making, not a requirement of the business. set a status that says support answered within a day, then actually honour it. the sky didnt fall. customers adjusted to the pace i set instead of me adjusting to theirs. the always on pressure was mostly self inflicted.
Twenty years in and i only really solved this when i stopped treating the site as something that needed me and built it so it didnt. The off switch isnt willpower, its removing yourself from the loop that makes you feel needed. I set it up so nothing short of the site actually being down pings me, everything else waits for the morning. Took a while to trust it, but the business did not fall apart, and i got my evenings back. Turns out almost nothing genuinely needed me at ten at night.
im the opposite problem, im small enough that nothing ever actually breaks in a way that matters, and i still check obsessively out of pure habit. reading this thread i think half of us are checking for the feeling of being on top of it, not because the checking does anything. the alerts point is the real one though, i trust my gut more than my monitoring which is backwards. gonna fix that before i try to fix the habit.