neilgrey's comments

If your work is winding you up to the point of causing severe anxiety, then maybe you should be looking at why you're there in the first place...

I don't know if you've read much self-help, but there's a lot of "you-can't-help-it" contained within. "Letting the moment pass" is a micro-solution to an entire-life size problem.

Speaking as someone who experiences some of the same emotions described in the article, it's far more effective to reduce stress and anxiety by removing non-essential tasks from your list than it is to "just chill". People don't need to "step back every once in a while", they need to learn how to say no.

I feel as though you picked a single statement out of my comment and took it out of context.

The whole concept of running the hamster wheel in the first place is flawed; who are you "falling behind" if not comparing yourself to other people.

The article wants us to "take a fucking step back for a moment, stop beating ourselves up into oblivion, and to let the cogs turn as they will". What I'm saying is don't put yourself in that situation in the first place. Take joy and find meaning in the day-to-day of what you're doing, instead of setting the expectation that you're supposed to be "better than anyone else", at anything, really.

joslin01 said it pretty well in another comment: "It's best to be honest with yourself and come to terms with where you are in life and where you want to be. After that, unless you put action into your belief, you will be sad. Even if you fail, but put action into the belief, you'll be happy and have grown."

So, I implore you, what is something you're actually going to do with this self-help article's new-found insight that you "can't control everything" and need to "just chill"? Will it bring you more happiness knowing that anytime you're running yourself ragged you can "step back" and reassure yourself that you're "just human"?

This is exactly it. Goals will point you in the right direction, but the joy is in the pursuit.

I wonder how many people will read this article, have a lightbulb go off in their head, feel warm and fuzzy about it all, then wake up tomorrow and do absolutely nothing about it. Probably most.

This article is unfortunately what it epitimizes the most -- a self-help conundrum. Advice given from the perspective of a workaholic. But alas, what tools does it actually provide to take action? Walk away from everything? Should I take up meditation or yoga? Relax by putting and put my mind at ease by playing a videogame or laying on the beach?

What most people won't see is the key line of advice burried in the middle, which I believe the rest of the article counters is: "We have to put in our best efforts and then give ourselves permission to let whatever happens to happen". Putting in our best efforts is what opens doors to adventures and opportunities. Putting in our best efforts is what drives us forward to find passion in what we do.

Sure, we all need to realize that we're not robots with unlimited capacity, but the next step is to stop reading self-articles and start doing things that actually matter, instead of filling our time with arbitrary tasks.

Want to not "fall behind in life"? Don't be a lemming by following other people around trying to find meaning and value in your life. Make meaning and value in your life by being creative, self-reflective, and getting outside your horse-blinders by actively trying to experience life in other people's shoes.

Falling behind in life is a synonym for running the hampster wheel. Get off the damn wheel and do something that scares you even just a little bit today. Then do it again tomorrow.

That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors.

Yup, I love GH, use it every day, but issue management is the pits.

It'd be really nice if I could custom sort the queue of issues so that I know what's next up in my queue of things to do; right now I've got 5 tags called NextUp:1 -> NextUp:5 on each repo; this takes way more manual updating than a simple drag/drop widget.

Like they mentioned, having a voting system would be super useful for knowing what matters -- I cringe every time I leave a +1, so I've gotten into the habit of at least adding a comment after it --- but the premise and the pain are the same.

It's blinding. I get that it's supposed to imply the pocket connection, but if you go to pocket's website they only use that pink/red color in their logo and for accents like on buttons.

On this front -- I hate email. I'm tempted to do a pull request that creates todoist tasks for you each day. If you don't complete them it puts them back into the pool for a future date -- the last thing I need is my todo list guilt tripping me :p.