329: Zero Utilization on Your Brain

Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

So I just got back from my, it's become a bit of an annual tradition, my like post-September rest period, because the nature of being an iOS developer is we have WBDC in June. It's very exciting. It's very... It dictates the future for the next few months for us. We get through that. We get through September. iOS launches. New phones launch. All the things happen. We tidy up all the issues and bugs that are in the new OSs and the new phones.

And I find myself generally at the end of that to be rather worn down, rather tired and ready for a break. And I think for many years, I didn't take a break. and would jump immediately into my .1 releases. So I do all these big work, get it out for September, and then you have all this input coming in from users and your own ideas for things you had to defer and push off into the future.

And early years, I would be like, okay, now I've got those out and I'm just going to start on them. And the thing that's difficult about a break... And a bit of rest is that you don't know how much you need it until you take it. And several times I think I have found that I would by diving right in right away, I would just.

sort of run myself down and my productivity would fall. I would not be as useful at, you know, actually getting the work done. It would take much longer than it needed to. And what would actually be much more productive and much more useful is scheduling at a time. end of September, beginning of October, to have some time off to really take a break. And what I find is I'm actually much more able to ship things out.

in the next few months having taken this break because the nature of a break and the reason you don't know how much you need it until you actually take it is your brain is a... complicated thing. And if is, at least for me, I find over the summer, it is operating at a much higher level, a much more engaged level. There's so many sort of background processes constantly running, just like wearing down my energy stores cognitively. And those...

sort of that pressure can only, in my case, I found be something I can release by taking a break, by not thinking about code, you know, closing my computer, not opening Xcode. And eventually those background processes kind of like run their course. and disappear. And you can finally sort of get back down to like, you know, sort of

zero utilization on your brain. And it is important to do that because otherwise you are just, eventually you're just running wear and tear on yourself. And so that is a thing that I do. I just got back from, had a lovely trip. to Ireland, you know, and hiking and walking and all the things that I like to do. But it is something that I have found very essential, but it reminded me and I thought would be a useful topic of

kind of there's different kinds of rest that we have that there's, this is sort of the medium version, the taking a break for a couple of weeks. You could start on the other extreme where you say like the sabbatical kind of leave where you're gone for, you know, months at a time and you can kind of work.

your way down so we have you know months at a time weeks at a time days at a time hours at a time you know sort of minutes at a time and i think at each of those kind of gradients rest will have different impacts on us and different benefits and potential sort of pitfalls and

challenges. But nevertheless, it is something that I strongly recommend. If you are listening to this and you haven't taken a break in a while, it probably is a good sign that you need to take a break. Wow. Taking a break and rest and everything.

It's one of those things, like... flossing or sunscreen where it's like we all know we should do this like we everyone knows you should rest sometimes well maybe not everyone but you know but yeah it is kind of generally regarded as like oh yeah of course that's a good idea but then when it comes time to okay well are you gonna do it oh

oh, well, I can't do it. I don't have time for that. Or I'll take a rest, but not right now, not yet. Down the road at some vague future time that for many of us never comes, that's when I'll be able to take some time off or whatever. It can really...

cause a lot of problems over time of generally feeling overwhelmed, feeling burnout. It's obviously not great for mental or physical health to never have any kind of rest time. But it is, I think, the indie life... presents some unique challenges to it you know in one level we don't have a nine-to-five boss or schedule and so we you know we can kind of do whatever we want

In terms of like, you know, day to day, like if I want to take this afternoon off so I can go to the post office or bring my kids somewhere like, you know, like I can do that and no one's going to fire me for that. So it does seem like the indie life really lends itself well to like short to medium sized rest kind of happening whenever you need them for the most part. But when it comes time to like, I'm going to take a week off.

a few weeks off or a month off like that starts to get a lot harder for indies because when we are not working our company stops moving like it isn't like we have the co-workers who can you know pick up the slack if we are not working The work just piles up until we get back. So that can make it feel very difficult to truly relax or truly let go because you know that...

you're just going to have more work when you get there. It isn't just disappearing from your plate. It's just being deferred. So how do we manage that?

And I think it does definitely inform the kind of break that we can reasonably take. In the sense of, I was saying at the beginning, like the different levels, like the biggest level, like taking a couple months off, going on sabbatical.

is really tough. And I think the classic version where I think most people would reasonably go on sabbatical or something similar to it is after the birth of a child, you know, so going on maternity or paternity leave. And I remember in my own life, like I had... I've had two children since I was an indie developer, and I really wasn't able to take large amounts of time off in terms of not...

checking into work, not doing things. You can kind of take work from a high level of engagement to a... kind of take over making sure that things are okay you have a little bits of work here and there and you can sort of slow down the process but i was never able to feel comfortable sort of not checking in not engaging um with that and i think

that's somewhat just par for the course. I think, like you said, the flexibility we get from being our own boss and having more control over our schedule comes at the cost, I think, of making it very difficult to take long periods away.

And I think – and the reality is I think one of the challenging things I sometimes think about with something less longer like a sabbatical or taking a couple months off is I think from a rest and the benefit of the rest perspective, it – probably reaches a point of diminishing returns relatively early in that process where

At some point, it may have other benefits, like from people I know who've taken sabbaticals or longer periods, like it was useful for their life to gain some sort of broader perspective or to understand other things about themselves. At some point, the just...

I'm worn out from work or I want to recharge my cognitive and creative abilities likely reaches a point of diminishing return where that is not being restored by being gone for so long. And that at some point, honestly, the challenge in our business is... Technology is constantly moving and advancing and changing. Like, you know, while I was gone, Apple released iOS 26.1 beta 2. And so...

That was a thing that happened that I have not had the time yet to unpack and look at and see what's changed. And if I was gone for several weeks, there'd be several betas and several issues and several things that would have happened that isn't just work piling up, that it's like... the world is changing. And so if I had gone on holiday...

in May of this year and then suddenly picked up my computer and started to try to work now with all of iOS 26 and liquid glass and all the things having happened in the meantime, like it would have been completely chaos and I would have felt really behind. And so I think that level of break. I don't feel too bad in some ways that I don't think is reasonable for me to take. I think it's just part of the cost of being an indie developer is that you need to be involved somewhat regularly.

within a couple of weeks into your work at some level. And I think that's the best we can do for a lot of that kind of thing.

It can be hard, too, because when you think about a longer break, the way a lot of people achieve a longer break is they change jobs. Sure. If you're really... in need of a break for the kind of thing you're working on, one thing you can do is look for a different job or decide to take off for a few months. When you're an indie, you can't really do that.

Unless you are ready to shut down your business in some way or sell it or transfer it to somebody else. That can be hard. If I don't want to work on Overcast for a year, that's going to mean I have to sell it or shut it down. There's no other way unless I could try to hire somebody to replace me, but that's also not a super easy thing to do. And so for the most part, we...

We have the jobs that we've created for ourselves if we've succeeded. And look, that's in many ways a lucky position to be in. We both know that. To have a business that is good enough to be your job, it's great. It's what we all work towards.

But then once you have it, you also have one challenge of that success is you cannot leave unless the business leaves in some way. Another angle that I think keeps me... tied to work and makes it hard for me to walk away for even a week or two is because it's my product and because I see

All the things that I want to do with it in my head, in my notes. I have all these ideas I want to do with it. And I see all the feedback channels, all the emails, all the reviews, all the Reddit posts. I see all of that. And I see what everyone else wants too. Or I see things that need improvement. There are certain bugs left or certain parts of the new design people aren't getting. So I have to maybe rethink or tweak those. Stuff like that.

I'm seeing everything that I want to happen or that seems like it needs to happen. And it's this infinite to-do list that will never end, that I will never feel caught up on. So it's very difficult for me when... I face that huge list of things that either I want to do or that my customers are telling me I need to do. And to say, I'm going to take a week off.

Like, that's really hard for anybody. I mean, I'm sure many of the upset customers would also decide that was not a good idea for me to do. But, you know, just for me alone, like, I have a really hard time. Turning my brain off and disconnecting and saying, you know what? It is okay for me to just watch a concert tonight. To watch a concert video on my couch tonight and not work until I have to go to bed.

Like, that is very difficult for me to do. Like, how do you manage that side of it? Maybe it's a weird connection, but it really makes me think of something that I... sort of come to learn and understand in fitness when you're training, where very often you will do interval training or training that is based on...

You know, sort of some kind of work rest ratio, you know, so it's like go go fast for two minutes and then rest for two minutes and then go fast for two minutes and rest for two minutes or something like that. And I think.

Something that I took – someone recently asked was talking to someone about sort of how much rest do you need between intervals and how do you find the right amount for that? And I think something that sort of came up in that conversation that I thought was really relevant here is the sense that – The reason the rest is there is to make the work periods more effective. And you want to take however much rest you need to have the work be as effective as you can be.

And you're able to get the output that you want from that. And so I think the thing that I had to remind myself in terms of my work, you know, sort of work rest in terms of my actual programming is. For me to do my best work, for me to make the best versions of something, I need to have periods of rest long enough and regular enough that I am able to recover.

and come back at it with creativity, with the interest, with excitement, enthusiasm, motivation, all the things that combine to be my best work. And if I take too short or too infrequent breaks, I'm not going to be able to do that. My work periods are not going to be effective, are not going to be as helpful. And I think that switch has been very helpful for me to justify in my mind sort of the things that you you're just describing where.

It's the, oh, but if I stopped working, these things are going to pile up, or I really want to do this, or I really think this is helpful. And I think there's an honesty you have to have with yourself of, am I doing... Am I able physically and mentally and cognitively and creatively and all of those metrics able to actually do good, great work right now? Or am I just kind of just...

I'm sort of sleepwalking through this, doing my best, kind of struggling to feel creative to, you know, if I hit a problem and I'm trying to come up with a good solution for it, do I feel like I have the energy to do that? And if I don't, then it's like I need.

go into one of those rest periods. I need to allow myself to recharge enough to dive back into that. And I think changing it from that from the perspective of i'm neglecting something by taking a rest to i'm allowing myself to do better and more effective work when i come back has just for me has been very helpful just that reframing a little bit because otherwise i do feel like i'm letting my customers down i'm letting myself down and i mean sometimes there's the honesty and

kind of kindness you have to have to yourself of i think it's easy sometimes to have the like well i i should just do it like i'm a professional like this you know the professionals just show up and do the work regardless and it's like okay, maybe that's sometimes true, but the reality is like...

Unless I really am honest, I can be honest with myself and say, like, am I just being a slacker? Do I just want to, you know, whatever, watch movies and do nothing? Or is it I really need that break? And the result of that break will be effective. And if I can honestly say it, I think. having the break will be effective, then I should take it. And then I should feel confident in taking it and happy that I'm doing it so that when I come back, I can be more effective, that I can be more.

productive. And I think that's a pattern that the more I've gotten into this and you sort of get a sense of how much rest you need and how often you need it and when you need it, like you can be more productive. I was much more productive last fall than I think I would have been if I hadn't taken

a similar trip at the end of september like after the big push it's very useful to have this period where like all i have lots of work waiting for me you know at the end it's not like oh the work is finished when you ship your you know your

your September release, but there's lots of work, you know, just that I was waiting to start now, but I feel much more able to do it now because I'm not worn down. My brain is sort of sharp and ready and I'm... able to dive into it and i know that i will as a result probably get more done in many ways more quickly than if i hadn't taken the break which is always a slightly funny dynamic um but i think that i find is just a very helpful way to frame taking that rest because you're you

It's for a purpose, not for – as much as it is leisure. You're bringing in leisure into your life. It's not for just that purpose. It is not just for fun. It is not just for that purpose. It is something that is effective and helpful and making you a better version of your own self to do your work.

We are brought to you this episode by Sentry. Broken lines of code, busted API calls, app crashes. Nobody loves those things. This is why Sentry exists. It's the only developer-first app monitoring platform built to give you answers, not clues. Sentry gives you tools like error monitoring. and two new freshly minted tools

AI agent monitoring and structured logs to get to the root of the cause of an issue faster. It's used by millions of developers, including some of the biggest apps like Claude, Disney+, and Duolingo. And Sentry recently launched a new AI agent called Seer. which can automatically generate fixes with over 90% accuracy.

This can be incredibly useful. You know, if your app, if you have crashing on your servers or on your app, if you have, you know, your app is breaking or stalling, maybe tap latency, rage clicking from your users because they're trying to get something done faster and you have all these latency. All these things can happen, and Sentry can give you the insights into...

why that's happening, and can even help you then find and fix the problem. It's amazing. So don't forget, too, you have Sear, Sentry's new AI debugging agent on hand. So this is like hiring an engineer who already knows your entire code base. can find the correct root cause of a problem 94% of the time and can even provide merge-ready pull requests based on that analysis. So you can see for yourself what Sentry thinks it is, what it wants to fix, and you can approve it.

Try it free at Sentry.io, that's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io, and tell them that we sent you. They have a free dev plan, and listeners of our show can use the code RADAR on sign-up for three months free of the team plan and $150,000. thousand free errors that's sentry.io s-e-n-t-r-y.io use the code radar or just click the link in our show notes our thanks to sentry for their support of this show and relay

Yeah. And I think breaking down from that kind of big week long break, I think it's interesting to just talk about some of the smaller breaks that we'll probably take. So I think many of us probably live in a part of the world where a weekend is a thing that you work for a few days and then you take. a couple of days off. And I think as an indie, especially that is super important.

just from a perspective of you can work all the time. But if you want to have a social life, if you want to have a family life, if you want the sort of thing, the usual relationships that you have in your life, like I very early discovered. and have found just the importance of, while I could, in theory, work six days a week, seven days a week, I could work odd schedules where I take my days off in the middle of the week.

That sometimes could be helpful, and there have been periods of my... career where things are just really hectic and i have to do that but generally speaking i find it's important to take those regular breaks at regular times so that you can have regular relationships because not everyone in your life is likely an indie developer who has complete flexibility and control of their own

So strongly recommended doing that. And similarly, like the next level down, the importance of having somewhat of a reasonable daily schedule is just as important that, you know, for me, I work roughly. kind of office hours, sort of nine to five. And I don't do that because it is necessarily something that I have to do. There's very few external pressures driving me in that direction.

I found for my family that it was very helpful for them for me to be reliably around, you know, when the kids get home from school, my wife knows I'm coming home. Like that is a pattern that has been super helpful. And in the earlier times in my career where I didn't take that. sort of thing i would work till the work was done or until i felt like i was about there or whatever like it created these weird conflicts and tensions that even if necessarily from a work

rest perspective weren't as destructive, but were much more complicated and had issues that were sort of knock-on effects through my life. And I think having a regular schedule is an important part of this kind of concept of being rested and recovered and ready to do. your work because I think people just like

We thrive on routine, as certainly I do. And so having a sense of routine in your sort of weekly schedule and your daily schedule is just as helpful because there's something useful I find when I come to work ready to work.

And then it gets to the late afternoon, four or five o'clock. And I'm like, yeah, I'm ready. I think it's good for me to leave this here. And every now and then there'll be a thing, you know, text my wife and say, I'm going to be a couple hours later because I just had a breakthrough and I'm really in this problem and I'm going to work on it.

That's fine. But that is the, you know, sort of the rare event rather than the common occurrence. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, everything you're saying is things that I have told myself or the other people have told me.

And I think, yeah, I should do that. I don't do it, but I think I should. And it's hard to make that jump from I think I should to now I'm actually doing it. to actually make that push. I have found, to some degree, you have to... When we look at the typical office space work...

boss and work world. Your boss wants you to be in this chair from 9 to 5 and thinks if we're behind on work that why don't we just make everybody come in early or stay late or work the weekend or whatever. Well, that's not. really that sustainable and doesn't really produce good outcomes and in fact oftentimes if you overwork people you actually get worse

productivity, even in the aggregate, even the sum of it all, not even just the per hour rate, but even the sum of it ends up being worse because the quality goes down, you have more problems, people start burning out. So it's easy for us as indies to be able to look at that. from the outside and say, yeah, they shouldn't work people so long. But then are we able to extend that to ourselves? Are we able to look at our own work patterns and say, maybe I should not work until I go to bed every day?

Maybe that is too much work, and maybe I should just limit it to these hours of the day that I am most productive, and then the other hours I actually, not only am I just kind of accepting... Oh, I'm tired. I guess I have to stop now. But maybe I should actually embrace that and say, I'm going to work for these hours, and then I'm going to choose not to. I'm going to choose to stop.

for these other hours over here. But that's really hard to do. Yeah. And I guess the thing that I would think about, and maybe it's just, obviously this is one of those challenging questions, but it's like the why...

Why do you find that difficult? What about it? And the answer could be that it isn't the right solution for you. The solution that I'm describing has worked super well for me and my situation and the way that my brain works and all these things. And the reality is, as much as you and I...

are very similar in terms of our background, our experience, the job we do, and all these things. We are very different people. I think we've spent the last almost 10 years talking about the different ways in which we work. And it's entirely possible that the answer that is right for me... is the opposite of what would be right for you. It would help you to be most effective. And I think the reality is, it's probably, it's a...

thing to try, right? It's a place to try and see. And if it isn't the right answer for you, I think more fundamentally is just making sure that you are still allowing yourself.

the ability to feel recharged, that when you're working, you feel engaged and productive. And if you feel engaged and productive, awesome whatever system that is you know if you're working for two hours then taking a break for 10 minutes every time and then you sleep six hours like i mean you could come up with some kind of absurd but from my perspective like deranged schedule but if it was super effective for you like awesome do it

But more importantly, like finding a work rest ratio and schedule that allows you to be productive and allows you to be creative, especially like that's the thing that I find really goes. For me, that there's certain kinds of work that I just can't do when I'm tired or when I've been burning the candle a bit too long.

for a bit too long like that's where i really start to struggle that i don't have good creative solutions i can do like the basic boring kind of boilerplate work but when it gets creative and interesting it starts to really struggle but you know it's like find that for you and you know and see and as long as it's like if what you're doing is feel sustainable if it feels like it isn't something wearing on you long term then maybe that's fine too but you know otherwise just

i'd say try it and it's like see if that see if it feels different see how it changes or see how you what part of it is useful and you could potentially take on to yourself yeah that's

That's really good, you know, because I've noticed too, like when I, you know, if I just keep burning the candle at both ends, I notice that the quality of my work does suffer. And sometimes like if I'm working really late on a problem and I'm just, I'm not succeeding. Sometimes I'll wake up the next morning and just a quick aside, the way my brain works is I carry almost nothing in my brain overnight.

Almost nothing that I was thinking about or feeling at night is still there in the morning. It's like I have a clean sleep. Some people, when they wake up in the morning, it's like they just pause their brain, they just unpause it, and they're right back where they were. I'm like a reboot. I'm like, my brain's rebooted, I got a clean slate, fresh day. And this makes me very forgetful, but also it's hard for bad moods to carry through and things like that.

big advantages in programming is that when I come back the next day to look at a problem, I will often have a very different perspective or insight about it. I think, oh, this method I was working on last night...

There's a reason why I'm not getting progress there. I have a totally different idea for a totally different way to do this. It's much simpler. And then usually those following morning ideas, that's usually far better and ends up being... the way i go and it's way less work and it's way simpler and has way less you know complexity and bugs and everything and i think breaks you know in a sense what i am what i do every night by sleeping is forcing myself to take a break of sorts

And so maybe that's a good indicator that I can have success with other forms of breaks as well, besides the ones that my body biologically forces me to take. No, and I think that's just a useful insight to have, right? Like the understanding that, I mean, that often happens with me with things like the classic of like going for a walk or taking a shower and like the solution comes to you. And I think there's a freshness of perspective in there that, you know.

is useful, but it's definitely not easy. Like I think sometimes I'm in a problem and I just want to keep working on it until I get it. Like, why can't I do this? And it's like the reality with our jobs are not like brutes, like sort of. cannot be overcome by brute strength alone. There's a nuance and an elegance to what we're doing that is not like, if I just keep coding harder, it'll get better. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

Anyway, I had a funny little pro tip that I was going to want to end up this episode. So if you've lasted this long, I appreciate it. Maybe you're thinking about taking a break. And something that I did this last break that I wanted to just mention that was super helpful is a couple of years ago. Apple introduced a thing called hidden apps in iOS, which is the ability to take certain apps and just kind of like put them in a black hole.

So you right-click on it in the app library and say, like, require face ID is essentially the thing. And I imagine it's for people in situations where there's apps that they don't want other people to know that they're using or whatever, or require certain apps to have face ID.

I've never had a personal use for that in my own life personally. But for this last time I went on this break, I took all my work apps, like Net Newswire, I took Slack, anything related to my work, especially things that have notifications or inputs like that. Put them into the black hole and left them there for the week.

And what I found super helpful, and why I wanted to mention it here, is I didn't have to mess with all my notification settings and turn things off and use focus modes and all these weird things that are super broke. I would find really awkward to get back to the way that I like them.

It's just the app was there. All the notifications like went to DevNull. I never saw them. They just like happened and disappeared because the nature of a hidden app is that there's no sign of it anywhere on your phone. When I got to the end of my break.

I opened the hidden apps folder, took the apps, took them back out. Everything's just like I left it. All my notifications, all my settings are just like they were before. And so I just wanted to mention that if you're going on a break, consider putting the things that are going to be most...

detrimental to your rest in the hidden apps folder put them there for the week for the weekend whatever it is and then you know that you know when you come back your settings will be just like they were before so a little pro tip as a if you've lasted this long in the episode that's amazing Oh my God, I should have that for Instagram. Thanks for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you in two weeks. Bye.