Happy Friday everybody! My name is Jonathan Cutrell listening to another Friday refill episode of Developer Tea! Today's episode is going to take on a little bit of a contemplative style. This fits well with our Friday refill theme of trying to energize you as you go into your weekend and give you something to think about, something to look forward to, and perhaps something to work on. In today's episode I want you to ask yourself two simple questions. The first question is what are you waiting on? What are you waiting on? To be clear this is not trying to inspire you to take some kind of action. This is not trying to push you forward to make some commitment that you've been waiting to make. Instead, I want you to be mindful of something that is off into the future that is taking up some of your mental capacity. Some of your emotional capacity. Something you are waiting on. Now this can come in the form of anxiety, but it can also come in the form of excitement. These are both kind of forward thinking modes that we take on. And so if we're thinking about the future, if we are waiting on something, whether that is something that we're anticipating in an anxious way or we're anticipating in a positive excited way, we're putting ourselves in kind of a holding pattern of sorts. We're unable to focus on what's in front of us. Whatever it is that we're waiting on is taking up our presence. And the truth is that whatever we're waiting on might change. We may not even experience it at all for one reason or another. Now this doesn't mean that you can't have a positive emotion about something that is often to the future, but if you have a very clear answer to something that you're waiting on, it's likely that it's taking up more of your mental emotional being or capacity to think and process the world around you, then you really want to get it. The second question is looking backward. What are you replaying? Again, I don't want to color these as positive or negative things that you're replaying. It's possible that we're stuck in the past with a positive nostalgia, for example. And this can take as much of our emotional or mental capacity as something that we're anxious about in the future. One key differentiator here is that I'm not telling you that you shouldn't be waiting on something intentionally. In other words, taking the time to on purpose think about something that's happening in the future. We do this all the time. It's called planning. And we can talk about those things that we're excited about in the future. And we can talk about the things that we're anxious about in the future. But if it's taking over, if you're involuntarily waiting on something, your mind kind of returns to it naturally or your mind returns to that replaying of some event naturally without your intentional choice to revisit that event or to revisit that thought. And you're kind of being ripped out of the present moment. And what could have been something that you were looking forward to previously that's happening now, what's gone? Imagine that whatever that thing is that you're anxious about or that you're looking forward to has arrived today. And there's something else that you're waiting for again. So it's helpful. It might be useful to explicitly identify what am I waiting on and what am I replaying? If you're a journaling or you know each morning as you are waking up maybe trying to clear your mind, getting getting ready to work or whatever your personal rituals are, if you incorporate this idea, you can provide yourself the kind of the labeling technique here of saying this is the thing that's preoccupying my mind. I can be mindful of it and I can let it go more intentionally. Now this isn't just about being present and mindful, you know, in the meditative sense. This is also about freeing up your mental capacity to deal with the things that are at hand to be able to you know get into some kind of zone of work for example, or to be able to have a true deep focus on whatever you're currently engaged with. I'd love to hear your stories about how you figure out what is it that I'm waiting on or what is it that I'm replaying? And how is that affecting my present reality? I'd love to hear your stories. You can tell me and the other people in the Developer Tea Discord community by heading over to developertea.com slash discord. Thank you so much for listening to this Friday Reefle episode of Developer Tea. If you are enjoying Developer Tea, it's a huge help to the show. If you take a moment to rate and review the show in iTunes and in other platforms that support rating and reviewing. This is something that you hear from every single podcast out there and it is true. This isn't just a script that we repeat, you know, because we're a podcast and it's the cool thing to do. This is the way that this show continues to reach other developers. And of course another incredible way that you can share this show with other with other engineers like you is to actually do that to share it directly with somebody that you think would benefit from the show. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.