Your Job Ends at 5. Your Developer Brain Doesn't.

5:00 PM. Laptop closed. Slack closed. Workday over. Except my brain didn't get the memo.

I'm making dinner, and I'm still half-thinking about a function I left half-refactored. I'm lying in bed, and a bug I never solved wanders back into my head uninvited. Saturday morning arrives with zero meetings, zero tickets, completely open, and somehow by 11 AM I'm three hours deep into my side project again, treating my only unscheduled day like it also needed a sprint plan.

Technically, I'm not working.

I'm still at work. It just moved from my laptop into my head, and it didn't ask permission first.

I think a lot of developers know exactly what that feels like. This happens to me often enough that I stopped assuming it was just a busy week and started actually asking why.