The same is true for me. Not having work at work leaves me more worn out.
Or, possibly worse than having no work, having small amounts of annoying work, but nothing else. The worse is when all I have to do all day is this one annoying bug I havn't been able to figure out. It should take 2 hours to solve but it ends up taking three days.
I'm most energized when I start a new project and I have lots of stuff to build.
Sounds like you're a programmer too. I wonder if any other professions have this problem.
Believe it or not, I have the opposite perspective. I'd rather spend a whole week debugging something in a gnarly legacy system than architect/build one from scratch. I like being able to say, "it wasn't working before; now it works," and then get on with my life, rather than live with the consequences of a hundred wrong turns. Different strokes, I guess!
If you have a clear bug and you nail it that's a great feeling. But what's annoying for me is when you have a simple task of doing X, but you then realize that you need to replace Y for this, but A replacement doesn't work with B part and so on.. and when it's all done, few days later, all you've done is you just finished that simple 1 hour task.
That's what's killing me currently. Get a task, fairly straight forward, legacy system makes debugging a nightmare, end up spending a day or two on a task the output of which is < 10 LOC.
I definitely recognize this feeling. Some days everything fit and it's a clean implementation, but a lot of times there are tangential tasks that are never "seen" in the implementation. This can of course be reflected in scrum points or whatever, but is this an issue with our own psychology, with feature rewards or something else?
I don't know, and would like to know so I could work on it.
Or, possibly worse than having no work, having small amounts of annoying work, but nothing else. The worse is when all I have to do all day is this one annoying bug I havn't been able to figure out. It should take 2 hours to solve but it ends up taking three days.
I'm most energized when I start a new project and I have lots of stuff to build.