Setting Cost Expectations

We’ve designed the core of Developer Health OS to be achievable at no cost. However, there are paid services and products we’ll suggest throughout the curriculum that you may greatly benefit from in building your ideal environment. Therefore, we encourage allocating a budget that works for you to create this self-care environment.

What should your Developer Health OS self-care budget look like? Consider the professional athlete. Their team provides a certain level of care to train their body, but anything beyond what the team offers is an additional personal cost. The highest-paid athletes can spend up to 1.5M to keep their bodies operating at a high level. This makes sense for someone making $40 million per year. If Lebron James makes about $40 million per year and spends $1.5 million on optimizing his body, that’s approximately 4% of his income.

What if 4% of our income was budgeted to optimize our mental, physical, and emotional health each year? For the sake of simple math, if we took a net income of $100,000, we could allocate $4,000 annually to making significant life changes.

But let’s take a step further into the reality of life. Even if we net $100,000/year, we have to factor in non-negotiable expenses like rent, food, and bills, which might decrease our available earnings to something closer to $50,000/year, which translates to $2000 of income to spend on self-care. What could you do with this money to further your health and well-being?

When setting cost expectations, don’t get caught in the cycle of guilt that comes with the stigma of self-care and “frivolous” spending on non-essentials. Rest is essential to our lives. And you, as a tech worker, face unique challenges and depend on your mind to make money. Think of yourself as an athlete and do everything you can to protect and optimize the agility of your brain, just as Lebron James would do to preserve the physical strength of his free-throw hand.

This section of the Developer Health OS corresponds to Cerebral Calisthenics #2 Identifying Your Level of Burnout in the DHOS Workbook.