Why the Brain Needs More Downtime (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why the Brain Needs More Downtime (2013)

scientificamerican.com

436 pointstim_sw106 comments

I've been noticing that I'm more tired and need more downtime in days where I make, (or forced to make), critical decisions.

If I start the day by knowing what to do, then I don't really feel the burnout. For example, if I'm designing either a piece of hardware or firmware, and I know how to tackle the problem and it is just the matter of implementing it, I can code/design for 10 hours straight and when the workday ends, I still feel full of energy.

However, if the day is full of "decisions" (engineering or managerial), at the end of the day, I feel exhausted (and irritable, according to my family)

I've noticed this especially for inconclusive situations, when you need to make a call and you're not 100% (or even 90%) sure what's the right choice. These drain my energy more than anything. Combination of a need for prolonged high mental alertness and hight stress levels caused by uncertain outcome just burns through you. On the other hand some people, like gamblers, get an ultimate kick out of this.

I think, more than the outcome, it's the window of uncertainty that burns through you. Gamblers get a kick because the uncertainty window is fairly short. I'd bet that they'll flip when faced with an extremely long uncertainty window, like closing a corporate sales deal, or waiting for a job offer.

I'm guessing this must also have quite an effect on people who find themselves charged with a crime or even a civil claim. The snail's pace of most proceedings could keep you in a very uncertain situation for many months. Can't be mentally healthy, particularly considering the possibly severe negative outcome.

With something like a job offer, if you don't get the job you're no worse off than you were before. There's really only an upside potential. That has got to be less stressful.

As another guess at the difference gamblers feel: another aspect to the situation is whether the potential outcomes include a large reward, or if the best outcome is just 'less bad'.

A lot of times in the engineering situation we have to make these critical decisions which have a large impact on how the rest of some project goes. But the attitude generally seems to be about mitigating negative consequences, and not really hoping for or working toward some very positive outcome.

There is a similar analog in a lot of human behavior. Part of how I characterize it to myself is whether I feel that I'm, "digging myself out of a hole" or just striving for the highest gain possible (while lower gain is also fine). They two create vastly different experiences, the latter being far more positive.

I think you're right about that. I wonder if the best ways to avoid burnout, is to work on how you handle specifically these decision situations.

In other words, finding a way to deal with low certainty situations might be key, compared to just dealing with huge amounts of rote work.

This is a really interesting point. How would you approach this?

Some things that work for me:

- Cultivating a slight bias for making a decision; I remind myself that sometimes any decision is way better than no decision. Especially when a) time is a factor, b) managing people who want leadership.

- Prune the decision tree. When no option seems good, I switch modes and look for decisions that seem bad. Like SATs: rule out the bad answers and then guess.

- Calibrate expectations of information. Like Poker: Care about (and attach judgement mostly to) making the right call given the cards on the table, as opposed to winning any one pot.

When I find myself with a tough decision, I remind myself that it's tough for a reason: either the available options are similarly good, or similarly bad, or both. Therefore, the choice between them is not likely actually all that important. In poker you can bet the odds and be sure that there is a correct decision either way. In life you're probably lucky if that's true; it seems like the black swans are prevalent enough to sink almost any strategy.

There is a very rich man (forgot the name) who is making big decisions like this:

  * make a list of pros and cons
  * give each item an importance score from 0 to 10
  * if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons: do it

I believe you can do this for small decisions as well, without creating a list. Because most of the time you have a sense about the pros being twice as valuable as the cons.

Edit: Sorry, this comment is a little unrelated because the parent talked about making a choice. My comment is more about 'should I progress'.

> if the sum of pros is at least twice that of the cons

This is very obvious situation. But what if sum is not twice larger? Or if you are not confident in your importance score? This is where game becomes harder.

I wonder if energy drain is caused more by uncertain outcome or by brain working hard to find arguments to make decision.

Yup as the gp described, once you've made a decision the energy involved is all in implementation (and wasted worries). But actually exploring possibilities requires imaginging all angles and consequences as if they were real... at the same time. Can be very energetically consuming.

This has been my experience as well. What I've found helpful is to just take a decision real fast and move on. Sure, it might be a bad decision but it's a done deal nonetheless. I tend to feel less burned out even if the decisions turned out to be bad, vs spending an inordinate amount of time debating decisions. And I have gotten myself stuck in some real holier than thou decision wormholes, for instance, which programming language to learn now.

I seem to only be able to do this when I have a severe time constraint. I wish I could do it other times because it feels great to just decide and move on.

Set more non-cheatable time constraints.

Just In Time Procrastination.

If I set them, I'll cheat. Can you elaborate a bit?

Besides what you said of knowing what to do and the decisions part of the work there is one other thing, that at least for me, is(was) the culprit of most of my tiredness and irritability over the last year.

Changing contexts fast whilst taking decisions on these different contexts.

I was the only tech guy in this startup and I would handle basically everything on the tech side, working daily in three different languages and various "services". After a while as long as I had planned what I had to do for the day/week things were fine, but somedays I might be tackling this hard backend problem and I get asked to fix a frontend bug right now, I fix the bug, deploy it and go back to the backend stuff, couple hours later, I get a technical support call, again I must stop what I am doing to fix whatever needs to be fixed.

So, this thing of going back and forth between the areas in which I was responsible for would really take it's toll on my work, not necessarily in my productivity/hour, but in the amount of hours really worked, amount of sleep needed(which I found quite curious) and the chance of having some small anxiety crisis(which is something I kinda have to coupe with).

That's why decisive leadership is so important. It's really hard to work towards a goal while the people in charge keep changing their minds.

It's hard when the newest executive fad is not making any decisions at all.

"I'm just here to ask the right questions".

You ain't getting paid 2 million to ask the right questions. You're here to find the answer. I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions.

> I can have any person off the street ask me the right questions.

I doubt that. "Asking the right question" really means being able to identify which problems exist. From the anecdotes I read on HN about dysfunctional companies, this is sorely lacking.

Actually I find with products consumers use every day, they are able to ask the right questions fairly readily.

Yup. If I have a clear goal when I start the day, it is easy to get in the flow. But if I start the day with meetings, I become less productive.

And then you leave the meeting room, thinking "Well at least that killed a good amount of time" and you see you were actually only in there for 20 minutes.

Some days I have a lot of different tasks to accomplish and support items come at me usually at the wrong time (before vacation, at 5PM,...). For the last month I've been using kanban to manage my work (trello) with these columns

backlog on deck doing waiting impeded done

This has reduced my stress and gives me a place to put things to do as they come up.

I read Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry first. I found the book a bit overdone in explaining and justifying why. But maybe that is just me. I'm a scrum coach with 11 years experience as a scrum coach and 2 years as a product owner so I get the backlog, planned, doing, done thing.

I think the somatic marker hypothesis is relevant to what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

These managerial decisions have, by their very functional nature, a heavier body load.

It's analogous to code readability..

- No code reads easier than linear code.

- Linear reads easier than branched code.

- Branched reads easier than polymorphic code.

This. After being in a managerial position in engineering for a long time, I am (at 50) reconsidering transitioning back to an individual contributor role. Ever since I picked up a "leadership" role a couple of decades ago, I have been less approachable (per my family and friends) and need the weekends to just recuperate from a hectic week, rather than using this time to do fun things. And no, this is not because I am getting older. I have had a few stretches of downtime when I found myself doing fun things for days at end, and these were physically taxing activicites but were not "tiring."

I have the heuristic that I leave decisions for the end of the day, based on what I have done. In fact, this is one of my goals per day, when things are unclear.

One former colleague of mine would explain to clients that "Hard thinking is hard work, and hard problems need hard thinking before we put pen to paper" when explaining our pre-drafting billing.

In the case where you do not have to make decisions you probably have peace of mind. No worry so to speak.

„You know what the right thing to do is. Possibly due to experiene in the task and ecpected outcomes.“

Found the German (sorry for OT, but I had to say this).

I find that I struggle with offices... you're stuck there for 8+ hours (even if you don't work that way, you need to create an impression), but after several hour of intense focus and the noise and chaos of an open office, I can feel drained and anxious. Some days I'll walk to a nearby park with wifi after work, meditate for a short bit, and then code from there. My focus and creativity comes right back after a bit of downtime in a relaxing space.

When I managed a team, I tried to encourage my team members to take walks during the day. I've always found they help me get to a more reflective mindset as well as the movement and sunlight getting me back to a state where I can focus. But, more importantly, I wanted to avoid a culture where people felt like they needed "ass in chair" time to prove they'd worked. If everyone saw everyone else getting up and going elsewhere multiple times per day, they'd feel comfortable doing the same. It worked, in some sense...we got more done than most teams. But on an organization-wide basis, we got a bit of a reputation in other teams of being absent a lot which I constantly had to push back against during callibrations when deciding raises and promotions.

Overall, it was both encouraging, since I'm now convinced that humans work better in short bursts followed by at least some physical activity, but also discouraging in the organizational friction I encountered in my experiment.

That is exact reason I negotiated "work from home whenever you want" with the employer. It was either I quit because I could not stand random daily useless noise and chatter of the office or I can work from home and be more productive.

I'm kinda astonished that this even needs to be negotiated. It should be the default at any half-decent employer.

The problem is that a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely and/or treat work from home as a day off.

Yes! And discussing this on HN is totally biasing our impression on the subject. HN is full [1-5] of INTJ, sometime refereed a "problem-solver", and INTP who I believe share, at least partially, the same love of solving problem.

Not all personality types are willing to solve problems (aka working) for their own intrinsic motivation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675197

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7033047

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365294

> Not all personality types are willing to solve problems (aka working) for their own intrinsic motivation.

I disagree with the notion that wanting to solve problems necessarily leads to having the discipline or desire to work.

The problems I choose to solve in my spare time are almost always more interesting than the ones I solve for work because I choose them out of interest, whereas the ones for work are chosen due to more practical reasons.

True, being intrinsically motivated to solve problems doesn't mean people have discipline or desire to do so for work. Albeit it is not a sufficient condition, it is still helping to be a problem-solver I think. I may be wrong though.

> Not all personality types are willing to solve problems (aka working) for their own intrinsic motivation.

There's also the issue that some problems are shitty and boring. You're not "solving" a problem when you're writing another boring CRUD app.

Indeed. For me this would already be a problem at the workplace though, not only from home.

I don't know if I buy into that as a line of reasoning. I'm ostensibly an INFP and I actually love problem-solving (hence being a programmer). When I work from home I am motivated to work for a number of reasons:

- It's interesting / challenging

- A sense of duty / professionalism

- A sense of teamwork / camaraderie

This is entirely anecdotal of course. I also will often head to a cafe to get some 'human/ambient' time (another motivator). Being at home can be lonely.

The fact that INTJ and INTP may usually be problem-solvers does not mean that other types may not be as well. A -> B doesn't mean than ¬A -> ¬B

I'm just saying that HN is really biased toward known problem-solving personalities, this should be taken into account in the context of this discussion :-)

Hate to break it to you guys: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/go...

This is one opinion.

I always see people criticizing all sort of tests because they are not good regarding to some criteria. Well, this is true for all of them. Those tests are trying to divide billions of people into few categories, you lose information anyway. There are 8 billions of personalities that should be split into 16 categories, some people will match exactly, other will lies in-between and will not match the characteristics.

I don't know these big-five or hexaco tests, but by the principle they also try to reduce the dimensionality of 8 billions people to n<100 categories, the same as MBTI. They may be better than MBTI, probably, but this does not mean the later may not bring useful information for our discussion.

I made some quick stats one of the HN pool (probably not statistically significant, but still a good indication), INTJ are 2.5% in the real population but 30% of HN, INTP 4% but 28.7% on HN, ENTP 6% but 10% on HN, and ENTJ 5.5% but 7.5% on HN. The four together represent ~80% of HN, but only ~20% of the real population. Those are also the four most represented categories on HN, and curiously belongs to the "Intellectual" class of personalities [1], as you would except to find on HN.

Maybe it's not the best test, maybe it has some problems, but it is still a tool that can give us some bases for thinking and discussions.

[1] https://mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-gend...

It's not because the model is broken / wrong. That it no-longer holds any information.

Example: witches didn't float, yet you can probably assign some properties that would cause people to label them as such.

INFP are also strong problem solvers as can be any type when motivated... I think an INTP won't be deeply aware of motivations outside of the problem itself while INTJ will be much more selfishly calculated which is why they tend to make more money.

Unfortunately that's true. And the people who actually work better from home suffer from that. Sometimes I work several days from home and I really get into a flow and reach a depth of work that I can never achieve in a loud open office.

My direct manager is OK with that but the guy one level up always makes comments about people not in the office so I guess for promotions and raises it's better to be in the office.

Indeed!

And also due to some bad apples, the entire category of people willing to work from home is considered as a bunch of slackers - so you want to "work" from home, uh?

What they don't know is that when I work from home I produce 1.3-1.5x more than when I work at the office - do I like to work everyday from home, though? No!

The problem is that a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely and/or treat work from home as a day off.

Well, that's half the problem. The other half is the tendency of many managers to view all requests to work from home as a request to stay home and goof off on the clock. I've worked places where the apparent measure of productivity is how many aggregate ass-in-seat hours the department put in.

> The problem is that a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely and/or treat work from home as a day off.

My guess: these people aren't very productive or useful when stuck 8 hours in an office either.

Be micro-managed (by your manager, or by peer pressure in an open-space) is not a reasonable way of having productive engineers.

Well, I admit I slack more when I work from home, but that's usually because typically reason I work from home is that I'm so tired of working or depressed I can't convince myself to actually go to work. Now often I'll just take a sick day though but do some work.

That could easily be seen by half decent manager or team lead.

As someone who has hired people for remote position, it's a problem I've run into. A lot of people who look great on paper , have a lot of experience and seem a great fit actually do poorly working from home. It takes a certain kind of mindset to work well from home.

I'm now always a bit wary about hiring someone who has never worked remotely because I know the chances it won't work out are high.

Really? That hasn't been my experience at all. On any engineering team I've ever worked with. What field are you in? Are you basing your statement off of personal experience? If so, how many people have you seen behave this way?

I'm not the OP, obviously, but have had similar experiences. At a previous employer my team had a WFH day once a week, on which maybe 10-20% of people would work from home and be roughly as productive as they were in the office, 60% would take it and not do much or be responsive (e.g. if you pinged them about something, you'd be lucky to get a response in less than an hour) and the rest of us rarely took it up. So that is based off experience, albeit anecdotal.

I accept that it's possible to have a team that would do significantly better than that, but definitely don't agree with the utopian view that you can offer WFH to just any employee and they'll be productive, and crucially that it won't affect other employees who might need their input.

> be responsive (e.g. if you pinged them about something, you'd be lucky to get a response in less than an hour)

Maybe this is because this is the day they actually used to implement stuff free of people asking them questions about other stuff...

Humans are all different, not everyone can work from home and not everyone can work in an office. That is just the way we humans work. Some love to work in a busy kitchen stressing the whole day and then cook when they come home too. Others can't see a kitchen when they get home.

I wonder how much "can't work from home" comes from lack of experience. Remote work is still rather rare, and when people first try it, it's quite possible they haven't grown the discipline it requires. Could it come with time? Could people change?

I'm not talking about dicipline, that is just an easy excuse to tell people to get their act together instead of just accepting that we all are diffrent. Some have troubles around other people, others cant be alone.

I confirm for the GP based on my own personal experience.

Some good noise cancelling headphones are very helpful in this type of environment. If you can't get out of the office this is the next best option.

I use ear muffs over my in-ear headphones, the noise isolation is really good, but it gets uncomfortable after a while. Also some extroverted coworkers complain about my earmuffs isolating me from the team.

> complain about my earmuffs isolating me from the team

Siiiiigh... http://i.imgur.com/cXBhfPt.png

I have to work in windowless offices commonly. Every couple of hours I'll go outside and stare at the sun (with my eyes shut) just to give my brain a boost of daytime hormones. Works well. Only works in summer though!

That's one of the reasons I like working from home. I can look out the window and think about things. Most bosses like that too. Its hard to understand that a lot of companies think that people working in windowless, loud offices is a good thing.

I think most companies don't think the windowless thing is good... it's just not relevant. They don't care, or it is closer to the manufacturing floor or it's just, honestly, expedient. The vast majority of company management chains simply don't care about their performers.

Or it's relevant for the opposite purpose when it's a secured environment.

You are probably right.

Works year round in Florida!

I noticed I can be intensely focused for about 4 to 6 hours max, after that I'll be "washed out" and I become error prone for complicated tasks

Unfortunately the 9 hour in office format constrain me to stay on my seat, so I'll try work on easier things at that time while beeing quite unproductive

How to we bring this fact to companies? It seems only the most ""progressive"" companies like Facebook or Google really understood this

Companies like Facebook and Google seem to understand that the least. Hence the endless services and other perks meant to keep you on "campus" as long as possible.

Well they give you the opportunity to have down time when appropriate. And when you don't treat your employees like factory workers - surprise! They stay more with better satisfaction

"Some researchers have proposed that people are also physiologically inclined to snooze during a 2 P.M. to 4 P.M. “nap zone”—or what some might call the afternoon slump—because the brain prefers to toggle between sleep and wake more than once a day."

Anecdotally, Thomas Edison was said to sleep only 3-4 hours a night and take frequent (very frequent) naps throughout the day.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/11/thomas-edison-on-sl...

I'm extremely lucky as I have an office with a door. Most days I take a very short nap. It can be as short as 6 minutes but I like it to be 12 to 18 minutes. I drink a 1/2 cup of coffee before I nap most days. After darkening my space, I sit upright in my chair, close my eyes and nap. I use a android timer app and can glance at it with it if needed. I do find that most days I go out for a few mins, glance at the timer, out again till I get the amount I need in. I can turn around to my desk and be productive almost instantly after that short break.

My workspace nap time is usually between 1:30PM and 3:00PM.

On some days when I can't nap or don't I am foggy for the rest of the work day. On days when I nap this feeling is gone.

I 63 years old and love naps anyway. On the weekend I can nap in the corner of the couch for 20 to 30 mins sitting up. I used to be a road (plane) warrior and traveled for work 45 to 50 weeks a year. I had to learn to sleep wherever, like airports, on the plane, etc. So now I can sleep anywhere most days.

For example if I go to the doctor's office and have a long wait I can tap a nap if my body says it wants one.

My team is a team of 2 and they work in an open space outside of my door. They seem to like it a lot but they respect each others need to be quiet.

We work with another dev/creative team that is in an open office and is 8 people and they hate the open space. Everyone has headphones on but phone calls and visitors disrupt the quiet. Sometimes one of them comes to my open space and sits at one of the tables to get some quiet time in.

Edit: typo

> Sometimes one of them comes to my open space and sits at one of the tables to get some quiet time in.

I would love to have that option in my open office.

Right now the other half of the scrum team has been relocated to the football stadium till office renovations are done. When the team practices they play music loud to simulate crowd noises. So their open environment is worse than imaginable.

It's been suggestes that humans might naturally prefer biphasic sleep when removed from artificial light.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_slee...

I'm ambivalent about this. I have a friend whose a Harvard math major, I've seen him work. He sleeps late and wakes early; when we work together, he always messes up my schedule by calling me in the middle of the night. I'm all tired and groggy the next day, and he's totally fine.

I think some people just inherently have more energy than others.

When I was younger I was like this. Sleep was 4-5 hours per night all days of the week. I had no troubles keeping awake and had plenty of times for coding, playing games and learn new stuff. And a fulltime job on top of that. Not so much any more, I need at least 7 hours of sleep but haven't started realy with coffee yet, don't believe the hype about it :-)

I think I get a good six hours of actual work in the office. And then I need to check out and take a shower. Something about that after work shower just brings my focus and clarity right back. But if I have to crank with my team for a 12-15 hour day, after max 8 hours, we're all just physically there, but mentally have checked out long before that.

On sleep, 5-6 hours is optimal for me. Too much can be bad, I feel groggy and have brain-fog the rest of the day. I can get by on fewer for one day, but more than that and it becomes painful. I think a lot of this also has to do with lifestyle. How often and when do you eat, have sex, get sunlight, drink water, go out doors, etc. Many levels can be played with here.

Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep.

> Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep.

I would be very careful with that. 6 hours is already very low. We (as in: science) could probably come up with a recommendation here if we had any fucking clue why we actually sleep. There are of course a bunch of theories, but nothing definite enough to base policy decisions on.

>> if we had any fucking clue why we actually sleep

To give rest to the body and the mind (to a lesser extent during REM sleep)?

> Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep.

I know a number of people who tried polyphasic sleep to 'waste' less time on sleep. They were doing the version where you only sleep 20 minutes every couple of hours.

One of them told me the weird sleep schedule altered his mental faculties, but he didn't notice until he stopped doing it - one of the faculties affected was the faculty to tell his faculties were affected, apparently.

Out of the dozen or so people I know who tried, only 1 managed to sustain it for more than one month.

Were his facilities affected in a positive or in a negative way?

Oh, negatively. Here's one typical story:

He went to a restaurant while on poly sleep. There was a sign posted for a lunch special. He couldn't make sense of it and thought it was badly written.

He went back after going back to a normal sleep schedule and realized the sign made perfect sense. He had managed to break his reading comprehension.

Turns out he was borderline dysfunctional but couldn't really tell at the time.

My only tip for getting by on less sleep, is regular sleep. Routine is my friend.

Best option I experienced was working remotely from PST on EST schedule. So start at 6am done at 3 eat + have a drink take 1 hour nap and you have 8 hours which after nap fills like a whole new day.

I'm having a hard time organising and especially switching tasks and getting meaningful work done when multiple things that are unrelated fall together. Having a single thing do to and beeing able to just leave work would be great but at the moment I'm freelancing and having multiple jobs and doing sysadmin-style work, learning theory and programming in a new language really just kills me and I'm not getting much done. Once I get traction in a certain task it's okay but the constant switching is killing me.

Great article. I remember seeing these ideas on Cal Newport's book, "Deep Work". I need more discipline to execute my "downtime plan".

I've always had a hard time sleeping/waking on time. What you might call a "night owl".

I'm starting to notice that on weekdays I actually perform better with 6 hours of sleep rather than 8 or 9. Then on the weekend I would "sleep in" to make up for the lost sleep time.

For some reason, if I sleep for 8 or 9 hours, I wake up feeling like I don't want to do anything. I don't feel sluggish or anything. I just feel "satisfied". Like there's nothing to be done. I can just "be". I can't bring myself to focus on any specific task. Nothing feels urgent.

When I sleep 6 hours, somehow I can focus more.

This is combined with not consuming caffeine. If I drink coffee after I have slept only for 6 hours, it makes me tired and sluggish.

Are you me?

I feel like many engineers are better and more productive late at night. Mornings sap the energy from my body. I often need a solid three hours just to "boot up", but at night I absolutely kill it with productivity.

I wish the world revolved more around our schedule.

I find I work better at night as well. I have a hunch this is due to the lack of distractions. One doesn't get many useless shoulder taps, phone calls, or IMs at 3 in the morning.

I have this with weekdays & weekends. I'm insanely productive on weekends, Monday and Tuesdays, not so much.

It's like my entire schedule is shifted by two days.

> I'm starting to notice that on weekdays I actually perform better with 6 hours of sleep rather than 8 or 9.

Same here but in a different way than you describe. I become scatterbrained and jump from task to task never able to focus on anything because my brain is just firing too fast for its own good.

Of course dip too far below 6 hours and I once more can't focus. This time because my brain runs away from any perceived obstacle and opens the nearest distraction (like HN)

That might not be related to amount of sleep but rather how many hours there are until your next guaranteed interruption (lunch).

Try a morning standup meeting!

In all seriousness though I don't find the interruption that bothersome.

Ha! I kind of feel the same way. In my case it seems like a full night's sleep makes my senses sharper and the environmental annoyances at work become that much more irritating and hard to ignore. Maybe I also have come to associate the feeling of a full night's sleep with weekends and vacations.

Can you wake up naturally on both cases? I find that my day is much better if I wake up without an alarm, but I can't do that most days due to traffic, gym, etc.

On days I wake up naturally, early in the morning, I am 100x more productive than a typical day. The problem is keeping that consistent seems to be really difficult for me, possibly depending on a bunch of factors, like stress levels, exercise, sleep quality. It might even depend on the season, with cooler months somehow being better for me.

I noticed the very same. I often feel fresh just the moment I open my eyes without an alarm. Tho it's also true that in some occasions I wake up and realize you need 30-90min more so and I try to dig back in :) All this is altered by any alcohol consumption the night before - proportionally to the amount.

One of the ways I manage my ADHD is by tiring myself out physically before I work. That way I don't have to depend on a tired brain and stress before I can focus. I find the reduction in physical energy is just as effective, but of course that may just be me.

I'm not sure about more productive and focused, but I do find I slip into exactly that pattern.

Coffee probably isn't helping me either.

This is an amazing observation. I have not noticed this, but I exhibit the same pattern of behavior.

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