Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance | Hacker News Reader

Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

elemental.medium.com

278 pointsfeross148 comments

I get up at 5am to start getting the kids up and ready for school (high schoolers first, then elementary schoolers, then middle schoolers). Everyone is finally at school by 9:15am and I can head in for work. I get home around 6pm and get the little kids in bed by 8pm. 8-8:30pm is me time. Then I get ready for bed and am asleep by 9pm.

I can't imagine what a slow morning (or evening!) would even be like. I'd appreciate it if someone could add about 6 more hours to every day.

How do you do this? I would literally die. I can't live life so breathlessly with what sounds like no room for breaks. Are weekends even enough for you to recover?

Forget burning out of a job, I'd burn out on life.

Mad props to you. You've got a hell of a lot more discipline than I do. Your kids owe you.

What is a weekend? Honestly, weekends are super busy. I actually look forward to Mondays when I can go back to work and sit in front of a computer for much of the day.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way.

This is the real life of folks with kids, so if you have coworkers with kids be a bit emphatic, now imagine them doing all this and having to worry because maybe one or more of them happen to be sick. If you have kids, either you become good with time management or life will beat the crap out of you.

On one hand I agree with your statement, on the other hand, kids are a choice.

Should I also be giving people lots of slack for getting drunk and coming to work hungover? That was a choice too.

Don't respond with some biological need nonsense. Last time I checked we're not automatons that slavishly need to fulfill our biological needs.

I can’t tell if you’re trolling, but some people do believe this.

Society benefits from people having (a reasonable number of) children. Without them, humanity is done. Perhaps you think that’s for the best anyway, in which case I wonder why you’re doing anything at all.

I thought the same until I had kids. This sort of thing is part and parcel of having children, you really do learn not only to handle it, but to derive enjoyment from the situation overall.

If it helps any, my experience is that it's hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier as the years go by and the children become increasingly self-sufficient.

> hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier

A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn (assuming the newborn is healthy, eats and sleeps okay, ...).

I was able to get some amount of work done while taking care of my first kid up to about age 1. In the two years since then, not so much (I just pray for conveniently timed naps). The second one is 6 months old, and is way easier to take care of right now.

If you just accept that you will be doing no independent creative work, then a 2+ year old isn’t too bad. They can start to “help” with routine chores, can walk around for themselves, can feed themselves, eventually stop needing diapers, etc. The work is not really hard per se. More like relentless.

As a father, support of the mother takes lot more work when she's taking care of newborn than a 3 year old. As a mother, a newborn is certainly a lot more difficult, if not more physically taxing, than a 3 year old. Also, it takes months for the mother to recover from birth trauma.

This seems to vary from family to family / child to child.

I wouldn’t describe anything (after maybe the birth itself, which I can’t answer about) related to our 6 month old so far as “difficult”. It is only “physically taxing” insofar as it takes a lot of time every day, and alongside other obligations (in particular, the 3-year-old) that leaves everyone a bit sleep deprived. I would say the 3-year-old takes at least twice as much time and 5x as much effort. (The work is stuff like reading books together, building block towers, running around the playground, preparing food, etc. Nothing especially challenging by itself.)

My wife gets burned out pretty quickly when I leave her with both kids on the weekend for most of a day. She’s generally relieved to get back to the office on Monday and leave them to me. :-)

Amen to this... 3.5 yr old and twin infants here... I haven't been able to concentrate in years. When I have attempted to produce anything of value (in job or hobby), it's been at the expense of my family...

Gotta love the "this project needs to get done, so who's going to be mad at me and how far can I push it?" feeling.

Sometimes friends or family members ask me why XYZ projects are half completed, and it's hard to properly find the wording for "I want my wife to still like me at the end of most days".

> assuming the newborn is healthy, eats and sleeps okay

This is an enormous assumption. Many babies are fussy, colicky, or otherwise high maintenance. The variation at this age is just ridiculous.

> A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn

I think this varies enormously between kids, and to some extent between parenting styles as well. With my particular kids (5y and 3y) I can often spend a whole afternoon working on a project while they play individually or together; at younger ages the time commitment was far larger (nearly continuous).

Ha! My boy (almost 3) may be playing with his legos for whole afternoon, but the moment I peek in the general direction of my laptop, he wants to bang on the keyboard. Not any keyboard (tried that), but my keyboard specifically.

And when it comes to "it depends on the kid", oh dear. I try to practice stoicism whenever I remember about it, and logically I try to remember that I should be grateful for his fussiness and rebelliousness, since they give me occasions to practice my stoicism. But it sure does feel a bit like stockholm syndrome sometimes.

I think of our three year old as more or less self sufficient around the house at this point. Though I guess she will be four in two months.

My personal experience both from growing up and now raising three kids is that the kids will accept just as much independence as you are willing to give them.

Though they do get to be whiny sometimes. And I absolutely agree about the relentlessness of it all.

> If it helps any, my experience is that it's hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier as the years go by and the children become increasingly self-sufficient.

Not sure what kind of beings you're raising but my experience with three kids is that it gets progressively harder until around 5 and stays stable until 13 and gets much harder from there.

It also depends on the gender. In my experience girl's are much harder as teenagers than boys. YMMV

https://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/comic/long-weekend/

That's brilliant! And so true.

I definitely couldn’t do it. After a few years at a corporate gig I’ve taken a new job with extremely flexible hours. I work 20 hours/4 days a week. Four five hour work days a week. It’s a HUGE difference.

It’s crazy to me that people are willing to give so much of their life to their employer. Is your life not worth more to you than that? You’ll sell decades of your life just for a nice paycheck? Aside from the fact that it’s mostly all that’s on offer WHY do people do this?

How much do you earn, if you don't mind my asking? And what sort of work is it?

$100 an hour as an independent contractor developing farming robots at a place that feels very very good for me.

EDIT: I definitely got very lucky finding this position. I’m not suggesting everyone can just do this. But if people don’t refuse to work 40-50 hour work weeks, then that’s what employers will expect.

Even though people claim to work 40-50 hours many times they are spending half that time watching videos or messing around, this is a generalization of course.

It’s true. It’s frustrating because when I was hourly at Google I was extremely mindful to always be working when I was billing. Don’t bill for lunch. Don’t bill for long coffee breaks, etc. But when I billed 30-35 hour weeks it felt like my manager thought I wasn’t working hard enough. It’s like... I was probably working just as much as many full time employees who don’t count their hours. My managers manager told me they expect people to sometimes work 50-60 hours on big projects and I was like “nooope”. 20 hours a week suits me nicely.

What country are you in if you don't mind?

I don't really know how it works in countries with better healthcare, but in the US you usually have to work fulltime to get any sort of benefits from your employer. And benefits through the marketplace (not through an employer) are generally expensive for what they offer.

Someone in the US would need to make quite a bit to be able to do part time.

I’m in the US and I pay about $550 a month for health insurance. I’m a 34 year old white male. I factored the cost of insurance in to my bill rate when negotiating this position.

Maybe some day we’ll get universal health care.

Meanwhile I'm over here having trouble getting up before 9am, I make up for it by spending time coding at night and on the weekends sometimes instead of paying video games. I figure if I bring something to work useful on Monday and say "hey! look at this cool thing I built over the weekend" people seem to leave me alone about coming to the office at 10/11am

> I get up at 5am to start getting the kids up and ready for school

I don't mean to pry or be cheeky or sound judgemental, but how many kids do you have that it takes 3-4 hours to get them all breakfasted and ready for school? And is school far away or just a 10-15 min drive? What are you doing during that time?

I know kids can consume a lot of attention in the morning (especially the elementary lot), but that amount of time seems extraordinary.

I'm 52 and my folks were never up before 7:30am to get us fed and watered and ready for school and there was still plenty of time for banter, making packed lunches etc.

I'm genuinely interested.

Well, plural children in three categories of school (so 6+) was what caught my eye!

I did notice the plurals. If so then I probably get it. That said, High Schoolers, if in their teens do tend to sleep in longer (unless they're those annoying up-with-the-lark types), and can be a bit more self sufficient when trained properly :) so you could knock an hour off that schedule.

I actually went and read part of there post history and

    "My wife lost the diamond in her wedding ring and we were talking about getting it replaced. I have two daughters in their early 20s and they were aghast at the idea..."

So make that 8+!

I understand now, props to you my friend :)

I think that clearly places you outside of any group that this article is talking to.

Really? Why? this isn't China.

What does China have to do with anything? I suspect if you had 7 kids in ANY country you can't really try to have a slow... anything?

I can understand getting the kids up for elementary school (especially if they're very young) but even when I was in 5th grade - I was getting up myself, eating breakfast I made, and walking to school by myself. My parents were frequently gone by the time I woke up because they had to be at work before I had to be at school. In middle school (6th - 8th) - it was no different for the rest except that I walked or biked across town. High school was a bit closer but I still walked or biked. Bus was an option but I skipped it because it took too long (I was the first stop on a long many stop route).

Obviously, if they need transport because you're 5+ miles away and there's no buses then I understand transporting them takes a lot of time. Regardless, shouldn't your children be somewhat self-sufficient by 10 years of age? You make it sound like you have to do everything for them for it to take 3+ hours every morning.

I'm a nightowl, and so are my kids. They will happily stay up to the early morning hours reading. Getting them out of bed in the mornings is a major pain in the butt. But, they will happily sleep in and miss the start of school if I'm not there.

But isn't learning how to get up in the morning a part of growing up...? (Same with going to bed on time) Couldn't it be taught just like cooking their own food and grooming themselves? I learned pretty quickly the consequences of tardiness by getting detention, lower grades, etc. Now - if they don't care one damn about school then I think that's a separate problem and them avoiding school by sleeping in is just highlighting a separate problem. If they have a really hard time getting up every morning and can't sleep at night then they could have insomnia and do well with at least some acknowledgement of it. I suffered with insomnia for over a decade. It was due to horrible amounts of stress.

Back to you: If they're always expecting their parents to wake them up every morning - how are they going to fare when (if?) they move out?

I was just like the kids the op described. Turns out, I never could make it to early college classes (so I got Cs in anything pre 9AM). I quickly learned to only sign up for later classes. Then, I entered the workforce as a software engineer, working for companies where I could head in late. Life’s worked out ok for me.

Turns out, you can live a perfectly happy life in which others don’t dictate your morning routine.

yes, middle schooler and more so high-schoolers should be responsible enough to get up in the morning and be ready by themselves.

My kids are 5y and 3y, and the oldest has just started kindergarten. I'll wake them up if need be, and then if they're ready for breakfast on time they each get a penny. Boy do they want that penny!

With older kids I would imagine some sort of just "here's an alarm clock, getting up and ready for school is your job" would work, but I've never been a parent of older kids ;)

After you drop them off, but before you go to work - can you work from home at your kitchen table with your laptop and coffee?

I could, but I don't need to. My work is super chill. I show up when I want to and leave when I want to. We are encouraged to use the fitness facilities every day, so I usually spend an hour or so working out midday as well.

This is baffling. After elementary school, my parents didn't have to think about me at all in the morning. During elementary school, my mom gave me a ride to school on the way to work, and if anybody needed waking up, it was her. A few times in middle school, I missed the bus.

I wonder why we are required to work 8 hours instead of just 2 every day.

I'm curious about what you need to do to get your kids ready for school?

I'm not sure what age middle schoolers are (haven't heard of that term before), but shouldn't kids be capable of waking up, dressing, and going to school by themselves by they're hitting Gr.3 and up (and definitely by high school!).

Alternative: slow afternoons? I mean, my routine usually has me start with tech/work at 6am, but I wrap up around 2:30 and put some hours outdoors or in my other hobbies.

I think the important part is just not spending ALL DAY doing any one thing.

My grandma has a saying - "Everything in moderation, including moderation"

Both! I've always though 9am-2pm are ideal work hours (with a lunch break).

I’m doing this as well. 7am-12pm for Deep focused work.

1pm-3pm for gym

3-5pm for reflection, thinking and writing.

You still my schedule :) It works well for intermittent fasting. 5pm is the first and only meal.

I have always heard the saying attributed to Oscar Wilde.

Nice - then my grandmother has good taste :) thanks for the source.

Or slow evening.

My work routine is up at 9:15am, out the door by 9:45am, at work at 10am, work through to 6pm, home by 6:15pm, and then the next ~7 hours are for family, friends, hobbies, a leisurely dinner, etc. Some days I'll come home from work, eat dinner, take a nap, and then wake up with several hours of uninterupted time to focus on personal things. It's great!

> I think the important part is just not spending ALL DAY doing any one thing.

I could not agree more.

As someone whose default ringer setting is off unless I'm expecting a call, and have been like that for almost a decade, giving fewer people a guaranteed option on my time is a great start to being able to build and choose with calm, higher quality decisions. We get what we reward. When you don't set boundaries, you can't expect other people to anticipate them, let alone respect the ones you have in effect imagined. Writing and answering emails at 2am just makes you the 2am email guy and who wants that person in their life?

In the morning, I read from a physical book first thing to set a boundary between my real day and the internet. It's not a trick and I usually forget most of what I've read, but it's a boundary I set and a choice about how I relate to the world. Forget about hacks to steal back moments so you can find a way to bear the suffering you've accepted as normal. Just learn to value calm, and place its priority above everything you feasibly can.

The quality of the decisions you make as a result of valuing calmness as a principle will alter the trajectory of your life. It can't always be the supreme priority, but being deliberate about making exceptions to it is most of the way there. When we worry about missing opportunities (FOMO), we tend to overlook that it presupposes those opportunities come from someone else. It is a figment of how we have chosen to relate to those perceived people. It also goes away as a result of recognizing that perception as an inessential obstacle to the calm that you value.

Sure, if you haven't set boundaries before, choosing to set them will be disruptive, initially. The relationships that dropped off were the ones that involved emergencies, panics, and ultimatums. They were also similar to the ones that dropped off anyway once I became more successful because their basis in shared, co-misery wasn't there anymore. It creates a self-selecting filter where your only remaining connections are to people who respect those boundaries, and in effect, you.

Anecdotally, it's a pretty good way to live.

This "tech-life balance" approach is a start and is a sign of the need we have for it. I'd argue a more effective approach would be to just choose calm. Make an active decision about how you relate to the machines and the perceived relationships they represent, using calmness not as a goal or temporary state, but as a principle.

Then, turn off your ringer.

> When we worry about missing opportunities

Becoming an entrepreneur cured me of this worry, because I realized that there is no shortage of opportunities -- they're all around us all the time, the trick is in noticing the ones that can be of value to you.

Since they're common, there's no problem with missing one. Another one is right around the corner.

This also helped me avoid some really bad business decisions.

There's no shortage of demands on your time. There's absolutely a shortage of true opportunities. This is because if someone manages to convince you that spending your time on their thing, then they benefit.

So everyone packages their demands as opportunities.

I've yet to see a shortage of opportunities.

However, I agree with you that if someone is coming to you with something that they're presenting as an opportunity, it most likely isn't. Actual opportunities rarely come that way.

Ok, now I get to trot out my framework for determining whether something is an opportunity or not. There are three basic ways to get ahead, a) to climb a ladder up a mountain, b) to build a ladder up a mountain that already exists, c) or to build a mountain. Only the first qualifies as an opportunity.

Most 'opportunities' are really just directions to places on mountains to build ladders, or places where no mountain exists.

Access to real ladders to ascend real mountains is heavily guarded and rare. Finding places to build ladders is probably what you're thinking of as an opportunity, but I would not consider that opportunity.

If I had few million bucks in the bank to enter a market with, then I can consider building ladders a real opportunity.

In my view, an opportunity (in a business sense) is when you find a need people have that isn't being adequately fulfilled. You capitalize on the opportunity by fulfilling it. 99% of the time, you don't need a few millions to do this.

I'm not talking about "getting ahead" in the sense that you seem to be. That's a different, and much more complicated, topic.

To enter a market you need to build a firm and develop a product. This requires non-trivial time and resources and is risky. Without the resources you can only try it a few times in a lifetime. With the resources, you can keep trying until you find success.

It's building a ladder up a mountain that already exists.

> This requires non-trivial time and resources and is risky.

Absolutely true. You need to take a risk to take advantage of an opportunity.

> Without the resources you can only try it a few times in a lifetime.

If you have time and determination, you really do have all the resources that are necessary (unless you're wanting a get-rich-quick type of thing, of course). There's nothing that limits you to a few times in a lifetime.

Sure, with time and determination, you can build a ladder up a mountain. But one path is as good as another if that's the case. All the 'opportunities' you're ignoring aren't opportunities, they're noise

A real opportunity compels you to take advantage of it, you really are losing something if you don't follow it up.

What's limiting you to a few tries to a lifetime is time. It takes 5-10 years to properly validate a business model, you can only do that so many times. And you might not be in the same place after an attempt that you were before, meaning it might take even more time.

I think that we may be defining "opportunity" differently. It sounds like you're defining it more like a "windfall". To me, an opportunity is when you see a path to enhancing your success. It is not automatically success, and does not imply that no effort is required on your part.

An opportunity is when you find a way of advancing your goals that has a reasonably good chance of success.

> It takes 5-10 years to properly validate a business model,

Except that it doesn't. And you should never go into business with a business model that is so fixed that the only thing you can do is to validate it or not. Your business model is something that you are continually adjusting (sometimes radically) as you learn more about what you're doing or as your situation changes.

> To me, an opportunity is when you see a path to enhancing your success. It is not automatically success, and does not imply that no effort is required on your part.

It's not lack of effort that defines opportunity but the reduction of risk. If someone offers me an opportunity, that means I can work hard and have more of a guarantee of success than if I went and did something else.

Opportunity means it's not just your intuition, effort, and resourcefulness that mitigates risk. Some other factor is helping. Some other company or person is offering you crucial advice and resources. Like Dr. Dre mentoring Eminem. That's an opportunity. You have to get lucky to find one, and then you have to be ready to jump on it.

Getting to the top of a mountain always takes effort, it's just a question of how much it takes to get to the top and whether the direction you pick is the right one.

I think what you’re talking about is arbitrage: finding $20 bucks on the ground is an opportunity, but building a whole new currency isn’t. I’m not sure it’s that simple, but it’s certainly an interesting idea.

Brilliant and incredibly well written. Thank you. Another principle to add to calm/peace could be joy.

Interesting.

A couple of decades ago, I developed a habit of waking up early enough that I don't have to do anything at all for at least the first hour of my waking day.

This was accidental at first, but it improved my life so much that I never stopped doing it. It never occurred to me that this was anything other than a personal quirk.

I'm struck by a couple of things,

Getting up at 4.30am seems excessive and presumably requires going to bed at 8-9pm

I can't imagine doing this with a child

What time do you think little children go to bed?

We currently aim for 7.30 on a school night but might need to push it a little earlier, it depends on how well I manage to get her to school in the morning.

I work on the basis that younger children do better with about 10-11 hours sleep

If you go to bed at the same time as your kids you could get up at 4:30 and get 9 hours in bed. Really there's a slider for "free time at night" and "free time in the morning" that you can adjust; my wife is a evening person, so she gets up 30 minutes after the kids are up. I'm a morning person, so I get up an hour before the kids are up.

Children tend to be solar powered. Getting them to bed before 10pm in mid summer nights can be a real challenge in northern latitudes.

Black out curtains really help. But starting the bedtime routine when the sun is out is a real chore. I honestly have no idea how Alaskans get their kids to sleep at all in the summer.

Blackout curtains definitely help here in Seattle, I grew up in the UK where it's even worse.

The other thing that helps is consistency and bedtime rituals, that being said I'm glad that as school starts the nights are already noticably longer and we'll soon be able to watch the sunset and be in bed on time

I really can't agree its "a challenge", I went to bed at 8pm every single evening as a young child. I remember it being still light out in the summer when I was went to bed, but there wasn't a choice, I was to be in bed, so I went to bed with a groan. Same with my siblings, we were all in bed at 8pm sharp every single day, no exceptions.

It's about setting firm rules and sticking to them.

And my parents made me go to bed at 8pm but I stayed awake until 2am. I’m not sure of the point you’re trying to make.

I think this depends on the particular child. I had one who needed to be put to bed early or the next day was going to be a nightmare for everybody. But I had another one who didn't do well with an early bedtime.

I don't think there are many one-size-fits-all answers when it comes to kids.

Honestly, they go to bed at the time the parent sets a routine after probably 3 or 4yo. My kids consistently go to bed at 9pm for school, 10pm on weekends/summer, and typically no problems going to sleep or waking up in the morning. It's been like that for years now. The time they did have trouble going to sleep at the right time is when they visited grandma for 2 weeks and had a wild and inconsistent sleep schedule the entire time. It took them about 2 weeks to adjust back to the normal routine. One hour adjustment from weekends etc is easy, but 2-3 hour adjustment is a huge stumbling block

As a new father who goes to bed at 8-9pm and gets up around 3-4am, I can't imagine _not_ doing this with a child.

Indeed, and I remember those years too

right now I have to get a kiddo to school by 7.50am, so we get up at 6.30 and she goes to bed at 7.30.

TFA is talking about carving out 4 hours a morning of "me time". It's hard to do that with a kid and a job

It will change over time. My child is now in high school, but not yet driving age, so I have to provide much of the transportation. School starts at 7:30am, 4 days a week (0 period) and 9am the other day. He has after school activities that means he gets home at 9:30pm 2-3 nights a week. He stays at school the entire time and studies or goofs off with the rest of the band students depending on his workload.

Going to bed before 10pm is basically impossible for us. 11pm is more common. Then it's up again between 5:30 and 6:30 to do it all again.

My kids go to bed at 6pm.

What age are they? My 10yr old daughter is at soccer practice at 6pm... My 7yr old is reading books until about 8pm.

3 years and 9 months. Not a very representative sample, I'll admit.

I can't imagine ever going to bed unless it's completely dark outside.

I did grow up in the northern latitudes somewhat, so going to bed before 11pm in the summer would be ridiculous. We were out playing with friends until 9-10pm, easily.

It doesn't really get dark wherei live in June/early July, and from April until mid august midnight is more like dusk.

You can get blackout curtains that work very well.

If you can consistently wake up at 430AM in a standard workday and just carve out 5 hours of freetime in addition to the time others have you're either a savant, an inhuman monster who doesn't need sleep, or your job probably doesn't require you to do that much. Either way I'm not going to take your advice too seriously when it comes to universality.

Also could we maybe get an example of a person with a real job doing this? "Employee engagement" isn't exactly the kind of thing that requires, you know, faculties.

I have a real job and do this. I don't get up at 4:30am, though. I get up at 5am.

I get up at 5 am for morning me-time, even on the weekends. It was never a goal; I just tend to wake up after 6 hours. I'm sure it's not healthy.

You might just be lucky https://www.chronobiology.com/short-sleepers-1-percent-popul...

Employee engagement sounds like talking to people, and that would drain me much faster than programming.

Yo. AMA.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899933

And you probably don't have young children.

I have young children and waking up at 5am every morning is a life saver for me. By the time I finish the bedtime routine at night I'm usually too drained to do much that's productive, but by waking up at least 90 minutes before the rest of the house it gives me valuable quiet time to after a decent night's sleep to get things done.

That was me too when I had a toddler at home. I got a lot done before the "work day" began and in the evening I was too fried to do much more than be a good member of the family.

I do 6:15 instead I only get about an hour of time to myself (some of which is taken up by a quick shower), but it's amazing.

Children. I get up about 4:45 AM. Thirty minutes for myself, then microwave my son's bottle. Twenty minutes to get him ready, if I'm lucky, then twenty more to get to a diner that opens at 6 for breakfast. Daycare opens at 6:30, at work at 7AM. Don't work more than 10 hours because daycare closes at 6PM.

Yeah, Before Children (BC) the World is your oyster.

At least you get one day off every week if you’re doing 10 hours a day, right?

The good thing about children is every phase will pass. Them waking uber early will gradually lessen and you will be able to get up a bit early and enjoy some time to yourself. I’m finally past the super early phase with my second and I can now get up early and play guitar with no interruptions.

> Children. I get up about 4:45 AM. Thirty minutes for myself, then microwave my son's bottle.

Sure, but that's when kids are fairly young. That'll pass when he heads off to primary school (elementary?). Well until the next one and then you decide NO MORE! :)

> Don't work more than 10 hours because daycare closes at 6PM

My advice would be cut that back to eight hours at most (or else burn out will hit you), unless of course you've got some mad distanced round trip between office/home/daycare in which case that's understandable. Or you get paid a stupidly amazing salary where sticking this out for 5-7 years means you can extricate yourself to a slower pace of life.

2 children (1 can no longer be classified as young) and I get up between 4-5 most days. Occasionally I have breaks where I sleep in till 10 am (lol - see aforementioned kids) but it's definitely doable. Just don't be dogmatic and listen to your body.

I do this. I exercise, chill out, and then write fiction for a few hours before I go to work.

I wouldn't say I'm an overachiever but I do work at a fairly high-pressure, competitive BigCorp. Haven't been fired yet, and my performance reviews are fine. The truth is that if somebody else owns 100% of your highest level creative output, he owns your soul too, and I'm just not down for that.

It does mean making sacrifices in other areas, but for me personally the alternatives are worse. Obviously not everybody has the luxury of so much (theoretical) free time.

It's amazing to me how many of the responses in this thread missed the "and" clause in the first sentence. If you're getting up early and your kids get up an hour or so after you, you don't have "5 hours of free time[sic]".

I tried this regime back in the 90's for a year or so in my late 20's. Woke up at 4:45am, showered, coffee, quick listen to the news on Radio 4 then read a book for an hour, fiddled with some code for work then jumped in the car to head to work at 8am.

At the time I was also a field engineer so I could be sent off on a 400 mile round trip to resolve a customer issue on-site. The drive to the office was 50-60 mins as well.

During the working week I often I wasn't getting home until around 7:30pm and by 9:30pm I was dead to the world.

It was shit. I had no social life and wouldn't see friends until the weekend (usually a Saturday because on a Friday I was buggered - I did in fact fall asleep in the pub one night after just one pint).

In the end I thought "fuck this", went back to my old regime of fall out of bed at 7:45am'ish, coffee, jump in car and life significantly improved. I got to see my pals in the evening if I wanted to and could also spend a couple of hours in the evening fiddling with code, reading books and even watching a bit of telly.

So yeah I kinda wholeheartedly agree with your comment.

I've been adopting this approach in order to have higher-quality free time. I find that if I wake up early (around 7:30) then I can take an hour or so to myself in the mornings to read, play a game, or work on a personal project, and I have my full brainpower to apply to it. However by the time I get home from work around 6, I don't have nearly as much energy to put in to the same activities, and can't focus as easily or make as much progress.

Am I the only person who can never have "full brainpower" anytime within 3 hours of waking up?

For me it's more like 4-5 hours..

For me, it's slow afternoons. I'm more productive on tech things in the morning, so I don't want to slow myself then. Around 3pm, though, I like to take off until around 6 or so. It really feels better to have a gotten a bunch of stuff done before I slow down.

Yup. Sometimes, I'll do like 15m of yoga in the morning. i think the key is not to rush it. don't rush your breakfast (if you eat it), don't rush your brushing teeth, your shower, etc.

So it seems the "secret" to tech-life balance is choosing more life than tech? Don't get me wrong, I'm all about tech-life balance and work-life balance (which this article and the problem in general heavily overlaps with), but the secret is conciously organizing your life to have more life than tech. Part of this is finding a job that allows you to choose life outside of office hours. Having more free mornings to do things not related to tech is probably a symptom of achieving a better tech-life balance.

Do these types of jobs even exist anymore in tech? At least in SV, every job I've come across these days seem to require on-call and an implicit requirement to work into the night hours in order to finish your work. Not to mention super competitive teammates that don't mind working 24/7 and putting pressure on me to work even longer. I would gladly take a minimum 25% pay reduction if it meant I only needed to work 9-5pm with no obligation to answer emails or Slack messages after-hours. I would love to hear examples of companies with this type of WLB if they do exist.

> Do these types of jobs even exist anymore in tech?

Yes, they do (although maybe not in SV). They're not even rare! I'm working at one right now -- and, honestly, that's how it's been at nearly every tech job I've had over my career.

I'm the only dev at a small consulting firm (3-5 people, including owners). I'm payed for 40hrs/week but rarely put in more than 35. This is completely accepted. Even though we're all very enthused about the work that we do and want to deliver the best that we can, it's always understood that work is not everyones highest priority at all times.

I leave my work phone at the office when I leave.

My job in a tech startup in NYC is 9-5. We are on call on rotation, which usually means two or so weeks a year. I don't look at Slack or email after 5pm nor do I have any notifications on my phone for any work-related app (just Slack for now).

It really hasn't affected my career - I just got a raise/promotion actually. My experience is that the "I love to work!" type of employees just get more work assigned to them instead of rewards.

One of the big reasons I love being an east coaster working remote for a west coast company is that my day is more like 11am/noon to 8pm+ ... As a night owl that works great for me because I still get plenty of sleep even if I stay up until 4am.

Does anyone else here find that the idea of a slow morning could have anything to do with the decline of quality, youth playtime, or time parents spend with kids. I found a fantastic article about this here a few months back that reminds me of what Hanock does here. Definitely worthy of a try. (https://houseoflawandorder.com/the-alarming-decline-of-quali...)

I think it depends a lot on what you do with your phone/laptop in the morning. If the first thing you do is hop on email or social media, then yes, I can see how that could be psychologically draining.

But if you start with news(ish) type things, that's just another way of "reading the morning paper". I personally start by checking HN and Reddit, and then curated news like the Associated Press app.

I think it's useful to point out that your Reddit and HN are curated too.

I found Reddit's /r/all and logged out experience draining. The defaults on Reddit seem similar to other social media now.

I found the frequency and filter quality of stories on HN to be better during weekdays and working hours. I think HN has better curation with more active users. It feels less like a News source during downtime.

That's fair to point out. They are curated, just curated differently.

I would argue starting the morning without an "infinity pool" (i.e. a site or resource where you can just keep browsing forever) is best.

While I agree with just looking at headlines to get the latest news in tech, I've been on HN and reddit long enough to realize most comments and submissions are the exact same over the years.

>“Technology has done nothing but enhance my life. But how you decide to carve out time for yourself is important,” says Nicole Loher, a 26-year-old marketing consultant for Microsoft. “There was a time when I did transition into being that obsessive with the phone and it didn’t feel that great.” Loher is also a slow-morning devotee and she started her routine a decade ago, frequently waking at 4:30 and spending the hours up to 9 a.m. as “strictly me time.”

So she started this routine when she was 16?

> > Loher is also a slow-morning devotee and she started her routine a decade ago, frequently waking at 4:30 and spending the hours up to 9 a.m. as “strictly me time.”

> So she started this routine when she was 16?

i want to know what high school she was at that wasn't already running classes by 9AM.

I feel like most US high schools have classes by 7:50-8am; not sure how it is elsewhere but this was true in the Great Lakes about a decade ago.

~16 is about when my kids seem to start trying to manage their phone obsessions. There's nothing really weird about it.

Nicole Loher is better known as an Instagram/Tumblr influencer who graduated high school early to work in fashion while attending college in New York (she pretty actively blogged during this time), so it's plausible she started some sort of routine at 16.

ah yes, my slow morning where i wake up at 4:30 am and run a marathon before going to work

Medium server went down to help up improve our tech-life balance.

I’ve been doing this lately. It’s pleasant for sure.

It blows my mind some of the comments here of people who do this. I can literally not recall a time that mornings were not miserable.. and that includes when I am jet lagged (either going to a country, or coming back) and naturally fall asleep by 9pm and awake by 5am. Mornings are boring and I can never really get into enjoying them. The most fun I've had was one time in China I woke up at 4am and went to photograph things at 430am.. But that's not something I'd do every day, and even at the time I felt kinda cranky about it.

I have 2 kids, so have to have some structure to my sleep schedule. Left to my own devices, my natural bed time is 3-4am and I'm awake at 11am-12pm. With kids during school (in summer they sleep in too) it's a bit more reasonable though probably less healthy. Asleep by 1 or 2am and wake up at 8am. They're 9yo and 6yo and the oldest is responsible for getting the younger up if she doesn't wake up with the alarm. They're both 90% ready by the time I wake up (they prefer to wake up at 7am or even 6:30am to have some play and tv time before school). This includes getting themselves dressed, hair and teeth, and the picky youngest packing her own lunch. Their school starts at 8:45am and I'm typically out the door at 8:30am and back by 9am.

I don't really start working until 10am most days, but I'll do some passive stuff like read emails and industry news type stuff while having coffee. At 10am I'm getting started, at 11am on a good day I'm hitting a stride. Typically not doing my best coding work until at least 2pm though after lunch. Depending on how in the zone I am and what I'm doing, I work until 5:30pm to 7pm. I have the benefit of being remote and setting my own hours though, so it's definitely a blessing I know many people aren't fortunate to have. Have dinner with the family after I stop working, and then just relax with dumb activities (TV, social media) and of course bonding stuff with family, until the kids go to bed at 9pm. When they go to sleep I sometimes work for a couple more hours (coordinating with 12 hour different timezone is fun), but more usually relax with peace and quiet playing games, messing around with interesting research (both hobbies and work), or just dumbly watching TV, or do some hobbies (analog photography/darkroom printing)

I sacrifice sleep more than I should, and typically will have a 10 minute power nap after I'm done working.. But honestly, as long as I'm getting 6-7 hours of sleep, I feel just as well as when I'm getting 8 or 9. When I get less than 6 though I definitely regret it the next day. And I don't mean just sleeping in on weekends. I had about 2 weeks this summer where I had no kids, no wife, and basically nothing guiding my sleep schedule. I'd tried naturally sleeping for a week with no alarm and realized I felt more tired and it was consuming a lot of time. I was waking up at 11 or 12. So I started setting my alarm to a more reasonable 10am and was in bed by 3 or 4am, and always felt well rested after I got out of bed.

Some people can not "relax" and enjoy mornings. My goal with mornings is to get that phase of day over with so I can work and then get to a free evening. When I'm jetlagged it's pretty interesting becoming a forced morning person, but it's always proven to me that having 3 hours of free time in the evening is so much more valuable to me than 3 hours of free time in the morning.

Could we just stop using medium altogether? I just get a pop up asking me to pay $5/mo. Not going to happen.

It’s a shame, used to read so much on medium but now I just read the hackernews comments.

Opening medium in midori will flash the content on the screen and then half a second later replace it with a giant full page “500 error” message.

Which is strange because that’s usually a server side problem. If the content made it then it should be a 200 anyway, so if some other asset has a problem they just kill the whole page using client side scripts?

Opening it in elinks fixes the problem of course.

One day, my grand parents told me a secret to access Medium without hassle.

I can't tell you in details since it's a secret but it really works, believe me. It's incredible. It has something to do with herbs, mindfulness and blocking JavaScript. Medium is so great when you do that.

On Android, IceCat Mobile blocks non free JavaScript and on Medium, it's a feature beyond the expectations.

I would call this graceful enhancement, or progressive degradation.

You start with a sane and nice baseline, and then add crap to that for supported browsers and configurations.

I have uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger installed on Firefox, and I can just click anywhere outside that window to see the full article. Not sure it's to do with the browser extensions necessarily, but I don't have a particularly exotic setup.

The only other thing I have which might help is a user chrome file - https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html - which has this simple rule in it:

  html, body { overflow-y: visible !important; }

That seems to help with a lot of the basic "disable scrolling" css rules that sites use.

There is no work-life balance in tech. You can deceive yourself but the balance died out something like 7-8 years ago.

When the wave after wave of tech changes happening and new tools coming into existence, the only lifestyle you can have to stay gainfully employed is: work, work, work until some other commitment (sleep, wife, kids) eat up remainder of your time.

Personally, I think in next 5-10 years, IT workforce will (1) Be well known for burnout and people leaving IT due to burn out. (2) Be further concentrated in parts of world where work is main objective of life (China/India, etc.).

This article isn’t about working in the tech industry

I understand but the whole start off your day slow, be dainty in the morning, etc does not fly well in IT industry I have seen.

People seem to rush to work, I would estimate majority either just grab some breakfast on the way or skip it and work per employee has increased a lot with added pressure to train/keep up to date for last 10 years.

How would anyone at work know if you woke up earlier and enjoyed a slow morning?

There is work life balance. In SF, in particular, some companies treat their tech work force like newborn puppies. Other areas of the country as well treat their engineers like they are unicorns.

If there is a move towards outsourcing it's that the effort of US programmers is lower than abroad and the costs are much higher (I'm not talking about quality, obv)

If you're being mistreated at work, I recommend looking for another employment. Last I checked there was a surplus of 80K programming jobs in the US per year.

I've been in the tech industry working for tech companies for a decade and have never regularly worked more than 40 hours per week. I do not check work email outside of business hours and I do not have email or chat alerts on my phone. I set the expectation with all of my coworkers that they can call me on the phone if there's an emergency outside of normal hours and I'll try to help, but that type of thing should always be handled by our on-call engineer first. If you're speaking from personal experience, you should re-evaluate your employer and how you approach your work life.

This. The only times that I've worked more than 40 hours a week is during an emergence or when working for my own company.

I can't say I've ever had that sweet of a deal (perhaps a byproduct of working at smaller startups), but what you describe is much more in line with my experiences than the nightmare described in comment you responded to.

This isn't representative of my personal experience nor my peer/friend groups' in tech. Anecdata: of the ~5 senior engineer friends I have at large tech companies only one of them consistently works much more than 35 hours a week.

I was actually really heartened to see this article on HN because slow mornings have been life changing for me. Spending 3 quiet hours in the morning on my own pursuits has been wildly mood elevating. Plus, I usually use one of those hours to read about tech (although HN is banned from my morning hours). Five hours of study a week is easily ~240 hours of spaced repetition even if you miss a few weeks, and I would bet good money that it's more studying than the vast majority of my coworkers.

Balance is thriving in SF/SV from what I can see.

This depends enormously on where you're working and what you're optimizing for. "Deceiving yourself" is far too strong: people can easily tell how many hours they're working and whether they're expected to be continuously available.

I have two small kids, so it's important to me that I have a lot of time outside of work. Typically I'm up at 7am, get them ready, bring them to school, get to work ~8:30, leave work ~4:50, kids down ~8:30, bed ~10. I rarely check email outside of work or work in the evenings (only when there's something I'm working on that I'm super excited about) and there's no pressure at all to work more hours than this. I'm not on call.

Not all tech jobs are like this, and I'm lucky I've found one that is a good fit for me, but work-life balance is totally possible.

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