Poisoning the Day
ashore.io
ashore.io
Avoid the day. And when it’s done, that’s when your focussed work starts (my favourite adherent of this approach is Demis Hassabis: who works a “second day” from between 11pm and 4am).
Anyway, for me it was easier to wake up earlier than try to do focused work after an exhausting day with children. Doing stuff in the middle of the night is a privilege of the childless anyway.
I think simplistic terms like "morning person" and "night owl" are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché applied to identity. Much like "introvert" and "extrovert".
Also, I have started thinking about my Night Owliness, as a manifestation of avoidant character in general. The "waiting till deadline to do a sprint" type of mentality.
> “Every day is a new beginning. You wake up and at some point in the day, someone shoots up a school, or something’s going on with your family, or you wake up and eat the wrong thing. And then you’re done. Emotionally cooked. Literally and emotionally poisoned.
> Every day I wake up and can get to the studio before something has shattered my existence, I am grateful. And I can do things.
If the day "poisons" me that means I should have been more disciplined - the correct answer to consuming news media, for instance, is always to consume less of it. If someone is consistently poisoning my day the answer is to reduce contact with them.
I think what triggered me was this line - "no early morning notifications - no sudden alert about Putin’s latest military actions."
Unless you're a journalist covering the Ukraine war, you really shouldn't have real time notifications informing you about Putin's military actions, and if you do, that's productivity problem #1.
I'm just saying this guy paints a picture of a constantly interrupted life and from my experience the first line of defense is to reduce the interruptions, with measures that are much more aggressive than the average modern person's.
> Ask: if this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? Don’t ever arrive at your computer without a clear list of priorities, you’ll just read unassociated email and scramble your brain for the day.
When I read that last bit ("scramble your brain") I had a profound sense of agreement that this was incredibly applicable to me. I feel like distractions 'poison' my vibe, productivity, priorities, and most importantly, distract that bit of my brain that ticks away in the background working on important creative stuff. When it's distracted with news, emails, or other junk, it's unavailable to work on creative/important problems that actually matter.
Sometimes I find it best best to stop my workday before entirely finishing a task: The next morning (or in some cases, the next Monday) there will be an obvious next-step to work on that which I'm already familiar with.
In contrast, arriving without a clear next step can trigger some severe doldrums.
If you read the whole article there’s a section dedicated to evening people.
Regardless, the advice is about avoiding emotionally draining stimuli until you’ve accomplished what you want to do for the day.
You can wake up at noon and still do that. The root problem is that people are consuming large amounts of negative news and social media early in the day and draining their mental capacity before they even get started on what they want to do.
I see this all the time in, for example, junior hires. Some of them will tell me they’re exhausted or they have no time to do anything outside of their 40 hour workweek. When I ask some questions to figure out where their time is going every day, it always comes down to spending so much time on phones and watching Netflix that their time and energy are fully consumed before they have a chance at anything else.
The advice in the article is good and it’s not about being a morning person.
That's not necessarily true. If you're a morning person managing other people that are not morning people but insist on having daily meetings in the morning, you're an asshole. I find meetings early in the morning sadistic and way more draining than reading the news, but I'm not the type that gets emotional about the news while I will react negatively in an early meeting at the drop of a pin. It's not about needing coffee nor did I get up on the wrong side of the bed or whatever demeaning quip you want to offer. I'm not up to speed until later in the day, and forcing me to pretend I am is just rude. This is the biggest downside to WFH where everyone can live in whatever timezone so someone's afternoon meeting is my morning rather than just scheduling the meeting where everyone is on the same schedule. It's one of the few things about working in an office I can appreciate. Definitely not to be misread as a vote for RTO.
This of course raises the question why forcing morning meetings on morning people is an asshole move, but forcing morning people to meet afternoon people in the afternoon is OK.
Can I suggest that maybe we all need to put on our big-boy/girl pants and accept that the world has more people than ourselves? And that this means we all need to compromise from time to time?
It is absolutely impossible to get any team efforts done in a world where everybody insists we all exclusively work in their own preferred style of work.
Get a grip. Most managers try to accomodate folks, but core working hours exist for a reason.
It's a perfunctory mention of the exact kind morning people commonly throw out to superficially address an evening person's actual constraints.
The article's whole thesis is that after some point in the day your emotions will end up fried. An evening person can't simply flip the arrow of time to make it so that before that point in the day, their emotions have started off fried but then get unfried afterwards. Rather completely different approaches are needed.
The most important part of any meta thinking is to know thyself. I'm sure this article is thoroughly useful for a subset of people, but not me. It would be nice if authors were upfront about the constraints they are writing from, and especially if they didn't try to hand wave them away.
For myself, the news does not significantly affect my emotions more than a handful of times per year. I'm certainly not getting exposed to it or other goings-on through adversarial notifications. And my actual mobile pocket device generally lives by the door. Those are basic table stakes for my own existence.
But I remember that I used to be an evening person. And what I remember is that in the evening things got quiet in my head. Yes, usually "emotional" things happened during the day, but after 8-9 PM I had a boost of clarity and could get some difficult tasks.
Fwiw, I wrote about it here:
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/the-inner-game-of-knowledge-wo...
It’s something I struggle with, too.
I've come up with the same, internalised, realisation, based on my relation with religion & science. Both are a way to describe our world with metaphors (e.g. electric & water currents). At some point, for some people, one is a more attractive way, to describe our relation with the environment.
The brain is becoming more physically tired during the day. At a certain point, say 5pm, it's done: the accumulated wear and tear is too much. Try again after sleeping.
This might not be a concern at 20 but is at 60 (Bezos' age).
There isn’t a whole lot you can do with it if you don’t have the freedom to work when you’re energised and stop when you’re not. A lot of us in the software industry have the advantage of being able to not work a lot during “normal hours” and then pull off an entire weeks worth of work on a Saturday, but a lot of us don’t. I worked 30 hours a week for a while (37 is normal in Denmark) and I consistently scores between 20-30% better on our infernal measurements for quality and productivity than I did when I went back to a 37 hour week. Not because I was doing anything different, felt less motivated or was intentionally trying to do anything different. I was simply more tired and it impacted me more than it might do to neurotypical (or whatever we call healthy people these days). Of course for me personally the 37 hours are way better because it pays 20% more.
Anyway, even if you aren’t neurodivergent like me I still suspect you’re not cut out to do office work as though you were at an assembly line. Which is really where the modern “work week” originated. Cutting down on distractions, getting enough sleep and so on will obviously work in your favour. So yeah, I agree with you.
Did you miss a comma, or, like, where did that come from?
This is a real problem for people who have a habit of reading a lot of news and social media first thing in the morning. Some people show up to work having consumed hours of the latest rage-bait on Reddit, sky-is-falling takes on Twitter, and news about the latest wars, disasters, and political problems. They’re emotionally and mentally burdened before they even get started on work.
It often manifests as people claiming they don’t have any time to do anything outside of their 40 hour work weeks. I’ve mentored several early 20s people working relatively easy jobs, having no significant other or kids, and no real obligations who lament how they never have time or energy to do anything after working 40 hour jobs. Every single time having them check their screen time stats results in eye-popping amounts of Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and other endless streams of stress and ragebait content. Putting a 30 minute limit on these apps with their phone’s built-in tools can work wonders on fixing their lives.
I think a better approach is to focus on becoming emotionally resilient so that things don't overwhelm so easily, or so it's possible to reset even given an emotional challenge. At least, that has been critical in my life to avoid spirals of self-recrimination or agonizing over things I can't affect or control.
Especially if what you want to be productive on is art, it's good to take advantage of the time when you feel most connected to yourself. But I find that connection requires lowering all of my defenses, including to the outside world. So it's still best to do that before I've been beset by the news.
At the same time, being more resilient can help me get other useful stuff done through the rest of the day, including stuff that is sort of adjacent to the art-making process. (For example, I make music and it's hard to find an inspired melody later in the afternoon when my head is aswirl with the chaos of the world, but I can still putter around with sound design and mixing.)
Yes I absolutely agree, and I should have said it. Thank you for making this point.
Emotional resiliency is not just about receiving negative stimuli and recovering from that. It's as much about knowing yourself well, knowing what kinds of situations or stimuli you should try to avoid or minimize, and knowing where and when you can best function to your full potential. So I very much agree with what you're saying.
While his portfolio is no doubt impressive (including names such as Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey and Lorde), this is still a bit too much hyperbole for my taste...
Interestingly, late afternoon is the time that I am most productive when coding. At 6pm when work ends I often feel that I could easily go on for another few hours
Work/life balance is important so I should probably listen to my body and focus when it wants to.
Too much focus on how to optimise your day, your schedule and not much emphasis on how to feel motivated about work you’re doing.
Because kids are professional day poisoners."
When it's legal and otherwise sound I prefer to work and do business with parents for partly this reason. If they've managed to navigate the first few years of broken sleep and don't use work as escapism, then they're probably pretty hardy.
But has anyone found success re-establishing that fresh mind without sleeping?
Maybe meditation can help?
Has anyone had the experience where if you try to watch an anthill (or just many ants in one place), your vision gets out of focus after a couple of seconds? And you can't just re-focus, even after turning away from the ants. It takes a while until you are able to focus again.
It's very relaxing. I'm wondering if this is the same effect they are after with the animation.
Nietzsche noticed the importance of this even living in solitude a century before the Internet- he found even if he read books in it morning, it could “poison” his thinking the rest of the day, so he didn’t read until he was done working. Like him or not he stands out as someone that consistently came up with really creative and new perspectives, and managed to publish a lot of writing on them.
I think this is true, but find the Internet very addicting- it is really hard to just not use it casually until I’m done working, when my work itself requires being on a computer and looking up information. The Internet is a nuclear bomb of distraction and emotional manipulation compared to whatever books Nietzsche was likely reading in the 1800s.
This advice holds true for me. The days I don’t have anything bother me go well. The days that I do, don’t.
Or maybe online minimalism. The "digital" is kind of orthogonal.
I suggest countering it with a concept of "day reusability". You know, just as with rockets...
Russian? Chinese?
I think it's a bit condescending towards people whose day quite physically depends on the absence of this kind of news. It's not like Putin is invading Manhattan currently.
do better. try harder.