How to beat that exhausted feeling
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
With such an inflexible regime, all it takes is one night of going to bed late (real life can disrupt even the most disciplined schedules) and you're doomed to exhaustion for the rest of the week. Let alone the fact that people aren't clones of one another; not everyone has the same sleep patterns.
As much as everyone trash talks big corporations, I work for one now and have this beautiful thing called flex hours. Unless there's a meeting in the morning (rarely) I'm usually up at 915 and into work before 10am (no rush hour traffic). Some people arrive as late as 11-1130am, but as long as you're doing the work that needs to be done it doesn't matter.
It's a nice balance because it allows me to go to bed ~1am and then any shift in sleep during the week (usually the weekend) isn't so drastic to cause massive exhaustion for the next few days while trying to rotate back.
Those that have flex time are lucky, and I find that programmers are more likely to have this perk. When I was an employee, I didn't explicitly have flex time, but I pretty much lived on the 10-to-6 schedule, coming in at 11 if I needed the extra hour.
I have a few friends (who are also programmers) who explicitly get flex-time.
But my wife, who is a fashion designer for a major department store, does not have that option. She has the classic "corporate" job. Be there at 8:30, attend useless meetings all day, and after 4 or 5pm the real work can finally start. But she has to be there at 8:30, otherwise she's likely to miss a meeting in the morning. The whole process from concept to delivery is one of the most convoluted processes I've ever heard, involving meeting after meeting. Nothing is approved until an army of committees have agreed to it.
Secondly, I also have the option of working from home and can easily just VPN in, except personally I work much better when I'm in a setting that is designated for work only, so I choose to head into the office M-F.
As a programmer there's a lot of flex in big companies that let them come pretty close to the flex of working on a startup. In fact, I would argue that working 80-90 hour weeks (including weekends) on a startup is hardly flexible. The only real difference is whether or not you're working on something that is intrinsically motivating, but I find it's always possible to find meaning in even the most dull of tasks.
For now though, I balance the need for food and rent with pursuing my own ideas.
The thing is, if I left the office in the middle of the day for a walk/gym session, everyone would get noticeably uncomfortable. Mind, I'm not sure how much walking one can get done in a suburban office park.
I can easily work long hours on something I care about, but the pressure to chain myself to the desk and avoid noticeable breaks gets to be quite a drag. In summary I don't think we are disagreeing on anything.
That's what hacker news is for.
Surely a correspondingly early night the next evening will redress things?
I notice that I get brutally exhausted when it's time to change jobs or otherwise move on in life. Can't wake up, have trouble getting things done, generally just worn out.
The funny thing is, if I start something else the next day, like a new job I'm excited about, boom, back to full steam. I don't sleep much and don't want to, work crazy hours and wake up excited about rather than dreading my to-do list.
Thus far the startup life has catered well to that. At one year in I'm still excited almost every day about getting up to work. I work around 100 hours most weeks and it doesn't seem like a chore. I'm really hoping that pattern holds true for the long haul.
OK, I'll stop whining now. :)
Second is that I'm not consulting, so "billable" and "work" aren't the same thing.
Yesterday I spent:
- 1 hour in a meeting with a potential customer
- 2 hours traveling there and back on the subway, during which I read work-related research papers
- 1.5 hours talking with my co-founder about stuff we've got coming up on the horizon
- 1 hour reading and answering mails
- 9 hours, from around 6:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., coding with a break in there for cooking dinner
I then woke back up this morning at 7:30 a.m. and am about to get back to that code, after my morning routine of checking mail and news. :-)
"Exercise is important too, although, says Lipman, this should be restorative rather than exhausting - he doesn't think we are built to run marathons or spend hours on treadmills.
Instead he promotes moderation, focusing on yoga and simple programmes designed to retrain our bodies to rest and recover..."
Not only are human bodies remarkably well-built for running, but it was key in our evolution. Yoga was not.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2004/11/17-running...
Whether we want to believe this or not, all of us could leave our job and find something easier. We might have to downgrade our lifestyle a little but we would survive. So not only do we work jobs that really aren't that tough but we have the flexibility to leave at any time. In short, we need to stop being whiners.
The author maintains that fats and cheap carbs can only interrupt the body and add to its exhaustion. I think this is true only if you fail to shoot the moon.
1. With the caveat that 45 minutes sounds too long to me. It should only take 15 minutes or so for the caffeine to get through your digestive tract. Also, sleeping longer than 15-20 minutes probably results in significant grogginess.
Also: Getting regular exercise helps so much.