The habit is in the 7th paragraph, after 2 images:
> Rather than trying to complete your task in 20 minutes, take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task. Then go home. Rest. A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Only you will be full of energy, together with a settled plan. No doubt you’ll accomplish your task before lunch.
> A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day.
Unfortunately, in between there's sleep, which is the great feelings eraser / emotional cache flusher. So all that'll happen is that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening, then disappear at night. Come morning, it won't be there, so I'll have to read the plan to hopefully induce that feeling again.
I do the same thing as the author does. Moreover, I keep these notes more frequently, to the project's notebook with my other thoughts during the day.
When I return to the task, I get up to speed in ~10 minutes, and things way go smoother because a) I'll be rested, b) My brain would have processed the plan and came up with a refined version of it. When I read the plan I wrote, I automatically recall the refined version most of the time.
Then, I get to work and finish what I have started.
Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left.
as a non-morning person, it usually takes me about 4-6 hours to get up-to-speed. because there would be some unexpected twists and turns that will distract me from the task.
meanwhile, exact opposite. if i cannot "solve" an issue, if i just wait till the evening by going for a 100+km bicycle ride, i magically solve the problem in the evening (right about at dusk and after).
That doesn't sound like you are a non-morning person, but that you have a very inefficient start of the day. Good news: you might be able to add as much as 20 hours of productivity to your week!
I do cycling, currently based in Luxembourg. I cycle (for fun & sports) about 10.000 (ten-thousand) kilometers per year. I also like 100+km rides, although I do that weekly mostly between mid-April to mid-September period...
I can easily sleep 10 hours, start at any time. It's not a problem of falling asleep, it's a problem of waking up :)
That he doesn’t react to the suggestion of trying daily a few hours of cardio exercises instead preferring a few hours of insomnia, indeed tells me there are other issues in his/her life.
That's because every person who struggles with sleep has heard this advice a thousand times. It just doesn't work for all of us.
I lift weights, and I make sure to do big muscle groups. I wake up around the same time every day, ish. I do not drink coffee in the afternoon. I do not use blue light screens at night. And any number of other advice that people keep bringing up.
Like the comment above that says if you wake up at 06, you will be tired at 23. Yeah, sure, but you still won't be able to sleep. All that does is make you more tired permanently, but sleep still doesn't happen.
People just do not work the same, some people are really more active at night. And this advice is echoed constantly whenever this topic is brought up.
For what it's worth as one bit of advice: Try to make the best of what you can do in those long deep night hours. If you can't use them for sleep, as a deep night owl, then make them count for something else that's useful. Many of history's most interesting, famous and also infamous characters (and overall very productive people by sheer virtue of their achievements) were extreme night owls. It didn't stop them from creating and working.
For certain types of endeavor or work in particular, the part of the day in which the hours are put in isn't nearly so relevant as the hours simply being used in the first place.
Just a few observations from one night owl to another; I can rarely go to sleep before 4 am.
No, it's because if you have an actual medical condition, doing exercise doesn't work. I do exercise daily, it doesn't actually solve the core issue. It's like saying you can solve a broken leg with exercise.
I'm like GP too, I'm usually at my peak performance somewhere after dinner. Used to be a stereotypical night owl, but eventually life forced me to act like a morning person (small kids + partner who is a genuine, bona fide, textbook morning person slash productivity beast).
Close to a decade of that lifestyle, and my body didn't adjust. In my case, there's no insomnia - I indeed start feeling tired around 21:00 - 23:00. Just that my performance curve didn't shift accordingly; only thing that's changed is that I had to give up my most productive parts of day (afternoon, late night), because I'm too tired to do anything at that point.
I don't get it, what do you do for 4 to 6 hours? I can understand an hour as sometimes I get coffee and relax into the work but 4 to 6 hours? That's like most of the workday already gone.
So they're just in a state of quasi work for the entire day in the evenings too? If they spend 6 hours on easy tasks when do they have the time for the hard tasks unless they work something like 12 hour days?
I'm not a "very" morning person. I generally wake around 7am in the morning, and start my wind-down at 11:00 pm.
I generally plan my next morning and half day before I go to bed. This allows me to create a routine with some flexibility for the morning.
While I can, and like to work, at nights, I do it less and less. Increasing the efficiency of my work routine is a more rewarding process for me. Also, I'm more conscious about my biorhythm now, so I want to give my bods enough time to detox itself, esp around 1-3pm, when your brain "takes the chemical trash out".
> Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left.
That is interesting for me. It's something I wish was the case for me, because I've been struggling with this a lot. I started referring to it as "lack of emotional continuity" or "emotional cache flush". It's like a context switch, but on emotional layer. I basically can't seem to hold on to my emotional state for extended duration, and in particular it gets reset at the day boundary (i.e. when I sleep). This affects both positive and negative emotional states.
Practical consequence of that is that I prefer "sprints" to "marathons" when dealing with tough problems, whether intellectual or emotional - it can take up to an hour for me to "work myself up" the right way to focus on a hard task, or to talk about some difficult personal topics, so I need to make the best of it.
I really, really wish there was a way to do the emotional equivalent of the "write down plans and thoughts at the end of day, read them again in the morning" trick.
Curious. That's the complete opposite of me. My sleep is akin to MacBook's Power Nap. Everything stays put except some small background processes. My version also has good and bad sides (esp. dealing with hard events in life).
I understand how your emotions/body work and how upsetting the current "configuration" is, but maybe it's the way because your body is trying to process or overcome something in the grand scale.
Did you try meditation, esp. not the canned ones from the apps, but a proper practice with a proper instructor and mentor? A good practice generally help you to understand what makes you tick, or live a more balanced inner life, which may help you reducing in this "work up" time, or change the things which you doesn't like about yourself.
I will first offer you a cliche from a movie that I saw in my pre-adolescence in the '70s from a much older era, the title of which I do not recall:
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
How I obey this rule at the end of the day is to continue my code in the necessary points, interspersed with "blahs" if I am feeling verbose (and necessary means that nothing critical is left out, and nothing irrelevant is included in reminding tomorrow).
How I disobey this rule is to verbally say (out loud) the idea that comes to mind in odd moments, as they are prone, followed by "note this" (at which point everyone around you admires your incomprehensible spontaneous demeanor). This imposes a tag on the inspirational memory of perspective and involvement, and I find that I retain it until no longer needed.
> that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening
I find that it can even ruin an evening. I'll find myself trying to solve a problem in my head rather than being present with my family.
The only thing that works for me is waiting for clean breaks that happen mid-late afternoon. As soon as I reach a happy stopping point, I must stop and switch to shallow work for the rest of the afternoon. Then it's easy to leave my computer at the end of the day.
It's hard but after years of struggling with this, I found a sustainable way to balance work and life.
I also track my consistency with doing this so that I notice myself slipping back and correct it before it becomes a problem.
A good night of sleep induces its own feeling of well-being, excitement, awesomeness. I swear, I have terrible sleep and when I get an 85+ sleep score I'm a different person.
I have 3 small kids. Sleep is an achievement itself. I only get to experience at most two of "good", "night" and "sleep" :).
(Back before that, in some previous night, my body would still take 8-10 hours of sleep if I let it, and the more I did, the more tired I felt throughout the entire day.)
It's weird how thoroughly people have internalized that tl;dr is supposed to be the default way to take in information now. Not only for themselves, but for others.
Most of what I read these days can be captured— almost entirely— by a good tl;dr. Unless I’m reading for pleasure, I’d prefer to read content that is as direct and succinct as possible.
The problem with this approach, that I discovered is, normally what we assume as a filler can have a lot of information for other parts of our brain or life in general.
I have enlightened from many small details in articles, books and papers. While looks unimportant and irrelevant, these parts can knock down dominoes in one's subconscious, resulting in enlightenment or closure on another subject.
Even if that doesn't happen, I learn a couple of more things.
tl;dr: reading tl;drs only is akin to chewing caffeine powder instead of drinking coffee. bland, uninspiring and non-rewarding. What we assume as useless is generally is the spirit of the matter.
> tl;dr: reading tl;drs only is akin to chewing caffeine powder instead of drinking coffee. bland, uninspiring and non-rewarding. What we assume as useless is generally is the spirit of the matter.
Which is how I drink coffee.
Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind). Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with in adulthood). I wouldn't even touch this stuff, if not for it being the universally approved (socially and legally), ubiquitous wakefulness promoter (aka stimulant drug), and better alternatives are much harder to get (even prescribed, they're not meant to serve as coffee replacements). Caffeine powder (in tablets or otherwise) is how you get to "the spirit of the matter" while skipping all the misery and unpleasant side effects.
I suppose it really is a good analogy to most of long-form writing that isn't pure fiction or explicitly for entertainment.
coffee, even without caffeine, contains so much antioxidants, you can sort of imagine the coffee bean as carrying the antioxidant burden of the entire world on its back
I know that everybody has a different metabolism and respect your choices, but I'll kindly disagree and will not accept the blanket statements you did.
> Which is how I drink coffee.
You're not drinking coffee. You're using caffeine as a drug. Which is fine, but the similarity is akin to drinking Soylent and claiming you cooked and ate a particular dish for the lunch.
> Coffee is bitter, awful, and irritates bowel, wasting your time on extra toilet visits (of the longer kind).
Coffee is not awful, and not all coffee is bitter. Lighter roasts have a gentler taste profile (plus higher caffeine), and/or you can select less acidic beans. What I generally brew ends up pretty smooth. Either case, it doesn't irritate my bowels.
I'm not particularly critical of how coffee affects my bowel movements. It doesn't imprison me in a particular place in my home or office. Honestly, if you think spending 10 minutes for your body's needs as a waste of time, I think you have to review your lifestyle choices.
> Adding milk makes things even worse (lactose ain't particularly light to deal with in adulthood).
I'm drinking at least ~400ml milk (for the last 30+ years) and eat good amount of cheese every day. I don't believe this. Don't come with try and see, because I tried, and it changes nothing. My body doesn't care about it.
On the other hand, coffee's stimulant effects is secondary to why I drink coffee. I like its taste, it helps me to digest after lunch, and generally it's a good combination with a cookie or a bitter chocolate in the lunch break before starting the second half of the day. BTW, I drink a bit more than a single cup of coffee every day, because I regulate my intake amount and time, yet I get the benefits. Otherwise, I had periods which I drank 2L per day. So coffee tolerance can be tuned and can be kept in check.
The "spirit of the matter" is coffee as a whole, with all the taste, personal time and whatnot. Caffeine tablets capture a single aspect without any taste or finesse.
It's same for the long form writing. I'm in it not only for the tl;dr, but the story in itself. Funnily, I generally read these while drinking my coffee, so the enjoyment is squared.
We discussed the same thing for the last couple of days with colleagues. Distilling everything doesn't concentrate the contents. You have to lose something, and that something is not only filler for most of the time.
Sure but this is only important if the only thing you care about is absorbing just the information without any of the context around it. That context is often imoprtant.
I wonder what the oldest reference is we can find to this practice. I bet it's very old. Oldest I know of is only the late 19th century, but I bet we could beat that by at least several hundred years. Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?
Small aside someone might find interesting. Hopefully not offtopic. In Catalonia there used to be a thriving textile industry. Workers would work on a garment and fold it when it was time to go home, to unfold it the next day and resume work. That action (to fold) is in Catalan plegar. Still today people use that verb to mean being done with work today. "Quan plegues?" meaning when do you finish work, for example.
> Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?
Doubtful because the concept of clocking and clocking out is an artifact of the shift from mercantilism to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution where people sold their time in exchange for money.
Before that, in Elizabethan England, people were not free agents but subjects of British Empire. Merchants could control their destinies to some extent but did not exchange their labor so much as accumulated wealth through trade. They did not clock in and out.
So, there was not company time vs. personal time. There was just time and people conducted their bowel functions in outhouses and chamber pots befitting their stations.
The idea of avoiding work by taking a shit, though.
Like I could entirely see Julius Caesar’s Gallic Campaign including a bit about punishing some soldier because he always managed to need to shit during the hardest parts of setting up camp, or something like that.
> The idea of avoiding work by taking a shit, though.
That's not why you poop on company time. Rather, because a) you get paid for it, b) the company pays for water and hygienic products you use up in the process.
I Found No Peace by Webb Miller, published 1936, which is an autobiographical work by a reporter and war correspondent. I actually got the dates slightly wrong, this would have been the first decade of the 20th, not the 1890s as I thought (he wasn't old enough in that decade for the episode in question to have fallen in the 19th century, it was probably in something like 1905-1908).
Page 13 in my copy (I had trouble finding the passage in the scan I found on Internet Archive, I think it's a later printing that is somewhat abridged). He's writing of working for the state highway department, making road cuts and shoveling gravel:
> Some deliberately delayed the physical calls of nature in the morning until after they came to work. That give them the opportunity of taking ten minutes off. The nonshirkers applied blunt Anglo-Saxon terms to that particular trick.
Given his supplying the term "shirk" in that sentence and the characterization of their label for it as "Anglo-Saxon", I think what he's getting at is they called them "shit shirkers", which is pretty funny.
> Rather than trying to complete your task in 20 minutes, take this time to write down your thoughts, and a step-by-step action plan of what you think you need to do to finish your task. Then go home. Rest. A feeling of incompleteness will motivate you to come back and finalize your work the next day. Only you will be full of energy, together with a settled plan. No doubt you’ll accomplish your task before lunch.