0. Accept that your energy and dopamine levels will slowly go down throughout the day
1. Get enough sleep
2. Take a short nap or meditate (10-15m) after lunch to clear my head.
3. Exercise (even a little bit helps)
4. Accept that you’re not a robot and you will have worse days.
I’m oversimplifying here a bit but: historically humans worked in cycles (one busy day followed by one slower day) and our current approach is not sustainable.
Accept that you’re not a robot and you will have worse days.
Love this advice and wish I’d accepted it sooner.
Give up! You’ll feel better tomorrow and no one will care that you halfassed your work for a day. No one will even know.
I used to see it as giving up, but in practice, this is just a smarter way of working and taking care of yourself.
It's better to have a few lines on half-assed code left for the next day when you can finish it in 5 minutes, with much better quality/clarity because you're well rested.
The alternative being: grinding, writing messy/hard to understand/overcomplicated solutions which will take longer to untangle than the time you thought you'd saved.
I still struggle with this since I think there's an ego/impostor syndrome/anxiety aspect in play here -- I want to feel the reward of having done X, and I want it now, I want to prove to myself that I'm not terrible at this job. Sometimes I need to stay working on something for longer (e.g. an important demo), sometimes it just doesn't make much sense, but my judgement is clouded, because I don't have enough distance to the problem.
Comments
What works for me:
0. Accept that your energy and dopamine levels will slowly go down throughout the day
1. Get enough sleep
2. Take a short nap or meditate (10-15m) after lunch to clear my head.
3. Exercise (even a little bit helps)
4. Accept that you’re not a robot and you will have worse days.
I’m oversimplifying here a bit but: historically humans worked in cycles (one busy day followed by one slower day) and our current approach is not sustainable.
Love this advice and wish I’d accepted it sooner. Give up! You’ll feel better tomorrow and no one will care that you halfassed your work for a day. No one will even know.
I used to see it as giving up, but in practice, this is just a smarter way of working and taking care of yourself.
It's better to have a few lines on half-assed code left for the next day when you can finish it in 5 minutes, with much better quality/clarity because you're well rested.
The alternative being: grinding, writing messy/hard to understand/overcomplicated solutions which will take longer to untangle than the time you thought you'd saved.
I still struggle with this since I think there's an ego/impostor syndrome/anxiety aspect in play here -- I want to feel the reward of having done X, and I want it now, I want to prove to myself that I'm not terrible at this job. Sometimes I need to stay working on something for longer (e.g. an important demo), sometimes it just doesn't make much sense, but my judgement is clouded, because I don't have enough distance to the problem.