How I spent my summer… vacation?
by Matt May
Happy summer!
I’m going to kick this off with the most important news first: office hours return next week. I’ll post the link here and on LinkedIn next Monday, for slots on Thursday, August 21st. Consider this post a palate cleanser; I plan on posting more regularly again starting now.
This has been an active summer for me, some of which I’ll detail below. My major project over the first half of the year, which I hope to be able to talk about soon, is about burnout, and working on it forced me to confront my own experiences with it once again. After announcing my plans to reform my own company around helping others experiencing the same things I have, I decided that, rather than rush into a new work project, I’d take the time to do some literal and figurative deep cleaning.
For example, have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish I had several days to finally organize all the files I have spread out over a dozen different machines, so that I always have the latest versions and avoid having several copies of all my photo shoots that I have to de-dupe by hand?” And then bought a bunch of new storage, moved some of it offsite, and made sure you never lose a Taj Mahal photo set again? Friends, I have done that, backed it all up to high heaven, and it is everything I hoped it would be. My new filing technique is unstoppable.
Now I’m working on a couple things I have been neglecting for a while: my health, and a working schedule. By which I mean, principally, a schedule that works for me. What I’ve found is that the two go hand in hand. I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned, and what’s been working for me. (This touches on exercise, which I’m forced to admit is a key component to my wellbeing, but doesn’t talk about weight or diet, because I’m not optimizing for them. The point of this is to get you to think about what might work better for you, not to evangelize what works for me to everyone.)
For a long time, I’ve struggled with insomnia. While I was on stimulant medication for my ADHD, I found it was only effective from day to day if I could manage to get as close to a full night’s sleep as possible. Which is a lot like figuring out how to get your Ferrari to speed up the driveway and into the garage without crashing into the backyard. When the timing didn’t work just right, I was just as unfocused as if I hadn’t taken meds, and exhausted to boot. I’ve learned over the years that I’m hypersensitive to most medications, and when it comes to my circadian rhythm, I’d rather come up short on energy and be sluggish in the evening than be overstimulated all day and into the night. Prescription stimulants are a fairly blunt instrument for me: I can’t manage them with any precision, much less feed and hydrate myself so they don’t run wild.
Dr. Edward Hallowell, patron saint of ADHD, says in his books that his favorite medication is caffeine. It’s cheap, ubiquitous, and relatively easy to manage one’s dosage over the day. So this time around, I’ve started treating it like my helper. Getting down to the numbers: it’s generally considered safe to consume 3-5mg of caffeine per kilogram of mass, and I’m well within that boundary. I have one shot in the morning, probably around 75mg, which will get me going. I’ve found that a 100mg dose at 11am gets me through the rest of the day. (I’ve also learned, after crashing hard while out shopping one day, that I can’t just miss that dose anymore. I now keep emergency backup caffeine in my bag, and in the car.)
There are now scads of caffeinated waters out there, and I’ve found two that I love: Phocus and Ardor. They both have 100mg of both caffeine and L-theanine, which reportedly keeps the jitters at bay. I realized that in the past, my second hit of caffeine would usually be something like a Coke, which also comes with about 35 grams of sugar, and that would mask or even counteract the caffeine. These drinks don’t have any sugar (real or manufactured). If you like LaCroix, and caffeine, I highly recommend giving them a try.
Okay, that’s my brain fuel sorted. Now to work on my body. As it turns out, COVID-19 did a number on my heart and lungs two years before I even contracted it. During the 2020 quarantine period, my VO2max (a measure of one’s maximum aerobic capacity) plummeted. When my daily activities stopped, so did my exercise, and the most I managed that summer was a few walks. So I canceled the gym membership (it was quarantined anyway) and got a Peloton. I used it religiously at first, then sporadically, and eventually was down to once a month for the last few years.
I just recently figured out my problem sticking to a workout schedule. I was only ever doing it first thing in the morning, when the brain wasn’t firing, and my motivation was at its lowest. I never thought any other time could work. When I pushed off doing rides, that put me in a shame spiral, and then I would just give up. This is where having a schedule of my own kicks in! After experimenting with different workout times, I’ve found that 10-11am is my sweet spot. I’m awake from the coffee, but not so much that my heart is pounding while I’m exercising. And once I’m cooled down again, I get more caffeine to keep going! It’s the perfect plan, and also reason #323 why I’m probably not suited to office life.
I mentioned having a schedule as one of my needs, but I use that term fairly loosely. I don’t have an alarm app pinging me hourly with what I need to do. (I don’t even use an alarm clock, unless I have a flight or an early meeting.) However, I do have zones in my day where I know certain things fit:
- 7-8am up, make coffee, breakfast
- 10-11am work out
- 11am caffeinate, light tasks
- 12pm lunch
- 1pm-? GOOD BRAIN TIME
The last big revelation I’ve had is probably totally obvious to neurotypical folks, but was like magic to me: have fun activities that are easy to pick up and do when you have downtime. If I have a few free minutes, I have a guitar nearby that’s good for a few minutes banging out a song I know, or over an hour practicing something new. I have projects I can choose to work on with little to no setup time. I try to leave as little friction as possible to get into and out of these little joys, and even to interleave them with work and chores. They keep my brain active and satisfied, something that office work never did.
The (lost) future of work
Throughout both school and work, I’ve been trained to believe that if I can’t sit still for hours at a time seeing a single task to completion, with no other outlet for my energies, then I’m the one that’s broken. But while that part hasn’t come naturally to me, I’ve still managed to get a lot done. Trying to force myself into that box in order to be recognized as valuable only succeeded in stressing me out. And as long as I’m responsible for my own work, hell if I’m going to measure my performance by how many hours in a row I can stare at a cursor.
I recognize that those of you with children are probably scoffing at the idea of taking an arbitrary amount of time to figure out what kind of schedule is optimal for you. What I would say in response is that the culture of 9 to 5 (or 9 to 6, or 9 to 9 is so baked in, at least to American culture, that I’m guessing most of us have never had the time to think about what we’d like best. And that’s great—for the bosses.
We’re entering the most volatile period for labor at least since the Great Recession, if not the Depression. If laborers can’t even imagine another way to collaborate, one that allows us genuinely to “bring our best selves to work,” then we’ve just thrown away all of the “future of work” discourse of the last 15 or 20 years and are back to being at the will of whoever sees fit to hire us.
This is a terrible time for labor rights, and that doesn’t appear to be changing in the near term. As it is, remote work is all but over, and demands of longer and longer work weeks are getting increasingly explicit. That’s just for starters: benefits of all kinds are next on the chopping block.
Even if change is not readily achievable in this political climate, we should at least be thinking of ways to make it easier to integrate more people into the workforce. The only thing that seems to matter right now is how much you can work. Individually, and then collectively, we should put more emphasis on how well we can use the human resources that are available, but aren’t suited to working at fixed times and in fixed environments.
Or we can give in and watch AI replace us all. Your call.
Office hours
…start up again next week. Thursday sessions are free, as usual. Come back on Monday to sign up!