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What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

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Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#31

Post by Swizec »

weehobbes wrote: post #21

Few thoughts: For me personally, I experience a lot of ego depletion during the day. But having kids tends to do that. There's no way I can write at the end of the day, I'm just way to mentally tired. Also as someone who both codes and writes, writing is far more emotionally taxing. Coding is problem solving - there is usually a clear path to follow and I generally know when I've solved a problem. Writing for me is u…

Same experience here. Always an owl, always easier to stay up than get up. But damn these days I’m just tired at the end of the day and writing is hard. I can pull it off but it hurts.

In the morning writing is a lot easier. But mornings are also a lot harder to clear up. Girlfriend waking up, bird waking up, gotta shower and stuff, get to the office.

Very easy to fritter away a whole morning and get nothing done. Plenty of emails and tweets and such waiting from the previous day.

Anyway lark and owl is just a timezone. If you can switch 9 timezones when traveling, you can switch the 2 or 3 timezones from owl to lark and back.

Just don’t do both at the same time. That never ends well for me

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#32

Post by antirez »

I'm a night person but I never write code by night, mostly in the morning. Because when the day starts I simply have a lot more urgency of doing something creative. Later in the day I start to be less interested and tired and want to do less stressful activities.

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#33

Post by chrisweekly »

haddr wrote: post #28
chrisweekly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reading a terrific book -- "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing"[1] -- that reviews the literature on this exact topic. Recommended. 1. http://a.co/hY8eixX

Any takeaways from that book?

Disclaimer: only 1/2 done reading it. So far, the biggest actionable takeaway for me is the importance of taking breaks. I have the luxury of working for myself, mostly from my home office, which allows me the oppty to experiment w/ different ways to manage my workday. At some point I will write something longer-form about my system...

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#34

Post by nicklaf »

ahussain wrote: post #10
sqs wrote: post #3

My first question was about how writing prose differs from writing code. The post covers this: > despite being apparently similar activities (both mostly involve slinging text), the temporal timing of software development & writing are strikingly different. Thinking back, I don’t recall early-morning programming being a trend among programmers (programmers are infamous for preferring to come in late and late-night pr…

For me, writing prose (mostly short stories, journals, memoirs) is more emotionally taxing. To write well I need to find ways to silence the self-censorship that will inevitably prevent me from expressing the things I really want to say. This often happens when I am in a state approaching mania. Donald Glover says he writes in the morning because it is "closer to dreaming". Coding is primarily a task about cognition,…

Donald Glover says he writes in the morning because it is "closer to dreaming"

This is really the crux of it, in my experience. The first things I write down in the morning are usually continuations of subconscious creativity that began in the last dream I had before waking up. And usually my dreams are emotionally rooted in whatever problem I was solving the night before, which is especially helpful in making the stimulus of dreams fruitful.

First thing in the morning, my recall is very good, and I am lucid about the essential concepts needed to explicate what I am really trying to solve in abstract terms. After hours of working on a problem that's going nowhere? Not so much. But then a break or evening hike, and I am just as creative again until bed.

That said, for skilled activities like coding and playing a musical instrument, the temptation to be too creative before warming up and trying some experiments can probably only hurt your productivity, because if you sink your teeth into an idea before figuring out where your real problems are likely going to crop up, you're just committing to something that's probably unworkable.

So if I have lots of code to write, I instead simply collect a list of bugs in the morning that I intend to squash, grab a bite to eat, and then start hacking away. Then very often, by early afternoon, there's the chance to reach some kind of minor epiphany, where it becomes painfully obvious that something simpler can obsolete the need for the kind of hacking done in the morning. ;-)

If you're doing independent research that requires coding AND creative writing, I recommend going back and forth between the two approaches, perhaps alternating by day.

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#35

Post by alsetmusic »

chrisweekly wrote: post #25
weehobbes wrote: post #21

Few thoughts: For me personally, I experience a lot of ego depletion during the day. But having kids tends to do that. There's no way I can write at the end of the day, I'm just way to mentally tired. Also as someone who both codes and writes, writing is far more emotionally taxing. Coding is problem solving - there is usually a clear path to follow and I generally know when I've solved a problem. Writing for me is u…

I'm reading a terrific book -- "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing"[1] -- that reviews the literature on this exact topic. Recommended. 1. http://a.co/hY8eixX

Is that a URL shortener? Please post the link with a fully disclosed address. I’d like to see the content on the other end, but don’t know where it’s going to take me.

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#36

Post by ajkjk »

I find that creativity on a subject comes to me when my brain has taken a long break from it and thoroughly switched to another subject. It makes sense that sleeping functions to force my brain to look away from something, so when I return to it I have fresh eyes and new ideas.

Conversely, complicated technical work like coding seems easiest when I've got it all loaded into my brain. It makes sense that this would be true after a long day of thinking about it and building connections, but before it partially unloads overnight.

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#37

Post by philipbjorge »

alsetmusic wrote: post #35
chrisweekly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reading a terrific book -- "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing"[1] -- that reviews the literature on this exact topic. Recommended. 1. http://a.co/hY8eixX

Is that a URL shortener? Please post the link with a fully disclosed address. I’d like to see the content on the other end, but don’t know where it’s going to take me.

It links to Amazon Kindle. I believe this is the link that their app spits out.

https://urlex.org/ can expand these for you.

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#38

Post by Tycho »

I suspect there’s a strong selection bias here: nobody likes to admit they are a slob who doesn’t rise till noon, whereas people will gladly tell you they follow a Spartan regime and rise before dawn (even if they only manage that one week per year).

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#39

Post by ghaff »

Swizec wrote: post #31
weehobbes wrote: post #21

Few thoughts: For me personally, I experience a lot of ego depletion during the day. But having kids tends to do that. There's no way I can write at the end of the day, I'm just way to mentally tired. Also as someone who both codes and writes, writing is far more emotionally taxing. Coding is problem solving - there is usually a clear path to follow and I generally know when I've solved a problem. Writing for me is u…

Same experience here. Always an owl, always easier to stay up than get up. But damn these days I’m just tired at the end of the day and writing is hard. I can pull it off but it hurts. In the morning writing is a lot easier. But mornings are also a lot harder to clear up. Girlfriend waking up, bird waking up, gotta shower and stuff, get to the office. Very easy to fritter away a whole morning and get nothing done. Pl…

I write a lot. (It's a good part of my job.) I basically can't write in the evening and really haven't since college. (I did code in the evening for a number of years when I had a shareware business.)

Ideally, I have coffee/breakfast, take care of any outstanding items that have to be dealt with, and start writing for most of the day. That's a constructive day. In practice, I often have time getting into the flow and end up doing "research" for at least some of the morning before buckling down to what really has to get done.

Re: What Is The Morning Writing Effect?

#40

Post by jason_slack »

alsetmusic wrote: post #35
chrisweekly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reading a terrific book -- "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing"[1] -- that reviews the literature on this exact topic. Recommended. 1. http://a.co/hY8eixX

Is that a URL shortener? Please post the link with a fully disclosed address. I’d like to see the content on the other end, but don’t know where it’s going to take me.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072Q985YX?ref_=k4w_ss_details_rh
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