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Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

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Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#31
post #5

Alternative: slow afternoons? I mean, my routine usually has me start with tech/work at 6am, but I wrap up around 2:30 and put some hours outdoors or in my other hobbies. I think the important part is just not spending ALL DAY doing any one thing. My grandma has a saying - "Everything in moderation, including moderation"

I’m doing this as well. 7am-12pm for Deep focused work.

1pm-3pm for gym

3-5pm for reflection, thinking and writing.

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#32
post #27

As someone whose default ringer setting is off unless I'm expecting a call, and have been like that for almost a decade, giving fewer people a guaranteed option on my time is a great start to being able to build and choose with calm, higher quality decisions. We get what we reward. When you don't set boundaries, you can't expect other people to anticipate them, let alone respect the ones you have in effect imagined.…

> When we worry about missing opportunities Becoming an entrepreneur cured me of this worry, because I realized that there is no shortage of opportunities -- they're all around us all the time, the trick is in noticing the ones that can be of value to you. Since they're common, there's no problem with missing one. Another one is right around the corner. This also helped me avoid some really bad business decisions.

There's no shortage of demands on your time. There's absolutely a shortage of true opportunities. This is because if someone manages to convince you that spending your time on their thing, then they benefit.

So everyone packages their demands as opportunities.

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#33
post #5

Alternative: slow afternoons? I mean, my routine usually has me start with tech/work at 6am, but I wrap up around 2:30 and put some hours outdoors or in my other hobbies. I think the important part is just not spending ALL DAY doing any one thing. My grandma has a saying - "Everything in moderation, including moderation"

Both! I've always though 9am-2pm are ideal work hours (with a lunch break).

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Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#34

Could we just stop using medium altogether? I just get a pop up asking me to pay $5/mo. Not going to happen.

Opening medium in midori will flash the content on the screen and then half a second later replace it with a giant full page “500 error” message.

Which is strange because that’s usually a server side problem. If the content made it then it should be a 200 anyway, so if some other asset has a problem they just kill the whole page using client side scripts?

Opening it in elinks fixes the problem of course.

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#35

>“Technology has done nothing but enhance my life. But how you decide to carve out time for yourself is important,” says Nicole Loher, a 26-year-old marketing consultant for Microsoft. “There was a time when I did transition into being that obsessive with the phone and it didn’t feel that great.” Loher is also a slow-morning devotee and she started her routine a decade ago, frequently waking at 4:30 and spending the…

> > Loher is also a slow-morning devotee and she started her routine a decade ago, frequently waking at 4:30 and spending the hours up to 9 a.m. as “strictly me time.” > So she started this routine when she was 16? i want to know what high school she was at that wasn't already running classes by 9AM.

I feel like most US high schools have classes by 7:50-8am; not sure how it is elsewhere but this was true in the Great Lakes about a decade ago.

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#36
There is no work-life balance in tech. You can deceive yourself but the balance died out something like 7-8 years ago.

When the wave after wave of tech changes happening and new tools coming into existence, the only lifestyle you can have to stay gainfully employed is: work, work, work until some other commitment (sleep, wife, kids) eat up remainder of your time.

Personally, I think in next 5-10 years, IT workforce will (1) Be well known for burnout and people leaving IT due to burn out. (2) Be further concentrated in parts of world where work is main objective of life (China/India, etc.).

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#37
post #36

There is no work-life balance in tech. You can deceive yourself but the balance died out something like 7-8 years ago. When the wave after wave of tech changes happening and new tools coming into existence, the only lifestyle you can have to stay gainfully employed is: work, work, work until some other commitment (sleep, wife, kids) eat up remainder of your time. Personally, I think in next 5-10 years, IT workforce w…

This article isn’t about working in the tech industry

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#38
post #25

I think it depends a lot on what you do with your phone/laptop in the morning. If the first thing you do is hop on email or social media, then yes, I can see how that could be psychologically draining. But if you start with news(ish) type things, that's just another way of "reading the morning paper". I personally start by checking HN and Reddit, and then curated news like the Associated Press app.

I think it's useful to point out that your Reddit and HN are curated too.

I found Reddit's /r/all and logged out experience draining. The defaults on Reddit seem similar to other social media now.

I found the frequency and filter quality of stories on HN to be better during weekdays and working hours. I think HN has better curation with more active users. It feels less like a News source during downtime.

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#39
post #5

Alternative: slow afternoons? I mean, my routine usually has me start with tech/work at 6am, but I wrap up around 2:30 and put some hours outdoors or in my other hobbies. I think the important part is just not spending ALL DAY doing any one thing. My grandma has a saying - "Everything in moderation, including moderation"

I’m doing this as well. 7am-12pm for Deep focused work. 1pm-3pm for gym 3-5pm for reflection, thinking and writing.

You still my schedule :) It works well for intermittent fasting. 5pm is the first and only meal.

Re: Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance

#40
post #2

So it seems the "secret" to tech-life balance is choosing more life than tech? Don't get me wrong, I'm all about tech-life balance and work-life balance (which this article and the problem in general heavily overlaps with), but the secret is conciously organizing your life to have more life than tech. Part of this is finding a job that allows you to choose life outside of office hours. Having more free mornings to do…

Do these types of jobs even exist anymore in tech? At least in SV, every job I've come across these days seem to require on-call and an implicit requirement to work into the night hours in order to finish your work. Not to mention super competitive teammates that don't mind working 24/7 and putting pressure on me to work even longer. I would gladly take a minimum 25% pay reduction if it meant I only needed to work 9-…

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