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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

#131
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same until I had kids. This sort of thing is part and parcel of having children, you really do learn not only to handle it, but to derive enjoyment from the situation overall. If it helps any, my experience is that it's hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier as the years go by and the children become increasingly self-sufficient.

> hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn (assuming the newborn is healthy, eats and sleeps okay, ...). I was able to get some amount of work done while taking care of my first kid up to about age 1. In the two years since then, not so much (I just pray for conveniently timed naps). The second one is 6 months…

I think of our three year old as more or less self sufficient around the house at this point. Though I guess she will be four in two months.

My personal experience both from growing up and now raising three kids is that the kids will accept just as much independence as you are willing to give them.

Though they do get to be whiny sometimes. And I absolutely agree about the relentlessness of it all.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn (assuming the newborn is healthy, eats and sleeps okay, ...). I was able to get some amount of work done while taking care of my first kid up to about age 1. In the two years since then, not so much (I just pray for conveniently timed naps). The second one is 6 months…

Amen to this... 3.5 yr old and twin infants here... I haven't been able to concentrate in years. When I have attempted to produce anything of value (in job or hobby), it's been at the expense of my family...

Gotta love the "this project needs to get done, so who's going to be mad at me and how far can I push it?" feeling.

Sometimes friends or family members ask me why XYZ projects are half completed, and it's hard to properly find the wording for "I want my wife to still like me at the end of most days".

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

#133

I get up at 5am to start getting the kids up and ready for school (high schoolers first, then elementary schoolers, then middle schoolers). Everyone is finally at school by 9:15am and I can head in for work. I get home around 6pm and get the little kids in bed by 8pm. 8-8:30pm is me time. Then I get ready for bed and am asleep by 9pm. I can't imagine what a slow morning (or evening!) would even be like. I'd appreciat…

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

#134
post #81

I get up at 5am to start getting the kids up and ready for school (high schoolers first, then elementary schoolers, then middle schoolers). Everyone is finally at school by 9:15am and I can head in for work. I get home around 6pm and get the little kids in bed by 8pm. 8-8:30pm is me time. Then I get ready for bed and am asleep by 9pm. I can't imagine what a slow morning (or evening!) would even be like. I'd appreciat…

How do you do this? I would literally die. I can't live life so breathlessly with what sounds like no room for breaks. Are weekends even enough for you to recover? Forget burning out of a job, I'd burn out on life. Mad props to you. You've got a hell of a lot more discipline than I do. Your kids owe you.

Meanwhile I'm over here having trouble getting up before 9am, I make up for it by spending time coding at night and on the weekends sometimes instead of paying video games. I figure if I bring something to work useful on Monday and say "hey! look at this cool thing I built over the weekend" people seem to leave me alone about coming to the office at 10/11am

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you earn, if you don't mind my asking? And what sort of work is it?

$100 an hour as an independent contractor developing farming robots at a place that feels very very good for me. EDIT: I definitely got very lucky finding this position. I’m not suggesting everyone can just do this. But if people don’t refuse to work 40-50 hour work weeks, then that’s what employers will expect.

Even though people claim to work 40-50 hours many times they are spending half that time watching videos or messing around, this is a generalization of course.

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

#136
It blows my mind some of the comments here of people who do this. I can literally not recall a time that mornings were not miserable.. and that includes when I am jet lagged (either going to a country, or coming back) and naturally fall asleep by 9pm and awake by 5am. Mornings are boring and I can never really get into enjoying them. The most fun I've had was one time in China I woke up at 4am and went to photograph things at 430am.. But that's not something I'd do every day, and even at the time I felt kinda cranky about it.

I have 2 kids, so have to have some structure to my sleep schedule. Left to my own devices, my natural bed time is 3-4am and I'm awake at 11am-12pm. With kids during school (in summer they sleep in too) it's a bit more reasonable though probably less healthy. Asleep by 1 or 2am and wake up at 8am. They're 9yo and 6yo and the oldest is responsible for getting the younger up if she doesn't wake up with the alarm. They're both 90% ready by the time I wake up (they prefer to wake up at 7am or even 6:30am to have some play and tv time before school). This includes getting themselves dressed, hair and teeth, and the picky youngest packing her own lunch. Their school starts at 8:45am and I'm typically out the door at 8:30am and back by 9am.

I don't really start working until 10am most days, but I'll do some passive stuff like read emails and industry news type stuff while having coffee. At 10am I'm getting started, at 11am on a good day I'm hitting a stride. Typically not doing my best coding work until at least 2pm though after lunch. Depending on how in the zone I am and what I'm doing, I work until 5:30pm to 7pm. I have the benefit of being remote and setting my own hours though, so it's definitely a blessing I know many people aren't fortunate to have. Have dinner with the family after I stop working, and then just relax with dumb activities (TV, social media) and of course bonding stuff with family, until the kids go to bed at 9pm. When they go to sleep I sometimes work for a couple more hours (coordinating with 12 hour different timezone is fun), but more usually relax with peace and quiet playing games, messing around with interesting research (both hobbies and work), or just dumbly watching TV, or do some hobbies (analog photography/darkroom printing)

I sacrifice sleep more than I should, and typically will have a 10 minute power nap after I'm done working.. But honestly, as long as I'm getting 6-7 hours of sleep, I feel just as well as when I'm getting 8 or 9. When I get less than 6 though I definitely regret it the next day. And I don't mean just sleeping in on weekends. I had about 2 weeks this summer where I had no kids, no wife, and basically nothing guiding my sleep schedule. I'd tried naturally sleeping for a week with no alarm and realized I felt more tired and it was consuming a lot of time. I was waking up at 11 or 12. So I started setting my alarm to a more reasonable 10am and was in bed by 3 or 4am, and always felt well rested after I got out of bed.

Some people can not "relax" and enjoy mornings. My goal with mornings is to get that phase of day over with so I can work and then get to a free evening. When I'm jetlagged it's pretty interesting becoming a forced morning person, but it's always proven to me that having 3 hours of free time in the evening is so much more valuable to me than 3 hours of free time in the morning.

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

#137
post #7

I'm struck by a couple of things, Getting up at 4.30am seems excessive and presumably requires going to bed at 8-9pm I can't imagine doing this with a child

What time do you think little children go to bed?

Honestly, they go to bed at the time the parent sets a routine after probably 3 or 4yo. My kids consistently go to bed at 9pm for school, 10pm on weekends/summer, and typically no problems going to sleep or waking up in the morning. It's been like that for years now. The time they did have trouble going to sleep at the right time is when they visited grandma for 2 weeks and had a wild and inconsistent sleep schedule the entire time. It took them about 2 weeks to adjust back to the normal routine. One hour adjustment from weekends etc is easy, but 2-3 hour adjustment is a huge stumbling block

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

#138

I've been adopting this approach in order to have higher-quality free time. I find that if I wake up early (around 7:30) then I can take an hour or so to myself in the mornings to read, play a game, or work on a personal project, and I have my full brainpower to apply to it. However by the time I get home from work around 6, I don't have nearly as much energy to put in to the same activities, and can't focus as easil…

Am I the only person who can never have "full brainpower" anytime within 3 hours of waking up?

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real life of folks with kids, so if you have coworkers with kids be a bit emphatic, now imagine them doing all this and having to worry because maybe one or more of them happen to be sick. If you have kids, either you become good with time management or life will beat the crap out of you.

On one hand I agree with your statement, on the other hand, kids are a choice. Should I also be giving people lots of slack for getting drunk and coming to work hungover? That was a choice too. Don't respond with some biological need nonsense. Last time I checked we're not automatons that slavishly need to fulfill our biological needs.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real life of folks with kids, so if you have coworkers with kids be a bit emphatic, now imagine them doing all this and having to worry because maybe one or more of them happen to be sick. If you have kids, either you become good with time management or life will beat the crap out of you.

On one hand I agree with your statement, on the other hand, kids are a choice. Should I also be giving people lots of slack for getting drunk and coming to work hungover? That was a choice too. Don't respond with some biological need nonsense. Last time I checked we're not automatons that slavishly need to fulfill our biological needs.

I can’t tell if you’re trolling, but some people do believe this.

Society benefits from people having (a reasonable number of) children. Without them, humanity is done. Perhaps you think that’s for the best anyway, in which case I wonder why you’re doing anything at all.

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