Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer

I find driving to be one of the most useless ways of spending my time, and if it's for more than half an hour, I do try to figure out some way to increase the value of that time.

I have a weekly commitment that leaves me driving home (~40min) at 9pm, and I usually eat dinner (just a sandwich) while I drive. That also has the advantage of making it so that I'm not eating an hour before bed.

If I know that I need to call someone, I'll usually try to schedule that call while I'm driving. I used to take meetings while driving as well, though I stopped because it was perceived poorly by others.

What's sort of sad is that I can take public transit to all of my regular commitments, and that lets me keep doing something (reading, working, whatever). The schedules are poor, though, and they blow my commute times completely out of the water. For example, I've got a 5-7pm commitment that is a 15-minute drive one way, but if I wanted to go by bus, I'd have to leave at 3:30pm (latest it comes before I need to be there), and get back on it at 8pm (the earliest it comes after I'm done).

I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label.

But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.

Back in those days, when I wasn't at a computer, I was listening to non-fiction audiobooks on business and software. I don't know how I had such motivation bvack then, but I'm glad I capitalized on it while I had it.

In other words, to people reading questioning if they're working too much: it's okay to work hard as long as you're doing it for the right reasons. (I'll purposely leave "right reasons" undefined, that's on you to evaluate)

I'm just generally not a fan of people putting other people down for wanting to be productive. It's okay to work hard, and it's okay if your identity is your work at least for a short time in your life.

I don't know what those people are doing, but I built a personal day-to-day notes manager at work, for work, for under $20 in credits. Yes, I could have just used text files but this is less friction which means I'll actually stick to it. Nothing exactly like this already existed. It was built in under a week in small portions of spare time, and it probably would have been more like a month if I had to choose all the libraries and write the whole thing myself.

In my experience the driving-behavior part of my brain can run virtually autonomously, like how you don't really have to spend 100% of your brain to walk down the street. This means that the words-thinking part of my brain is almost completely free, with the exception of short high-attention spikes for risky maneuvers like onramp merging. This is why listening to music or podcasts is a very popular driving activity. In many places even handsfree phone calls are allowed as long as both hands are available and your vision isn't obstructed.

I would contend that listening to a podcast or being on a handsfree phone call would be on par with the Claw Phone.

> I was a workaholic from 18-26. 12+ hour days for months/years on end. It absolutely was not healthy. Toxic is not an inaccurate label. But I don't regret it. Those years are the foundation of the career I have in my 30's.

I'm glad this worked out for you

As a small counter anecdote I guess, I was this person in my 20s too. I arranged my whole life around work, constantly trying to get that next rung. Then I burned out, quit my job, moved to a new city and was unemployed for a year. My career has been pretty decent since then, but it almost had nothing to do with the hard work in my 20s. It's just that where I was working before didn't reward the hard work and where I am now rewards the work I do even though I don't work nearly as hard as I used to

Anyways. All I'm really saying is if you're going to work yourself to the bone trying to get ahead, make sure to take a breath once in a while and look around. Check in with yourself to ensure that the hard work is actually paying off, building the life you want. Otherwise it's just trading your youth and getting nothing in return