For someone who suffers from anxiety like myself, and therefore empathizes well with the perspective in the article (i.e. an emotionally-charged event can have an impact on my productivity):
I think a better approach is to focus on becoming emotionally resilient so that things don't overwhelm so easily, or so it's possible to reset even given an emotional challenge. At least, that has been critical in my life to avoid spirals of self-recrimination or agonizing over things I can't affect or control.
I agree with this, but I also don't think the strategies are mutually exclusive.
Especially if what you want to be productive on is art, it's good to take advantage of the time when you feel most connected to yourself. But I find that connection requires lowering all of my defenses, including to the outside world. So it's still best to do that before I've been beset by the news.
At the same time, being more resilient can help me get other useful stuff done through the rest of the day, including stuff that is sort of adjacent to the art-making process. (For example, I make music and it's hard to find an inspired melody later in the afternoon when my head is aswirl with the chaos of the world, but I can still putter around with sound design and mixing.)
> I agree with this, but I also don't think the strategies are mutually exclusive.
Yes I absolutely agree, and I should have said it. Thank you for making this point.
Emotional resiliency is not just about receiving negative stimuli and recovering from that. It's as much about knowing yourself well, knowing what kinds of situations or stimuli you should try to avoid or minimize, and knowing where and when you can best function to your full potential. So I very much agree with what you're saying.
This feels like an incredibly elaborate way to say that he's a morning person. There's plenty of people for whom the entire thing works the exact opposite, and of course loads of people everywhere in between. I wouldn't really read deep into this, it's one of those takes that tries really hard to sound profound, but it really isn't.
> This feels like an incredibly elaborate way to say that he's a morning person.
If you read the whole article there’s a section dedicated to evening people.
Regardless, the advice is about avoiding emotionally draining stimuli until you’ve accomplished what you want to do for the day.
You can wake up at noon and still do that. The root problem is that people are consuming large amounts of negative news and social media early in the day and draining their mental capacity before they even get started on what they want to do.
I see this all the time in, for example, junior hires. Some of them will tell me they’re exhausted or they have no time to do anything outside of their 40 hour workweek. When I ask some questions to figure out where their time is going every day, it always comes down to spending so much time on phones and watching Netflix that their time and energy are fully consumed before they have a chance at anything else.
The advice in the article is good and it’s not about being a morning person.
That's not necessarily true. If you're a morning person managing other people that are not morning people but insist on having daily meetings in the morning, you're an asshole. I find meetings early in the morning sadistic and way more draining than reading the news, but I'm not the type that gets emotional about the news while I will react negatively in an early meeting at the drop of a pin. It's not about needing coffee nor did I get up on the wrong side of the bed or whatever demeaning quip you want to offer. I'm not up to speed until later in the day, and forcing me to pretend I am is just rude. This is the biggest downside to WFH where everyone can live in whatever timezone so someone's afternoon meeting is my morning rather than just scheduling the meeting where everyone is on the same schedule. It's one of the few things about working in an office I can appreciate. Definitely not to be misread as a vote for RTO.
> If you read the whole article there’s a section dedicated to evening people.
It's a perfunctory mention of the exact kind morning people commonly throw out to superficially address an evening person's actual constraints.
The article's whole thesis is that after some point in the day your emotions will end up fried. An evening person can't simply flip the arrow of time to make it so that before that point in the day, their emotions have started off fried but then get unfried afterwards. Rather completely different approaches are needed.
The most important part of any meta thinking is to know thyself. I'm sure this article is thoroughly useful for a subset of people, but not me. It would be nice if authors were upfront about the constraints they are writing from, and especially if they didn't try to hand wave them away.
For myself, the news does not significantly affect my emotions more than a handful of times per year. I'm certainly not getting exposed to it or other goings-on through adversarial notifications. And my actual mobile pocket device generally lives by the door. Those are basic table stakes for my own existence.
I have small kids, so at the moment I'm a "whenever I have 5-10 quiet minutes" at a time person.
But I remember that I used to be an evening person. And what I remember is that in the evening things got quiet in my head. Yes, usually "emotional" things happened during the day, but after 8-9 PM I had a boost of clarity and could get some difficult tasks.
There's something it it though that's not interchangeable, that becomes a bigger factor as you age (see: that Bezos quote).
The brain is becoming more physically tired during the day. At a certain point, say 5pm, it's done: the accumulated wear and tear is too much. Try again after sleeping.
This might not be a concern at 20 but is at 60 (Bezos' age).
> Ask: if this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? Don’t ever arrive at your computer without a clear list of priorities, you’ll just read unassociated email and scramble your brain for the day.
When I read that last bit ("scramble your brain") I had a profound sense of agreement that this was incredibly applicable to me. I feel like distractions 'poison' my vibe, productivity, priorities, and most importantly, distract that bit of my brain that ticks away in the background working on important creative stuff. When it's distracted with news, emails, or other junk, it's unavailable to work on creative/important problems that actually matter.
Does the following part mean they're a morning person, or is it orthogonal?
> “Every day is a new beginning. You wake up and at some point in the day, someone shoots up a school, or something’s going on with your family, or you wake up and eat the wrong thing. And then you’re done. Emotionally cooked. Literally and emotionally poisoned.
> Every day I wake up and can get to the studio before something has shattered my existence, I am grateful. And I can do things.
Yeah it sounds like he's just terminally online. The whole idea here did not resonate with me at all. If I have serious work to do I isolate myself and do it until it's done or I'm out of steam.
If the day "poisons" me that means I should have been more disciplined - the correct answer to consuming news media, for instance, is always to consume less of it. If someone is consistently poisoning my day the answer is to reduce contact with them.
That’s what he says, though, at least in the context of Antonoff. He gets to the studio and gets to work without being sidetracked or letting other things sidetrack him. The “poison” is just the distractions to avoid.
Yes, this means he's a morning person. I feel great in the evening because I'm done with all the shit that happened during the day, now it's finally "me-time". There's nothing like a sudden wave of energy at 3AM. In the mornings I always think about all the unpleasant stuff that is going to happen during the day.
Maybe he is, but the advice stays for "evening-persons" too. I'm not an early bird, but I noticed that I am most productive when I pull all-nighters, when nothing happens and when no one bothers me. With age it is harder and harder to do though...
Did you read the article?, is about doing the importnat stuff when no one is around to distract you.
>Not an early riser? No problem, just flip it.
Avoid the day. And when it’s done, that’s when your focussed work starts (my favourite adherent of this approach is Demis Hassabis: who works a “second day” from between 11pm and 4am).
It can be a different thing for each person. For example, you might have some evening ritual that allows you to refresh your mind. Like an easy nice run. And then, with disabled notifications and clear mind, you can tackle your creative endeavors:).
I read the article and had the same response as GP. I don't know on what basis the author believes you can "flip it", but it seems at odds with the idea that at some point your day is "poisoned" and the rest must be written off, presumably until you can reset it by sleeping.
I find that advice vague. What does "avoiding the day" even mean?
Anyway, for me it was easier to wake up earlier than try to do focused work after an exhausting day with children. Doing stuff in the middle of the night is a privilege of the childless anyway.
Nah, I have several friends who work in the middle of the night after the kids have gone to sleep. That seems to be the the optimal solution for evening persons with kids.
This is good advice, though people are getting distracted by the unnecessary morning/evening talk.
This is a real problem for people who have a habit of reading a lot of news and social media first thing in the morning. Some people show up to work having consumed hours of the latest rage-bait on Reddit, sky-is-falling takes on Twitter, and news about the latest wars, disasters, and political problems. They’re emotionally and mentally burdened before they even get started on work.
It often manifests as people claiming they don’t have any time to do anything outside of their 40 hour work weeks. I’ve mentored several early 20s people working relatively easy jobs, having no significant other or kids, and no real obligations who lament how they never have time or energy to do anything after working 40 hour jobs. Every single time having them check their screen time stats results in eye-popping amounts of Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and other endless streams of stress and ragebait content. Putting a 30 minute limit on these apps with their phone’s built-in tools can work wonders on fixing their lives.
Focusing on a small unit of work (e.g, a day), can make you lose sight of the bigger picture, like how you need a break, or what you’re working on isn’t motivating anymore, which is why I kind of dislike most productivity advice.
Too much focus on how to optimise your day, your schedule and not much emphasis on how to feel motivated about work you’re doing.
> I sincerely doubt that anything great in the history of humanity has been built in the post-lunch afternoon
Interestingly, late afternoon is the time that I am most productive when coding. At 6pm when work ends I often feel that I could easily go on for another few hours
I'm in the same boat where 6pm comes and I actually have a hard time shifting gears from writing code or thinking intensely about my project. I've been working on my focus and starting earlier in the day. The difference is when I get on track earlier I still chug along until the end of the day. Then by night I'm exhausted and go to bed early.
Work/life balance is important so I should probably listen to my body and focus when it wants to.
> the producer of pretty much every contemporary pop singer you’ve heard of
While his portfolio is no doubt impressive (including names such as Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey and Lorde), this is still a bit too much hyperbole for my taste...
Generally agree with the sentiment that you should stop trying to create if you lose the spark. Don’t understand this idea that you HAVE to pay attention to social media and world news. Just don’t?
True, this is why Deep Work is a book people like. Optimizing how much time you can spend without any interruption, immersed in where you attention needs to be and not where it doesn't, but don't expect too much of it, it'll get poisoned and it's not sustainable to think or act otherwise.
The pattern didn't work on me, but maybe because I only watched a couple of cycles on my phone.
Has anyone had the experience where if you try to watch an anthill (or just many ants in one place), your vision gets out of focus after a couple of seconds? And you can't just re-focus, even after turning away from the ants. It takes a while until you are able to focus again.
It's very relaxing. I'm wondering if this is the same effect they are after with the animation.
Having moved to an entirely on-sore job, I really long for the days when I could wake up around noon and be incredibly productive after 20:00. Nowadays, it is a struggle to wake up at 06:00 and get to the office to get some things done before the heat of the day sets in. I resonate with this deeply.
"Helpfully, this is one area of productivity where people with children are actually ahead of the curve.
Because kids are professional day poisoners."
When it's legal and otherwise sound I prefer to work and do business with parents for partly this reason. If they've managed to navigate the first few years of broken sleep and don't use work as escapism, then they're probably pretty hardy.
> no sudden alert about Putin’s latest military actions
I think it's a bit condescending towards people whose day quite physically depends on the absence of this kind of news. It's not like Putin is invading Manhattan currently.
For someone who suffers from anxiety like myself, and therefore empathizes well with the perspective in the article (i.e. an emotionally-charged event can have an impact on my productivity):
I think a better approach is to focus on becoming emotionally resilient so that things don't overwhelm so easily, or so it's possible to reset even given an emotional challenge. At least, that has been critical in my life to avoid spirals of self-recrimination or agonizing over things I can't affect or control.
I agree with this, but I also don't think the strategies are mutually exclusive.
Especially if what you want to be productive on is art, it's good to take advantage of the time when you feel most connected to yourself. But I find that connection requires lowering all of my defenses, including to the outside world. So it's still best to do that before I've been beset by the news.
At the same time, being more resilient can help me get other useful stuff done through the rest of the day, including stuff that is sort of adjacent to the art-making process. (For example, I make music and it's hard to find an inspired melody later in the afternoon when my head is aswirl with the chaos of the world, but I can still putter around with sound design and mixing.)
> I agree with this, but I also don't think the strategies are mutually exclusive.
Yes I absolutely agree, and I should have said it. Thank you for making this point.
Emotional resiliency is not just about receiving negative stimuli and recovering from that. It's as much about knowing yourself well, knowing what kinds of situations or stimuli you should try to avoid or minimize, and knowing where and when you can best function to your full potential. So I very much agree with what you're saying.
This feels like an incredibly elaborate way to say that he's a morning person. There's plenty of people for whom the entire thing works the exact opposite, and of course loads of people everywhere in between. I wouldn't really read deep into this, it's one of those takes that tries really hard to sound profound, but it really isn't.
> This feels like an incredibly elaborate way to say that he's a morning person.
If you read the whole article there’s a section dedicated to evening people.
Regardless, the advice is about avoiding emotionally draining stimuli until you’ve accomplished what you want to do for the day.
You can wake up at noon and still do that. The root problem is that people are consuming large amounts of negative news and social media early in the day and draining their mental capacity before they even get started on what they want to do.
I see this all the time in, for example, junior hires. Some of them will tell me they’re exhausted or they have no time to do anything outside of their 40 hour workweek. When I ask some questions to figure out where their time is going every day, it always comes down to spending so much time on phones and watching Netflix that their time and energy are fully consumed before they have a chance at anything else.
The advice in the article is good and it’s not about being a morning person.
> You can wake up at noon and still do that.
That's not necessarily true. If you're a morning person managing other people that are not morning people but insist on having daily meetings in the morning, you're an asshole. I find meetings early in the morning sadistic and way more draining than reading the news, but I'm not the type that gets emotional about the news while I will react negatively in an early meeting at the drop of a pin. It's not about needing coffee nor did I get up on the wrong side of the bed or whatever demeaning quip you want to offer. I'm not up to speed until later in the day, and forcing me to pretend I am is just rude. This is the biggest downside to WFH where everyone can live in whatever timezone so someone's afternoon meeting is my morning rather than just scheduling the meeting where everyone is on the same schedule. It's one of the few things about working in an office I can appreciate. Definitely not to be misread as a vote for RTO.
If you're a morning person and you're scheduling meetings for the morning you're literally wasting your period of productivity.
> If you read the whole article there’s a section dedicated to evening people.
It's a perfunctory mention of the exact kind morning people commonly throw out to superficially address an evening person's actual constraints.
The article's whole thesis is that after some point in the day your emotions will end up fried. An evening person can't simply flip the arrow of time to make it so that before that point in the day, their emotions have started off fried but then get unfried afterwards. Rather completely different approaches are needed.
The most important part of any meta thinking is to know thyself. I'm sure this article is thoroughly useful for a subset of people, but not me. It would be nice if authors were upfront about the constraints they are writing from, and especially if they didn't try to hand wave them away.
For myself, the news does not significantly affect my emotions more than a handful of times per year. I'm certainly not getting exposed to it or other goings-on through adversarial notifications. And my actual mobile pocket device generally lives by the door. Those are basic table stakes for my own existence.
I have small kids, so at the moment I'm a "whenever I have 5-10 quiet minutes" at a time person.
But I remember that I used to be an evening person. And what I remember is that in the evening things got quiet in my head. Yes, usually "emotional" things happened during the day, but after 8-9 PM I had a boost of clarity and could get some difficult tasks.
There's something it it though that's not interchangeable, that becomes a bigger factor as you age (see: that Bezos quote).
The brain is becoming more physically tired during the day. At a certain point, say 5pm, it's done: the accumulated wear and tear is too much. Try again after sleeping.
This might not be a concern at 20 but is at 60 (Bezos' age).
Tangental but I noted this quote from 4HWW:
> Ask: if this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? Don’t ever arrive at your computer without a clear list of priorities, you’ll just read unassociated email and scramble your brain for the day.
When I read that last bit ("scramble your brain") I had a profound sense of agreement that this was incredibly applicable to me. I feel like distractions 'poison' my vibe, productivity, priorities, and most importantly, distract that bit of my brain that ticks away in the background working on important creative stuff. When it's distracted with news, emails, or other junk, it's unavailable to work on creative/important problems that actually matter.
Is 4hww 4 hour work week, the book, that you’re referring to? It’s a good quote!
Does the following part mean they're a morning person, or is it orthogonal?
> “Every day is a new beginning. You wake up and at some point in the day, someone shoots up a school, or something’s going on with your family, or you wake up and eat the wrong thing. And then you’re done. Emotionally cooked. Literally and emotionally poisoned.
> Every day I wake up and can get to the studio before something has shattered my existence, I am grateful. And I can do things.
Yeah it sounds like he's just terminally online. The whole idea here did not resonate with me at all. If I have serious work to do I isolate myself and do it until it's done or I'm out of steam.
If the day "poisons" me that means I should have been more disciplined - the correct answer to consuming news media, for instance, is always to consume less of it. If someone is consistently poisoning my day the answer is to reduce contact with them.
That’s what he says, though, at least in the context of Antonoff. He gets to the studio and gets to work without being sidetracked or letting other things sidetrack him. The “poison” is just the distractions to avoid.
Yes, this means he's a morning person. I feel great in the evening because I'm done with all the shit that happened during the day, now it's finally "me-time". There's nothing like a sudden wave of energy at 3AM. In the mornings I always think about all the unpleasant stuff that is going to happen during the day.
Maybe he is, but the advice stays for "evening-persons" too. I'm not an early bird, but I noticed that I am most productive when I pull all-nighters, when nothing happens and when no one bothers me. With age it is harder and harder to do though...
He’s really talking about how to maintain focus and neurological energy, but doesn’t have the right words.
Fwiw, I wrote about it here:
https://vonnik.substack.com/p/the-inner-game-of-knowledge-wo...
It’s something I struggle with, too.
If you don't wanna read elaborations on known concepts then don't read articles.
I think simplistic terms like "morning person" and "night owl" are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_cliché applied to identity. Much like "introvert" and "extrovert".
Well I think they refer to the genetic make-up of the circadian timing system, as mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_owl .
Most modern night owls just have very bright whole-house lighting and a world-class 24/7 carnival in their pockets.
Did you read the article?, is about doing the importnat stuff when no one is around to distract you. >Not an early riser? No problem, just flip it.
Avoid the day. And when it’s done, that’s when your focussed work starts (my favourite adherent of this approach is Demis Hassabis: who works a “second day” from between 11pm and 4am).
How do you flip it though? What does that really mean?
It can be a different thing for each person. For example, you might have some evening ritual that allows you to refresh your mind. Like an easy nice run. And then, with disabled notifications and clear mind, you can tackle your creative endeavors:).
Maybe it means finding an antidote rather than a poison. Dealing with bullshit first until you get inspired, and then doing the focused work.
I read the article and had the same response as GP. I don't know on what basis the author believes you can "flip it", but it seems at odds with the idea that at some point your day is "poisoned" and the rest must be written off, presumably until you can reset it by sleeping.
I guess it follows that one should... take a nap in between?
I find that advice vague. What does "avoiding the day" even mean?
Anyway, for me it was easier to wake up earlier than try to do focused work after an exhausting day with children. Doing stuff in the middle of the night is a privilege of the childless anyway.
Nah, I have several friends who work in the middle of the night after the kids have gone to sleep. That seems to be the the optimal solution for evening persons with kids.
Exactly this.
This is good advice, though people are getting distracted by the unnecessary morning/evening talk.
This is a real problem for people who have a habit of reading a lot of news and social media first thing in the morning. Some people show up to work having consumed hours of the latest rage-bait on Reddit, sky-is-falling takes on Twitter, and news about the latest wars, disasters, and political problems. They’re emotionally and mentally burdened before they even get started on work.
It often manifests as people claiming they don’t have any time to do anything outside of their 40 hour work weeks. I’ve mentored several early 20s people working relatively easy jobs, having no significant other or kids, and no real obligations who lament how they never have time or energy to do anything after working 40 hour jobs. Every single time having them check their screen time stats results in eye-popping amounts of Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and other endless streams of stress and ragebait content. Putting a 30 minute limit on these apps with their phone’s built-in tools can work wonders on fixing their lives.
Focusing on a small unit of work (e.g, a day), can make you lose sight of the bigger picture, like how you need a break, or what you’re working on isn’t motivating anymore, which is why I kind of dislike most productivity advice.
Too much focus on how to optimise your day, your schedule and not much emphasis on how to feel motivated about work you’re doing.
> I sincerely doubt that anything great in the history of humanity has been built in the post-lunch afternoon
Interestingly, late afternoon is the time that I am most productive when coding. At 6pm when work ends I often feel that I could easily go on for another few hours
I'm in the same boat where 6pm comes and I actually have a hard time shifting gears from writing code or thinking intensely about my project. I've been working on my focus and starting earlier in the day. The difference is when I get on track earlier I still chug along until the end of the day. Then by night I'm exhausted and go to bed early.
Work/life balance is important so I should probably listen to my body and focus when it wants to.
> the producer of pretty much every contemporary pop singer you’ve heard of
While his portfolio is no doubt impressive (including names such as Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey and Lorde), this is still a bit too much hyperbole for my taste...
but none of these people are actually good, so its ok.
Weird pattern, that posts with titles like that seem to surface around Thanksgiving.
Russian? Chinese?
American?
Generally agree with the sentiment that you should stop trying to create if you lose the spark. Don’t understand this idea that you HAVE to pay attention to social media and world news. Just don’t?
If you don't have a good night's sleep your day is poisoned from the start. That compounds to life-ruining status if not quickly addressed.
True, this is why Deep Work is a book people like. Optimizing how much time you can spend without any interruption, immersed in where you attention needs to be and not where it doesn't, but don't expect too much of it, it'll get poisoned and it's not sustainable to think or act otherwise.
Seems to be the exhaustion that happens when you’ve built up waste products that need to be cleared by sleep.
But has anyone found success re-establishing that fresh mind without sleeping?
Maybe meditation can help?
You might enjoy this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41942096
The pattern didn't work on me, but maybe because I only watched a couple of cycles on my phone.
Has anyone had the experience where if you try to watch an anthill (or just many ants in one place), your vision gets out of focus after a couple of seconds? And you can't just re-focus, even after turning away from the ants. It takes a while until you are able to focus again.
It's very relaxing. I'm wondering if this is the same effect they are after with the animation.
The Magic of Not Giving a F** : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwRzjFQa_Og
It's always been ironic that a book about not caring what other people think needs to censor the word "fuck" in its very title.
Perhaps nsdr (popularized by Huberman).
I'm definitely also heading increasingly to "digital minimalism".
Or maybe online minimalism. The "digital" is kind of orthogonal.
What they’re saying is that I shouldn’t be scrolling Hacker News at 7:28am. Understood.
This advice holds true for me. The days I don’t have anything bother me go well. The days that I do, don’t.
Having moved to an entirely on-sore job, I really long for the days when I could wake up around noon and be incredibly productive after 20:00. Nowadays, it is a struggle to wake up at 06:00 and get to the office to get some things done before the heat of the day sets in. I resonate with this deeply.
This was a vapid and useless article. "Just be a morning person", gee thanks that sounds awful to me.
"Helpfully, this is one area of productivity where people with children are actually ahead of the curve.
Because kids are professional day poisoners."
When it's legal and otherwise sound I prefer to work and do business with parents for partly this reason. If they've managed to navigate the first few years of broken sleep and don't use work as escapism, then they're probably pretty hardy.
If you want something done ask the busiest person you know
Fun take.
I suggest countering it with a concept of "day reusability". You know, just as with rockets...
There is option 2: work slower, with a list.
> no sudden alert about Putin’s latest military actions
I think it's a bit condescending towards people whose day quite physically depends on the absence of this kind of news. It's not like Putin is invading Manhattan currently.
there are some interesting points here but a lot of it is just acknowledging lack of quality and willpower.
do better. try harder.