This is the third published week of the "Lights Spreadsheet" -- a tracking/control method for daily habits and production. Here were last week's results.
So, what happens with the fall-off? Here's my journal notes/weekly planning from before the week, from an entry titled "Doctrine/Plans for 1 May to 7 May" --
Thursday, 1st May to Wednesday, 7th May
1 May: At Sea
2 May: At Sea
3 May: At Sea
4 May: Arrive Southampton; transit London
5 May: London
6 May: London; Kai departs
7 May: London…?I’m going from a maximally set-up environment for productivity to one with shaky logistics and unclear plans, in an expensive and generally not-conducive-to-health city.
I’ll check in with people worth seeing in London, and that’ll be good. Kai departing is a hit, though I’ll see him next week.
As soon as I arrive in Southampton, I’ll need to spend a lot of time and vigilance in making sure my plans to get out of London to Marrakech come together quickly, and then handle the logistics. This might be a defensive action, so hitting some Yellows or Reds in my lights is not the end of the world, given the circumstances.
With any set of data/controls like this, context is everything. Unsurprisingly, things start getting shaky with my very-not-planned London plans and logistics.
Basic things -- what to eat? Where to lift weights? -- become a cognitive drain. The "Eat Healthy -- Plan" means knowing where I'll get food that meets dietary requirements. Having that sorted out probably saves, no joke, between 30 and 120 minutes each day. It's just a huge hassle to go looking for decent food.
The biggest damaging factor to productivity, by far, was mediocre or bad sleep on 2nd May, 3rd May, 4th May, 5th May, and 6th May.
You can see how fatigue starts kicking in higher, then exercise falls off, then everything else starts falling off.
It gets worse before it gets better -- Week 4 is already complete and I'll publish it shortly with more analysis -- but some of the details are not as bad as they look.
I'd been sacrificing a lot of administration and details work in order to be all-in on my largest priorities. I had hours and hours of calls that were more-or-less necessary once I arrived. These were not fun in aggregate -- it's really not fun to spend 7 hours on the telephone in a day -- but almost every call is one that individually was either necessary or very relevant/valuable.
I don't see any way around that... if you have a highly collaborative/connected life, and you're out at sea (literally) for two weeks, you have a lot of calls when you come back. The time to do that directly came off many of my projects. Without optimal living quarters, better plans in advance, or perhaps just "throwing money at the problem" (something I usually refrain from doing -- higher spending means I need to spend more time working, and less time on creative and philanthropic projects which are how I deploy most of my time now) -- well, without one of those you'll have a drain in a new city. Pair that with a backlog of work, and the biggest productivities suffer.
That's Week 3. I'll do Week 4 now in the next entry.