One observation I’ve made recently is just how big the fall-off is from peak morning performance to the last evening-time thinking of the day.
The odds of me badly mis-estimating my chances of working and then screwing off procrastinating, eating junk food, or rationalizing some bad decisions is almost zero in the first 4-6 hours awake, and still very low the next 4-6 hours.
It’s that last run of hours in the day, when fatigue has kicked in and the mind isn’t fresh — that’s where bad decisions come in.
The thing is, when your cognition is compromised, it’s often hard to be aware of that very fact. At least, that’s how it happens for me.
Here, this is a common situation lately — it’ll be somewhere from 7PM to 10PM and I’ll have one or two more “medium-sized” chunks of work I wanted to do for the day that aren’t done.
Do I wind down, do something easy, and sleep? Or do I take a crack at doing those things?
My natural inclination seems always to the latter — work! More! Now!
The thing I’m trying to realize is, by sleeping earlier, I get those exact same hours — just earlier in the day tomorrow instead of in compromised-mode right now. If my schedule shifts to much earlier than I meant to, I can take a long nap mid-day the next day, which tends to almost as good as a full night’s sleep for restoring judgment and thinking ability.
Another path that many of the smarter people I know walk on: when it’s late in the day and judgment is compromised, they just do stupidly trivial stuff. Do laundry. Clean up. Maybe pre-cook some food for tomorrow or the ongoing week, or do a very simple errand.
For some reason, that consistently never appeals to me in the moment — if I have some more high-concept stuff I want to do, I want to do it in the evenings. The thing is, these sessions often produce nothing of value — and then, eventually laundry needs to get done and errands need to get run and all of that.
I’m trying to intellectually bias myself very strongly to easier and more trivial tasks late in the day instead of anything important, and whenever the decision is “Do I work a bit more, or sleep…?” to always take sleep unless in the middle of an intensely productive session (and even then, to be skeptical).
Your experiences?
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