Someone shared this video on Mastodon the other day. It really got me thinking. Basically, I'm trying to figure out if I'm working with or against my brain.
I've kind of been trying to build my life to limit chaos in my life. I've written about how I have to limit how late I code, and how much, otherwise I can't focus on anything else. I've been putting up guardrails. This video has got me wondering if those guardrails are helping or actually hampering my creativity and productivity.
I feel like I do pretty well when I have a routine. I tend to wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, go running after dropping my daughter off at school, intermittent fasting, and things like that. I think routine helps give my day structure and offloads a lot of decision making.
I've tried to add structure to my work/side-projects—3 days a week, same time, etc. But I'm not sure if that helps me do my best work or not. I tend to work in bursts. I procrastinate a lot at work, then one day, bam! I get like 80% of my tickets done. I putter around my side-projects, then bam! 3 new features. In retrospect, I may have tried to build my systems so that I wouldn't feel lazy. But if I'm not as productive as I want to be in my allotted 1 hour 30 min work block, I don't feel great.
So I might need to rethink things. Or maybe not. Things are going pretty well. But I can't help but wonder if they could be going better.