
Slow Mornings May Be a Secret to Tech-Life Balance - feross
https://elemental.medium.com/why-slow-mornings-may-be-the-secret-to-tech-life-balance-b44c2139963b
======
irrational
I get up at 5am to start getting the kids up and ready for school (high
schoolers first, then elementary schoolers, then middle schoolers). Everyone
is finally at school by 9:15am and I can head in for work. I get home around
6pm and get the little kids in bed by 8pm. 8-8:30pm is me time. Then I get
ready for bed and am asleep by 9pm.

I can't imagine what a slow morning (or evening!) would even be like. I'd
appreciate it if someone could add about 6 more hours to every day.

~~~
echelon
_How_ do you do this? I would literally die. I can't live life so breathlessly
with what sounds like no room for breaks. Are weekends even enough for you to
recover?

Forget burning out of a job, I'd burn out on life.

Mad props to you. You've got a hell of a lot more discipline than I do. Your
kids owe you.

~~~
JohnFen
I thought the same until I had kids. This sort of thing is part and parcel of
having children, you really do learn not only to handle it, but to derive
enjoyment from the situation overall.

If it helps any, my experience is that it's hardest on the day your child is
born, but it gets progressively easier as the years go by and the children
become increasingly self-sufficient.

~~~
jacobolus
> _hardest on the day your child is born, but it gets progressively easier_

A 3-year-old definitely takes a lot more continuous attention than a newborn
(assuming the newborn is healthy, eats and sleeps okay, ...).

I was able to get some amount of work done while taking care of my first kid
up to about age 1. In the two years since then, not so much (I just pray for
conveniently timed naps). The second one is 6 months old, and is way easier to
take care of right now.

If you just accept that you will be doing no independent creative work, then a
2+ year old isn’t too bad. They can start to “help” with routine chores, can
walk around for themselves, can feed themselves, eventually stop needing
diapers, etc. The work is not really _hard_ per se. More like relentless.

~~~
jmb12686
Amen to this... 3.5 yr old and twin infants here... I haven't been able to
concentrate in years. When I have attempted to produce anything of value (in
job or hobby), it's been at the expense of my family...

~~~
war1025
Gotta love the "this project needs to get done, so who's going to be mad at me
and how far can I push it?" feeling.

Sometimes friends or family members ask me why XYZ projects are half
completed, and it's hard to properly find the wording for "I want my wife to
still like me at the end of most days".

------
abakker
Alternative: slow afternoons? I mean, my routine usually has me start with
tech/work at 6am, but I wrap up around 2:30 and put some hours outdoors or in
my other hobbies.

I think the important part is just not spending ALL DAY doing any one thing.

My grandma has a saying - "Everything in moderation, including moderation"

~~~
abhiyerra
I’m doing this as well. 7am-12pm for Deep focused work.

1pm-3pm for gym

3-5pm for reflection, thinking and writing.

~~~
d0mine
You still my schedule :) It works well for intermittent fasting. 5pm is the
first and only meal.

------
motohagiography
As someone whose default ringer setting is off unless I'm expecting a call,
and have been like that for almost a decade, giving fewer people a guaranteed
option on my time is a great start to being able to build and choose with
calm, higher quality decisions. We get what we reward. When you don't set
boundaries, you can't expect other people to anticipate them, let alone
respect the ones you have in effect imagined. Writing and answering emails at
2am just makes you the 2am email guy and who wants that person in their life?

In the morning, I read from a physical book first thing to set a boundary
between my real day and the internet. It's not a trick and I usually forget
most of what I've read, but it's a boundary I set and a choice about how I
relate to the world. Forget about hacks to steal back moments so you can find
a way to bear the suffering you've accepted as normal. Just learn to value
calm, and place its priority above everything you feasibly can.

The quality of the decisions you make as a result of valuing calmness as a
principle will alter the trajectory of your life. It can't always be the
supreme priority, but being deliberate about making exceptions to it is most
of the way there. When we worry about missing opportunities (FOMO), we tend to
overlook that it presupposes those opportunities come from someone else. It is
a figment of how we have chosen to relate to those perceived people. It also
goes away as a result of recognizing that perception as an inessential
obstacle to the calm that you value.

Sure, if you haven't set boundaries before, choosing to set them will be
disruptive, initially. The relationships that dropped off were the ones that
involved emergencies, panics, and ultimatums. They were also similar to the
ones that dropped off anyway once I became more successful because their basis
in shared, co-misery wasn't there anymore. It creates a self-selecting filter
where your only remaining connections are to people who respect those
boundaries, and in effect, you.

Anecdotally, it's a pretty good way to live.

This "tech-life balance" approach is a start and is a sign of the need we have
for it. I'd argue a more effective approach would be to just choose calm. Make
an active decision about how you relate to the machines and the perceived
relationships they represent, using calmness not as a goal or temporary state,
but as a principle.

Then, turn off your ringer.

~~~
JohnFen
> When we worry about missing opportunities

Becoming an entrepreneur cured me of this worry, because I realized that there
is no shortage of opportunities -- they're all around us all the time, the
trick is in noticing the ones that can be of value to you.

Since they're common, there's no problem with missing one. Another one is
right around the corner.

This also helped me avoid some really bad business decisions.

~~~
vinceguidry
There's no shortage of _demands on your time_. There's absolutely a shortage
of true opportunities. This is because if someone manages to convince you that
spending your time on their thing, then they benefit.

So everyone packages their demands as opportunities.

~~~
JohnFen
I've yet to see a shortage of opportunities.

However, I agree with you that if someone is coming to you with something that
they're presenting as an opportunity, it most likely isn't. Actual
opportunities rarely come that way.

~~~
vinceguidry
Ok, now I get to trot out my framework for determining whether something is an
opportunity or not. There are three basic ways to get ahead, a) to climb a
ladder up a mountain, b) to build a ladder up a mountain that already exists,
c) or to build a mountain. Only the first qualifies as an opportunity.

Most 'opportunities' are really just directions to places on mountains to
build ladders, or places where no mountain exists.

Access to real ladders to ascend real mountains is heavily guarded and rare.
Finding places to build ladders is probably what you're thinking of as an
opportunity, but I would not consider that opportunity.

If I had few million bucks in the bank to enter a market with, then I can
consider building ladders a real opportunity.

~~~
JohnFen
In my view, an opportunity (in a business sense) is when you find a need
people have that isn't being adequately fulfilled. You capitalize on the
opportunity by fulfilling it. 99% of the time, you don't need a few millions
to do this.

I'm not talking about "getting ahead" in the sense that you seem to be. That's
a different, and much more complicated, topic.

~~~
vinceguidry
To enter a market you need to build a firm and develop a product. This
requires non-trivial time and resources and is risky. Without the resources
you can only try it a few times in a lifetime. With the resources, you can
keep trying until you find success.

It's building a ladder up a mountain that already exists.

~~~
JohnFen
> This requires non-trivial time and resources and is risky.

Absolutely true. You need to take a risk to take advantage of an opportunity.

> Without the resources you can only try it a few times in a lifetime.

If you have time and determination, you really do have all the resources that
are necessary (unless you're wanting a get-rich-quick type of thing, of
course). There's nothing that limits you to a few times in a lifetime.

~~~
vinceguidry
Sure, with time and determination, you can build a ladder up a mountain. But
one path is as good as another if that's the case. All the 'opportunities'
you're ignoring aren't opportunities, they're noise

A real opportunity compels you to take advantage of it, you really are losing
something if you don't follow it up.

What's limiting you to a few tries to a lifetime is time. It takes 5-10 years
to properly validate a business model, you can only do that so many times. And
you might not be in the same place after an attempt that you were before,
meaning it might take even more time.

~~~
JohnFen
I think that we may be defining "opportunity" differently. It sounds like
you're defining it more like a "windfall". To me, an opportunity is when you
see a path to enhancing your success. It is not automatically success, and
does not imply that no effort is required on your part.

An opportunity is when you find a way of advancing your goals that has a
reasonably good chance of success.

> It takes 5-10 years to properly validate a business model,

Except that it doesn't. And you should never go into business with a business
model that is so fixed that the only thing you can do is to validate it or
not. Your business model is something that you are continually adjusting
(sometimes radically) as you learn more about what you're doing or as your
situation changes.

~~~
vinceguidry
> To me, an opportunity is when you see a path to enhancing your success. It
> is not automatically success, and does not imply that no effort is required
> on your part.

It's not lack of effort that defines opportunity but the reduction of risk. If
someone offers me an opportunity, that means I can work hard and have more of
a guarantee of success than if I went and did something else.

Opportunity means it's not just your intuition, effort, and resourcefulness
that mitigates risk. Some other factor is helping. Some other company or
person is offering you crucial advice and resources. Like Dr. Dre mentoring
Eminem. That's an opportunity. You have to get lucky to find one, and then you
have to be ready to jump on it.

Getting to the top of a mountain always takes effort, it's just a question of
how much it takes to get to the top and whether the direction you pick is the
right one.

------
JohnFen
Interesting.

A couple of decades ago, I developed a habit of waking up early enough that I
don't have to do anything at all for at least the first hour of my waking day.

This was accidental at first, but it improved my life so much that I never
stopped doing it. It never occurred to me that this was anything other than a
personal quirk.

------
pacaro
I'm struck by a couple of things,

Getting up at 4.30am seems excessive and presumably requires going to bed at
8-9pm

I can't imagine doing this with a child

~~~
peteradio
What time do you think little children go to bed?

~~~
milesvp
Children tend to be solar powered. Getting them to bed before 10pm in mid
summer nights can be a real challenge in northern latitudes.

Black out curtains _really_ help. But starting the bedtime routine when the
sun is out is a real chore. I honestly have no idea how Alaskans get their
kids to sleep at all in the summer.

~~~
astura
I really can't agree its "a challenge", I went to bed at 8pm every single
evening as a young child. I remember it being still light out in the summer
when I was went to bed, but there wasn't a choice, I was to be in bed, so I
went to bed with a groan. Same with my siblings, we were all in bed at 8pm
sharp every single day, no exceptions.

It's about setting firm rules and sticking to them.

~~~
mruts
And my parents made me go to bed at 8pm but I stayed awake until 2am. I’m not
sure of the point you’re trying to make.

------
cybersnowflake
If you can consistently wake up at 430AM in a standard workday and just carve
out 5 hours of freetime in addition to the time others have you're either a
savant, an inhuman monster who doesn't need sleep, or your job probably
doesn't require you to do that much. Either way I'm not going to take your
advice too seriously when it comes to universality.

~~~
closetohome
Also could we maybe get an example of a person with a real job doing this?
"Employee engagement" isn't exactly the kind of thing that requires, you know,
faculties.

~~~
vharuck
I get up at 5 am for morning me-time, even on the weekends. It was never a
goal; I just tend to wake up after 6 hours. I'm sure it's not healthy.

~~~
yummypaint
You might just be lucky [https://www.chronobiology.com/short-
sleepers-1-percent-popul...](https://www.chronobiology.com/short-
sleepers-1-percent-population-need-6-hours-sleep/)

------
kingbirdy
I've been adopting this approach in order to have higher-quality free time. I
find that if I wake up early (around 7:30) then I can take an hour or so to
myself in the mornings to read, play a game, or work on a personal project,
and I have my full brainpower to apply to it. However by the time I get home
from work around 6, I don't have nearly as much energy to put in to the same
activities, and can't focus as easily or make as much progress.

~~~
earlz
Am I the only person who can never have "full brainpower" anytime within 3
hours of waking up?

~~~
Izkata
For me it's more like 4-5 hours..

------
e40
For me, it's slow afternoons. I'm more productive on tech things in the
morning, so I don't want to slow myself then. Around 3pm, though, I like to
take off until around 6 or so. It really feels better to have a gotten a bunch
of stuff done before I slow down.

------
thorwasdfasdf
Yup. Sometimes, I'll do like 15m of yoga in the morning. i think the key is
not to rush it. don't rush your breakfast (if you eat it), don't rush your
brushing teeth, your shower, etc.

------
Mikulas0
So it seems the "secret" to tech-life balance is choosing more life than tech?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all about tech-life balance and work-life balance
(which this article and the problem in general heavily overlaps with), but the
secret is conciously organizing your life to have more life than tech. Part of
this is finding a job that allows you to choose life outside of office hours.
Having more free mornings to do things not related to tech is probably a
symptom of achieving a better tech-life balance.

~~~
president
Do these types of jobs even exist anymore in tech? At least in SV, every job
I've come across these days seem to require on-call and an implicit
requirement to work into the night hours in order to finish your work. Not to
mention super competitive teammates that don't mind working 24/7 and putting
pressure on me to work even longer. I would gladly take a minimum 25% pay
reduction if it meant I only needed to work 9-5pm with no obligation to answer
emails or Slack messages after-hours. I would love to hear examples of
companies with this type of WLB if they do exist.

~~~
apersom
I'm the only dev at a small consulting firm (3-5 people, including owners).
I'm payed for 40hrs/week but rarely put in more than 35. This is completely
accepted. Even though we're all very enthused about the work that we do and
want to deliver the best that we can, it's always understood that work is not
everyones highest priority at all times.

I leave my work phone at the office when I leave.

------
meddlepal
One of the big reasons I love being an east coaster working remote for a west
coast company is that my day is more like 11am/noon to 8pm+ ... As a night owl
that works great for me because I still get plenty of sleep even if I stay up
until 4am.

------
newsreview1
Does anyone else here find that the idea of a slow morning could have anything
to do with the decline of quality, youth playtime, or time parents spend with
kids. I found a fantastic article about this here a few months back that
reminds me of what Hanock does here. Definitely worthy of a try.
([https://houseoflawandorder.com/the-alarming-decline-of-
quali...](https://houseoflawandorder.com/the-alarming-decline-of-quality-
youth-playtime/))

------
jedberg
I think it depends a lot on _what_ you do with your phone/laptop in the
morning. If the first thing you do is hop on email or social media, then yes,
I can see how that could be psychologically draining.

But if you start with news(ish) type things, that's just another way of
"reading the morning paper". I personally start by checking HN and Reddit, and
then curated news like the Associated Press app.

~~~
knaik94
I think it's useful to point out that your Reddit and HN are curated too.

I found Reddit's /r/all and logged out experience draining. The defaults on
Reddit seem similar to other social media now.

I found the frequency and filter quality of stories on HN to be better during
weekdays and working hours. I think HN has better curation with more active
users. It feels less like a News source during downtime.

~~~
jedberg
That's fair to point out. They are curated, just curated differently.

------
krustyburger
>“Technology has done nothing but enhance my life. But how you decide to carve
out time for yourself is important,” says Nicole Loher, a 26-year-old
marketing consultant for Microsoft. “There was a time when I did transition
into being that obsessive with the phone and it didn’t feel that great.” Loher
is also a slow-morning devotee and she started her routine a decade ago,
frequently waking at 4:30 and spending the hours up to 9 a.m. as “strictly me
time.”

So she started this routine when she was 16?

~~~
sigstoat
> > Loher is also a slow-morning devotee and she started her routine a decade
> ago, frequently waking at 4:30 and spending the hours up to 9 a.m. as
> “strictly me time.”

> So she started this routine when she was 16?

i want to know what high school she was at that wasn't already running classes
by 9AM.

~~~
notfromhere
I feel like most US high schools have classes by 7:50-8am; not sure how it is
elsewhere but this was true in the Great Lakes about a decade ago.

------
philipsunrise
ah yes, my slow morning where i wake up at 4:30 am and run a marathon before
going to work

------
lonelappde
Medium server went down to help up improve our tech-life balance.

------
codyb
I’ve been doing this lately. It’s pleasant for sure.

------
earlz
It blows my mind some of the comments here of people who do this. I can
literally not recall a time that mornings were not miserable.. and that
includes when I am jet lagged (either going to a country, or coming back) and
naturally fall asleep by 9pm and awake by 5am. Mornings are boring and I can
never really get into enjoying them. The most fun I've had was one time in
China I woke up at 4am and went to photograph things at 430am.. But that's not
something I'd do every day, and even at the time I felt kinda cranky about it.

I have 2 kids, so have to have some structure to my sleep schedule. Left to my
own devices, my natural bed time is 3-4am and I'm awake at 11am-12pm. With
kids during school (in summer they sleep in too) it's a bit more reasonable
though probably less healthy. Asleep by 1 or 2am and wake up at 8am. They're
9yo and 6yo and the oldest is responsible for getting the younger up if she
doesn't wake up with the alarm. They're both 90% ready by the time I wake up
(they prefer to wake up at 7am or even 6:30am to have some play and tv time
before school). This includes getting themselves dressed, hair and teeth, and
the picky youngest packing her own lunch. Their school starts at 8:45am and
I'm typically out the door at 8:30am and back by 9am.

I don't really start working until 10am most days, but I'll do some passive
stuff like read emails and industry news type stuff while having coffee. At
10am I'm getting started, at 11am on a good day I'm hitting a stride.
Typically not doing my best coding work until at least 2pm though after lunch.
Depending on how in the zone I am and what I'm doing, I work until 5:30pm to
7pm. I have the benefit of being remote and setting my own hours though, so
it's definitely a blessing I know many people aren't fortunate to have. Have
dinner with the family after I stop working, and then just relax with dumb
activities (TV, social media) and of course bonding stuff with family, until
the kids go to bed at 9pm. When they go to sleep I sometimes work for a couple
more hours (coordinating with 12 hour different timezone is fun), but more
usually relax with peace and quiet playing games, messing around with
interesting research (both hobbies and work), or just dumbly watching TV, or
do some hobbies (analog photography/darkroom printing)

I sacrifice sleep more than I should, and typically will have a 10 minute
power nap after I'm done working.. But honestly, as long as I'm getting 6-7
hours of sleep, I feel just as well as when I'm getting 8 or 9. When I get
less than 6 though I definitely regret it the next day. And I don't mean just
sleeping in on weekends. I had about 2 weeks this summer where I had no kids,
no wife, and basically nothing guiding my sleep schedule. I'd tried naturally
sleeping for a week with no alarm and realized I felt more tired and it was
consuming a lot of time. I was waking up at 11 or 12. So I started setting my
alarm to a more reasonable 10am and was in bed by 3 or 4am, and always felt
well rested after I got out of bed.

Some people can not "relax" and enjoy mornings. My goal with mornings is to
get that phase of day over with so I can work and then get to a free evening.
When I'm jetlagged it's pretty interesting becoming a forced morning person,
but it's always proven to me that having 3 hours of free time in the evening
is so much more valuable to me than 3 hours of free time in the morning.

------
UncleOxidant
Could we just stop using medium altogether? I just get a pop up asking me to
pay $5/mo. Not going to happen.

~~~
jraph
One day, my grand parents told me a secret to access Medium without hassle.

I can't tell you in details since it's a secret but it really works, believe
me. It's incredible. It has something to do with herbs, mindfulness and
blocking JavaScript. Medium is so great when you do that.

On Android, IceCat Mobile blocks non free JavaScript and on Medium, it's a
feature beyond the expectations.

I would call this graceful enhancement, or progressive degradation.

You start with a sane and nice baseline, and then add crap to that for
supported browsers and configurations.

------
m23khan
There is no work-life balance in tech. You can deceive yourself but the
balance died out something like 7-8 years ago.

When the wave after wave of tech changes happening and new tools coming into
existence, the only lifestyle you can have to stay gainfully employed is:
work, work, work until some other commitment (sleep, wife, kids) eat up
remainder of your time.

Personally, I think in next 5-10 years, IT workforce will (1) Be well known
for burnout and people leaving IT due to burn out. (2) Be further concentrated
in parts of world where work is main objective of life (China/India, etc.).

~~~
kingnothing
I've been in the tech industry working for tech companies for a decade and
have never regularly worked more than 40 hours per week. I do not check work
email outside of business hours and I do not have email or chat alerts on my
phone. I set the expectation with all of my coworkers that they can call me on
the phone if there's an emergency outside of normal hours and I'll try to
help, but that type of thing should always be handled by our on-call engineer
first. If you're speaking from personal experience, you should re-evaluate
your employer and how you approach your work life.

~~~
standardUser
I can't say I've ever had that sweet of a deal (perhaps a byproduct of working
at smaller startups), but what you describe is much more in line with my
experiences than the nightmare described in comment you responded to.

