The Enormous Impact of a Personal Time Micro-Optimization

I tend to be one of those people/developers/professionals that takes “life hack” articles with a very fine grain of salt. Sometimes followed with an eye-roll, and a sarcastic “ummm… ok”. But I have stumbled into something that I thought was a nice personal improvement, and it’s turning out to be a life-altering change for me. I wanted to share what I’m doing, how I approached it (and originally chose this), and how I think this could help you. Maybe.

Small changes over a large scale result in big changes. We do this with our code. Shave 10 ms off an operation… that’s tiny. But over a million requests that’s the equivalent of nearly 3 hours of saved operation time. That’s huge. Small things in small scale are small. Large things in small scale are large. Small things in large scale are… huge. We do this with code. We do this with finances (put away a little money for a long time and.. you can retire). But why don’t we do this with time? After all, time is not only the most elusive thing for many of us (*raises hand*) but it is arguably the most valuable and limited asset we have in life.

My story

Here’s how this all came to fruition for me. A couple of short weeks ago as we were nearing the end of 2016, I did what I (try to) always do at the end of the calendar year: I think of how I can make the next year even better.

One of the things I wanted to do was maximize my time, and perhaps remove as much “wasted time” as I possibly could. Wasted time for me can be defined as time that isn’t put to good use. That doesn’t mean relaxation time, or unwinding time. On the contrary, I think that is equally important as any other time for productivity. We are only human, we need down time. But for me I had a little gap in the evening when everybody is asleep, and I watch TV and/or play around on my phone. Basically wasted time. My kids are in bed for the night around 7:30pm, and we chat and hang out from that time until about 8:30pm, which is around when she goes to sleep. At that point, I’m not typically ready for bed so I’ll “waste time” with TV or my phone. Then I’d usually try to be lights out by 10:30pm. Fast forward to the morning, I’ll wake up around 6:15–6:30am, grab a cup of tea and make breakfast. Then the kids wake up around 7:15am and spend a little time with them before I start work for the day.

What I really wanted to do was rid myself of this wasted time at night before bed. Maybe a half decade ago I could be productive at night from 9–11pm, but for whatever reasons those days are gone. Sure I could boot up my computer and start programming into the wee hours of the night, but I’d easily watch 2 hours pass without really getting all that much done. And not to my own fault, I’m mentally exhausted at that point of the day/evening.

So I wanted to shift that time to the morning. I wake up in the morning always completely refreshed. So instead of forcing myself at night, I figured I might as well just… wake up earlier! Basically, I shifted my sleep schedule from 10:30pm-6:30am to 9:00pm-5am. Whoa! In bed and sleeping by 9pm.

What did I gain from this?

So now I’m waking up at 5am, and by the time I get the sleep out of my eyes and pour myself a cup of tea, I’m doing <insert_productive_activity_here> (I will explain this below*) by 5:15am. That means I now have a solid 2 hours before the kids get up!

*What is this productivity time I talk about?

Great question! The answer is, whatever I want to do. For me personally, I am a software developer by passion so 90% of these mornings are spent writing code. But what I wanted to avoid was the feeling of “ugh not really wanting to write some code this morning” and then it would feel robotic and not very pleasant. And even worse, I might fall back into the “old wasteful routine”. I definitely didn’t want that. So I’m holding myself to a very broad rule: Just be productive. Does that mean I have to be writing code? No. Even though 9 times out of 10 that is how I’ll choose to spend my early 2 hours. I have a surfboard that got the nose broken off of it in the last gnarly storm I surfed. That’s something I need to fix up. I’ve already clothed and glassed it, I just haven’t found a good chunk of time to sand it down yet. So if tomorrow morning at 5:15am I am not biting at the bit to sling some code, I have no problem with it if I choose instead to go out into the garage and spend a couple of hours finishing my surfboard repair.

Small gains over a long time

You might be thinking ok, 2 hours isn’t bad. But eh not that much gained either. Not nearly enough to warrant a 9pm bedtime. But, think of it like this…

• 2 hours a day
• If done for 350 days out of the year, that’s a total of 700 hours per year
• Which is equivalent to almost 30 days (full 24 hour days)
• Which is equivalent to almost 88 eight-hour days (think: a normal work day)
• Which is equivalent to over 4 months of eight-hour days, five days a week (i.e. 4 months of a normal 40-hour work week)

That last point drove home when I did the math. I’m now gaining the equivalent of a third of a work year. For my own productivity. From originally wasted time. Take how productive I’ve been in my job over the past year. Take 33% of that, and that could be my personal productivity. That’s unbelievable! Talk about a huge personal impact on getting things done.

I could get a lot accomplished in 700 hours over the next year…

What is this NOT

This is not any of the following…

• A chore — this is fun! I love personal software development. This is my hobby. My passion. I like to be productive and making things (software or otherwise)
• Rigid — like I said, if I wake up one morning and don’t have a burning desire to work on code, that’s ok. I am not forcing myself to do anything specific. If I want to build a new shelf for my home office, that’s what I’ll do
• The quickest path to burnout — this is a huge consideration for me. The above two points contribute to the prevention of this one. I like this stuff, this is swimming downstream for me, so I don’t expect to get anywhere near feelings of burnout. Conversely, the past couple of weeks have actually proven that I have a more positive attitude throughout the rest of the day because I’ve accomplished person productivity things earlier on

Summary

I’m not much more than a week into this new schedule, but it is already proving to be amazing. Not only with a more positive feeling throughout the day, but also with what I’ve been able to accomplish. I’ve made more-than-expected contributions to an OSS project that I’m currently working on and really excited about. And come 9pm, wow I’m exhausted (the good kind) and ready for sleep and looking forward to waking up for another session of personal productivity.