Sudden Departure

Distractions

It's 5.50 AM and a Tuesday. Yesterday I finished the code review that I spoke about last Monday - it was a monstrosity counting in the high thousands of lines. It was quite taxing and not THAT fun, but it was alright. So far, I am sticking with the approach of continued manual code reviews, because I want to: 1) understand the architecture well, 2) prevent compounding of poor implementation, 3) make it easy to maintain, especially when it comes to documentation as I am fairly disappointed in the quality of the documentation written by LLMs.

There's also some maintenance going on at my building, so there won't be any hot water for the next two days, so there'll be no morning coding session for me, as I'll have to go to the gym to work out and take a shower over there.

I wanted to write a few words on distractions or

anything that turns your attention away from what you are trying to do, think about, or concentrate on - Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

I like the dopamine hits from planning - it's nice to see that filled calendar implying that I will have accomplished all those things I care about. I even suspect that it might be tricking the brain a little, giving a similar kind of satifaction that actually doing some meaningful work might give, in a way that's similar in terms of biology. Just like anticipation of doing something pleasing gives a suprisingly high amount of pleasure. However, I also like to stay real and have been toying with measuring how I spend time in a precise manner. Over the years (I started doing this around 8 years ago), I have discovered that I spend much less time doing things than I thought.

For example - yesterday I basically did only a few things through the whole day other than working on Wizard, the side project:

  1. Woke up at 6 AM
  2. Did my 9-5 from home, so saved about 30-60 minutes on commute friction. During that time I ate some lunch and had a short break to get some groceries, but it took me around 20 minutes. Other than that - real focused work. It's an 8h block.
  3. Cleaned around the house a little - about 15m total.
  4. Spent some time on household planning with my partner - around 45 minutes.
  5. Evening routine, winding down with a book - 30m
  6. Went to bed at 11 PM

So the total time spent on non-Wizard stuff was 9.5h or 10.0h to be conservative. Having been awake from 6 AM to 11 PM, that gives me a total of 17 waking hours or 7 free hours exluding the regular things - day job, basic cleaning, daily time spent with a partner and proper evening wind down.

I measured how much time I worked on Wizard yesterday - it summed up to 3.5h. So that means I spent roughly another 3.5h on things that were not accounted for - chatting with friends, looking up stuff on Twitter or Reddit, going to the bathroom, making coffee, grabbing snacks or having a few-minute screen break. If we assume that 1.5h of that friction is truly unavoidable (you can't skip the bathroom), that gives maybe 2h I could have gained if I avoided distractions or 57% more time to potentially spend on Wizard. Is that a lot? Kind of. But it's not really THAT big of a game changer. While making a weekly plan, it would be easy to assume that since you have 7 free hours, you will easily spend 5h on the side project, but then life happens.

The main takeaways for me are:

  1. We waste a shit load of time on distractions / stuff that we don't care about. If you think that you are spending X time or plan to spend X time on things you care about, always count the time, with an actual timer going on and you'll be surprised by the real count.
  2. The day job is a huge drain - if I didn't have a day job my free time per day during the workweek would have more than doubled (about 128% increase from 7h if we assume an incremental 9h per day to account for commute and other work-related friction). Assuming I'd really lock in and utilize 7 of these 9 hours, that means a 200% increase in time spent on the project.
  3. You need to leverage the weekends - it gives you the "what if I didn't have a day job" while having a day job or 300% of workweek-day productivity. So if you can manage to not go on a partying world tour on a Friday night and instead wake up early on a Saturday morning - that's a huge hack. Assuming you can do 3h of work on a workweek day, that's 15h across the 5 days of a workweek. If you can do 8h per day on the weekend (nothing too insane), it leaves you with 16h during the weekend or more than during the whole workweek!

It's 6.50 AM over here, so hey, I just spent an hour that didn't go towards my side project! But that's alright - I have been writing this post and lobbing over some prompts to my AI agent to discuss the topic of the influence of agentic AI on the CPU market and had a brief look at work email, so it's all good - no meaningful distractions :)

PS I also saw this video of a tour of Amazon's first office, quite inspiring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltcesVdRtEs