I have a lot going on in my life. Over the past 4 years, everyday I have been switching between many different personas:

1. A developer at Requestly
2. A computer science student
3. A nerd for all things related to networks
4. An aspiring indie hacker
5. A part time movie finatic

And many more….

But busy ≠ productive was an equation I understood quite early in this phase of juggling different interests and commitments.

Looking from the outside I guess an easy characterisation of me would be a guy who spends all his day slouched in front of a screen.

I am aware that it is unhealthy, and I have tried to fix this sometimes, but mostly I just accepted it for what it is.

If you are someone who spends most of their waking hours in front of their screens (phones, tablets, laptops, TVs, etc) I hope you are able to relate to this in some way. If so, I would highly recommend trying some, if not all of the changes that I made to see if they help you too.

But first we need to understand the problem.

Problems with my current lifestyle

Before this, every attempt to solve this has been in vain because I barely scratched the surface of the problem. I sometimes didn’t notice the evident issues, because I was happy with the lifestyle that I had. Mostly turned a blind eye to how badly it was effecting my body

So if like me, you have never tried to solve these, or even knew these exist, I hope this get’s you started towards taking the first step

The obvious (but not so obvious to me) problems that I always tried to solve

1. Sleeplessness:

   I live in a hostel and here the term “sleep schedule” feels like a foreign concept. When you have flexibility and nothing confining you to a routine, it is easy to loose track of time.

   Before last week it was very common for me to get through the day with less than 5 hours of proper sleep. There were even days when i was awake for 30-40 hours straight.

   6 hours was a luxury and 8 hours of sleep was a dream. I hope your situation isn’t as bad as mine. But even if it is, I can assure you it is possible to get back to a healthy routine.

2. Eye strain, brain fog and a constantly buzzing mind:

   Less sleep + high screen time = very bad eyesight

   Dry eyes had become a norm for me. I had become comfortable living with a mild headache.

3. Lack of focus:

   My work requires me to spend focused hours on the problem at hand.

   Most of the problems I face, I am only able to solve after an hour or two of constantly trying to wrap my head around it.

   Very bad eyesight + constantly tired but active mind = Very bad focus.

   I could sit still for hours, because I was used to that since my school days, but actually focusing, without my mind wandering away became harder and harder over the past year.

My futile attempts at fixing these

Before my current efforts, I always used to try to handle these one at a time. Most of these efforts were sub par and not many of these actually had a lasting impact. They were just "quick fixes".

Most of these are around increasing focus (you will notice I wasn’t focusing on my health that much)

1. Caffeine: We have all heard it “Coffee helps you focus”. Quotes like

   

   are so common to see on T-shirts.

   If you haven’t figured it out already, caffeine isn’t a permanent solution if you are in a state like me. Yes it is good from time to time (I’ve heard some amount of caffeine is actually healthy) but easy to loose track of when you are over doing it. It was for me

2. Planning my day:

I can’t sleep because I have pending work I have to finish, so let’s plan my day well the next time so that this doesn’t happen again — naive me convincing myself to plan out yet another plan

My plans have never really panned out the way I anticipated. Mostly because I am still bad at estimating the amount of time it would take me to do a task.

- A tutorial might just be an hour long but understanding it better might take an extra hour
- I might think I have the implementation details planned out for a feature, but I still tend to miss an edge case from time to time
- A 10 minute long article isn’t actually 10 minute long, it takes time to also understand the links within it
- Weekend Projects usually spill over the weekends

I hope you see the pattern. It’s hard to estimate tasks. And not to mention the soul crushing feeling to witness another failed plan.

I gave up on planning a long time back. In hindsight I probably did not do it right. But given the chaotic state of my life right now, planning still feels like a futile effort.

It might work for you but it didn’t work for me

3. Averaging sleep time: Now this was just a foolish lie I convinced myself to be true.

   I just tried to average out 6 hours per day of sleep over the past week.

   So if I spent a day without sleep I would spend an extra hour or two the next day.

   Not to mention that these weren’t all consistent hours, but rather broken down into chunks over the day as “naps”

   I see now that it’s stupid, but boy was that a convincing lie.

4. Pomodoro: This one still works for me from time to time. But I don’t do the traditional pomodoro of fixed length of focus and break sessions. (I am probably wrong here too, but hey, I never said I have solved all my problems)

   I just have a timer that I start with an estimate of how long I want to stay put, sometimes it’s 40 mins, sometimes an hour. It depends on the flow state I am in right now. The goal is to force myself to take breaks after that time.

   That helps me focus, but isn’t really the best strategy if you want a healthy lifestyle, because in my opinion, flow states should come naturally when you are working on something you like to work on. Not from a ticking clock.

5. Reducing distractions: This I still do to some extent.

   This does not mean completely abandoning social media. I still use twitter sometimes, but even at it’s peak it was not more than 45 mins a day.

   I use the DFTube extension cause I get easily distracted on youtube.

   That’s the healthy amount but I would also refrain from watching movies in times when I thought I was “busy” when I clearly needed a break. So it’s easy to over do it if you are driven in the wrong way.

Even though some of these didn’t work that well for me, I am mentioning these to put light on some of the downsides I experienced on trying the most commonly given advice.

The REAL problems

I always used to try to tackle the previously mentioned problems one at a time, never had the focus or time to step back and look at the big picture.

Looking back it is now very evident that the problems that really needed attention were:

1. Very high screen time:

   I reduced distractions on my phone. It was easy to track which apps were taking up the most time. And it worked sometimes. But even then, I would sometimes have these “bad days” when I couldn’t even get off the phone:

   And, on top of that, I would hardly ever track the time I spent on my laptop. How much of it was work? How much of it was just me lingering? Seemed like an important question before. But now, regardless, if it’s this high, it needs to be fixed.

2. Too much caffeine:

   I could never just have one cup of coffee. And then I kept wondering why I couldn’t sleep 🤦‍♂️.

   I would sometimes have 4 cups over the course of the evening, after telling myself I am drinking this because I need to focus at night.

   4 cups coffee + all night staring at the screen = me staring at the wall trying to figure out why I can’t go to sleep

3. Lack of a sleep and morning routine

   There was no fixed time for when to sleep and when to wake up. I already mentioned about the convincing lie I told myself. It stopped me from even trying to get good consistent sleeping hours

In hindsight, these were hard to notice as I had sort of accepted these to be a part of my current lifestyle. Realising that is not the case, is such a relieving moment.

My current routine 🌻

Ok so the mundane but effective routine that I now have is:

1. Wake up at 6, and don’t check my phone till I am done with breakfast.

   I deliberately keep my phone away from arms reach when I go to sleep. Also keep the internet turned off.

2. Do some stretches and freshen up a bit (brush, glass of water, all that stuff)

3. Head out for a walk.

   For now, it doesn’t matter where or for how long. Just go out and get some fresh air.

   Most days I see the sunrise. I run when I feel like running. I sometimes go to the gym at times. But none of it is planned here

4. Then Bath → BreakFast → Start the day

   So even though my day starts at 6 I don’t start work by around 8:30.

   With all that’s going on, it’s calming in some way to have an unplanned but still sort of planned morning

5. Try to end the day by 5:30 (6 max)

6. Do anything relaxing. Go to the ground, chores, a nap, read, talk to family / friends.

   Just get away from the screen

   The idea is to let your body know in some way that the day is over now.

7. Then just check up on the end of the day messages before dinner, do some last minute work and that’s it.

My mornings and rest of the day are mostly consistent now.

It is still hard for me to stop everything in the evening, still working on that. But on the days that I do, it feels so much better.

Drawbacks of this approach:

I sometimes feel that this has reduced my “working hours” and in extension, my overall throughput. Not completely sure about that yet. I just hope that the better focus and elevated energy can compensate that in the long run.

Plus this is also just another plan, I sometimes think that this might fail too.

And I understand while recommending this that not everyone might have the flexibility of changing their whole routine like this (if you are that person, do read the last section)

So how am I confidently recommending this, even when this is still a work-in-progress?

Because overall I have a great mood now, throughout the day.

I didn’t even know I was living life with a mild headache before this.

I had forgotten how relaxing consistent 8 hours of sleep really is. So ya this has helped me to do that.

Final thoughts

Now its obvious I don’t have some mind boggling fancy solution to a “Better lifestyle” (sorry if you were expecting some sort of wizardary).

But what I have learnt, amidst all the hustle and bustle, I now know that it’s very easy to miss out on the actually effective things that you can do to improve your day-to-day.

Fixing my problems required a complete lifestyle change. I set hard rules for a lot of things, most of them still don’t make sense to me because I sometimes think I can be more “productive” without them. But now the goal isn’t to be better today, but rather to get better everyday

So even if these don’t work for you, if you are grinding through the day and always think you can improve and be better. I am sure you are already doing well in life.

And if you are anything like me, you are probably going too hard on yourself anyway.

So for anyone who needs to hear this:

You are doing enough.
The result isn’t always in your hands, what’s important is you gave your best.
What you can’t control, you can’t control. So be kind to yourself.