Not What I Expected

I know a part of me thought that routine was going to be bogus, and perhaps that was my first mistake, but that routine didn’t last past the first day

Reality’s Kick In The Face

Previously I spoke about all the different things we hear and read about on the internet these days about what to do with our time, and I spoke a bit about what I was planning to do with mine. I ended up treating this lockdown as an experiment in what I felt was the right thing to do with my time.

The below diagram basically outlines my experience so far. It’s early days, and as I write this the President has only just announced that our lockdown is being extended (shocker) by another two weeks, so I’m going to have more time to experiment with this until things are back to normal, or as normal as we can get them.

My daily routine involved a few things, and they were manageable under the circumstances because I got used to them. A general day in my life looked like this:

05h30 — Muster the strength to get out of bed
07h00 — Get to work and ease into the day
08h00 — Official work starts
17h00 — Official work ends
17h30 — Gym time (or Honours classes depending on the day)
19h30 — Dinner time
20h30 — Start winding down for bed (or finish Honours classes)
21h30 — Hit Club Duvet

The funny thing is that even with this schedule, I managed to find time to work here and there, but my social life was few and far between, where I didn’t feel the guilt of not working (another story for another time). My weekends were saving graces, and those Starbucks employees got to know me very well.

When I knew that we were going into lockdown, I knew that there were a few things that weren’t going to be possible anymore, namely having normal office hours, visiting the gym and spending my weekends working at Starbucks. I thought to myself, that if I could now manage my own time, what would that look like?

I’ve read many articles and the like about managing your time as a freelancer and using schedules to your advantage if you didn’t have normal office hours. A lot of it tends to come across as pretentious and righteous, but that’s only because deep down we’re envious of those people. So why not try to be them for a little while and see what happens?

The following was what I thought I would like to do and how I wanted my days to go, according to the part of my brain that apparently filled in gaps I didn’t know were there:

05h30 — Wake up with the sun in my face
06h00 — Catch up on my seemingly endless GetPocket reading list
07h00 — Have breakfast with the family
09h00 — Start work
11h00 — Mandatory break to spend time in the sun
15h00 — Finish official work for the day
16h00 — Home workout
17h00 — Spend some time on Honours work and/or freelance
19h00 — Dinner time
20h30 — Wind down for bed
21h30 — Visit Snoozeville

I know a part of me thought that routine was going to be bogus, and perhaps that was my first mistake, but that routine didn’t last past the first day, and I’m going to try to explain what I think happened.

Our Bodies Don’t Like Our Routines

Unless you’ve been working from home for years and you know exactly what makes you physiologically tick, you don’t actually know what your body wants. Have you ever wondered why there is so much information out there about being productive and having the perfect routine? I’ll tell you why, and it’s because we crave it. We crave it so badly because we don’t know what we want, and we also don’t know what it looks like when it comes along.

There are enough people out there talking about how we aren’t built to be working a standard 8-hour shift of anything. Bear in mind, I’m talking from the experience of creative professionals and knowledge workers. The 8-hour shift was something developed to optimise an industrialised workforce, and while I’m going to try really hard not to go down that particular rabbit hole, I will say that my experience with it hasn’t been the greatest, and I haven’t heard of many people who’s experience has been on the other end of the spectrum.

Something Darius Foroux said in a recent newsletter of his really stuck out to me and made sense at the time because that had been my experience: after about 4–5 hours we stop being productive and work could be better done the next day. I know a lot of managers and the like think otherwise because they often think that time spent = progress, but with creative professionals and knowledge workers, that’s just not always the case. And yet we still find ourselves in workplaces that expect the same hours from you as from someone doing a completely different job than you. On paper, it looks great, but in real life, it doesn’t always pan out that way. Have you ever wondered (and felt bad) about all the times you were exhausted at 15h00?

The funny thing, is that as soon as you give your body the chance to decide what it wants to do, irrespective of physical obligation and expectations, a very big change happens. Why do you think you often sleep longer on weekends? Why you feel so good when you’re doing nothing productive on a Sunday? That’s because we crave something else, but our work demands a different lifestyle based on old standards in a new world.

Alright, I’m done being esoteric now, but all I’m trying to say is that our bodies often want something else than what we’re currently giving it, and as soon as you give it the chance to decide, you begin to see that. That’s what I decided to do.

What My Body Wants

I still went to bed at my normal time, ~21h30, but when did I wake up? 08h00. Every. Single. Day. No matter what time I went to bed, apparently my body wasn’t ready to start the day until 08h00 every morning. This frustrated me to no end because I’m a ritualistic person, and now the rest of my day was practically ruined. I know that might seem like an exaggeration, but I know some of you know what I mean.

I also didn’t work for long. Yes, I got what I needed to get done, and I did it distraction-free in my little make-shift home office at the end of my bed, but it wasn’t nearly for the time I thought it would be. Turns out my brain caps creatively at about 5–6 hours, after which all I want to do is be a potato and take my pants off, and not always in that order.

My routine before the lockdown? Gone. The routine I wanted to have during the lockdown? Never happened. What am I left with now? A confusing schedule and a workload that is screaming to get done. It’s like the remnants of the normal world are tapping on my window and I’m too scared to let them in. Not because I’m worried about them, but because suddenly the tools I was accustomed to using weren’t available anymore. Okay, maybe I am also worried about them. Just a little.

It took me a few days to get the hang of it, but I think I now have something that I can work with, and I know I’ve said it a few times already (please don’t do shots, we’re all on rations here) but I didn’t expect this routine at all, at least not for a long time:

08h00 — Crack open the eyelids
08h30 — Breakfast with the family
10h00 — Start working
15h00 — Stop working
16h00 — Start working on something else
18h00 — Dinner time (maybe a movie)
20h00 — Carry on working
21h00 — Carry on working
22h00 — CARRY ON WORKING
23h00 — Convince myself to go to bed
00h00 — Proverbial lights out

I’ve never really been an advocate for working at all hours of the night, even during my studies (I never pulled an all-nighter), but after getting into sleep science over the past year or so, I now understand that whatever time of day is good for you to work in, then you’re good as long as you get in your 8 hour z-train. So I decided to give that a go and work around it. After all, you can do far more in 6 hours with good sleep than you can in 8 hours with bad sleep. That’s been proven by science.

I’m not going to lie, though, it’s a strange feeling. I have my set up and I still see family, but because of the reduced access to the outside world, the time of day doesn’t matter much to me anymore. I don’t need to be up at a certain time unless I want to be, and I don’t need to work 8 hours if I can get what I need done in 4.

We all work slightly differently, and I’m starting to really figure out what works best for me, even if it’s not what I had expected. At least during a national lockdown, that is. Do you know what’s also funny? I have a feeling a lot of employers are going to be sweating when we all go back, because there are going to be far more people requesting to work from home than they thought. The industry has officially and globally been disrupted, and the delivery method aside, I for one am grateful for the change.