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Shifting my working day later

On Wednesday 21st August 2024, I started The Experiment: moving my working day from 8am-6pm over to 1pm-11pm.

PATTERN:

  • No work in the mornings, only pottering, my li’l walk, pootling around the house, maybe some reading and whatnot. It’s a delight.
  • I cook and eat a nice lunch.
  • I start work about 1pm. Afternoon is some meetings if needed, or some bits and pieces of project work, follow-ups, emails, etc.
  • I have my tea (I take enough break time to cook again and eat while watching a little TV).
  • After that there are NO EMAILS and no distractions … I love the after-dinner stretch. Headphones on, brain on. I do 1 or 2 really good focused pieces of work, in a way I can’t seem to achieve earlier in the day. Uninterrupted, serene. When it gets later I tend to get more focused. I work till about 11pm / midnight and go to sleep feeling contented, and I set my alarm for a not-too-early start the next day.

WHAT WORKS:

When that pattern happens I’m on top of the world! The change in timing gives me focused / deep work time (which I had been craving), and I feel energised and motivated as a result.

WHAT I HAD TO ADJUST:

I can’t always protect my mornings.

I have days where clients put in morning meetings (I do tend to ask for / propose afternoon slots but sometimes people don’t work afternoons, or there might be a whole group of people meeting and the date is already set, or mornings is what works best for everyone else). I have days where I’m out delivering all-day training.

I blocked out the time in my calendar: [my time] [working day part 1] [working day part 2].

Now when I have to have a morning meeting or do an all-day training, I swap the blocks around and have the evening off. It’s slightly less effective for me than having the morning off, but it’s better than doing a “third half” of a working day tagged onto the end. Or I have the afternoon off, bimble around on housework or DIY, then do focused work after dinner. It’s a close second to the morning “me time”.

One thing I’m still working on is getting overwhelmed with deadlines and too much work, and working from first thing in the morning till late at night. Sometimes it can’t be helped because deadlines do occasionally collide, but it’s also to do more broadly with how much work I take on and my scheduling. I’m working on it – and I’m hoping that looking at the data will confirm that I am getting progressively better at this.

CAT LIFE:

The only downside so far of The Experiment is that catto still goes to bed about 10pm, then politely wakes up again when it’s my new bedtime between midnight and 2am, but then wakes me up at sunrise. I then go back to sleep for a few hours. The two of us are doing staggered sleep shifts. It’s fine.

PRIORITISING SELF-CARE:

Interestingly, starting the day with “me time” very much feels like I’m putting myself and my wellbeing at the top of the list, rather than being the thing I mighthave some time for at the end of the day – when I have no more energy to do anything anyway. It’s a significant shift.

SOCIALISING:

One thing I’m figuring out is seeing people, since generally my friends are free in the evenings after a standard day’s work. When I can combine an earlier start with an evening off that’s a good opportunity, or, I can see people for a few hours then get back to work. That seems to work too, so far so good, and I’ll keep an eye on this.

DATA:

It’s been about 2 months now (how they have flown, log time theory is real*) – I have some quite good data which I have collected for my data visualisation course. I am still gathering data (aiming for 3 months) and haven’t started analysing for patterns, but I will come back and update this entry later.

(*) Log time,first postulated by French philosopher Paul Janet in 1897, posits that as we age, a year becomes a smaller fraction of our entire lives up to that point, so each unit of time is perceived** to pass quicker. There’s an interactive visualisation of exactly this, on this website by Maximilian Kiener.

(**) Of course time is an illusion (Albert Einstein), and lunchtime doubly so (Douglas Adams).


On a vibrant orange background, a diary is open on the table, displaying the whole week on the page spread, with space for a to-do list and some additional notes. A pen rests in the fold. Near it, a cup of coffee stands on a wooden coaster.

Photo by Ionela Mat on Unsplash

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