If hard work paid, the donkey would own the farm.

I am now going through a crisis and I am a few weeks away from the verdict day of my 3 years of relentless patience, lot of money spent and efforts. Naturally I am anxious throughout the day unable to do anything else other than play the waiting game.

• I used to strongly believe in putting in long hours. It doesn’t mean productive or not but I wanna put in the hours. If you see my GitHub a year and a half ago you can clearly see me putting in stretches of 12-14 hrs. Every Sunday I would wake up at 7, sit in front of my computer and take up the task and do it till night. Eating, watching TV, doom scrolling through social media, randomly roaming around (I am hyperactive so I can’t sit in a place for more than half an hour) I would do all of these things in between the task. So before going to sleep I would have a pseudo feeling that I have put in 14 hours for a task because that is the most notable task that I have done today.
• Because of this crisis I felt that I needed to take a huge break. But deep inside I know that a break is not gonna solve my foundational problem. The break would be an opportunity to run away from problems rather than face them head on. So I decided to take a step back for a month, go back to the drawing board and reflect on my love-hate relationship with this concept of productivity and hard work.
• I understood the only solution I have is to be honest with myself and figure out a plan for myself.
• My first observation is that I am a victim of pseudo-productivity. From the example above I could have clearly completed the task in 3-4 hrs but it got elongated to 12-14 hrs just because of all the uncounted minor activities (I won’t call everything a distraction) in between.
• Second observation is I have this hyperactivity problem that I and everyone around me has been well aware of ever since I was a toddler. For a brief period I tried to fight it and failed miserably. Now I have started embracing it as a quirk of mine. I have to somehow work around this. So naturally every hour or so I need to move around. Sometimes I even have a strong urge to run/do my cricket bowling run-up. This was harmless because I would get back to my seat, but I made a mistake here, in this break I would take up distracting activities like using the phone, watching YouTube, etc. which is a major reason why a 4-hour session becomes a 14-hour session.
• Third observation. After deep introspection I had only 1 question: is my job a really intellectually challenging hard job? It is not an easy question to ask yourself because your ego won’t allow you to answer it. Technically challenging is the ideal place I want to be because challenges are the stepping stones of growth, but I started to think if my job actually demands these hours or am I slow and lame and putting the blame on hard work and tough hours?
• Let me slightly elaborate on the problems it creates. First problem is this idea of working hard gives you some kind of entitlement that you will definitely win because you worked hard. Not every time does real life reward hard work, and definitely the odds of my pseudo hard work rewarding me is even lower. There is this cycle of chain reactions that follows the moment you feel that you were deserving because you worked hard but you didn’t get what you wanted. “I worked crazy hours but I didn’t get the job but someone else did”, “I worked crazy hours but the needle is not moving for me”, “I worked hard but he didn’t but he got it, I am so unlucky” (comparison is the root cause of all evil). This goes on and on and on. It strips off happiness and induces self-doubt.
• This is also a major burnout factor. Irrespective of whether you are actually working hard or not, constantly telling yourself that you are working hard is enough signal for your body to feel the strain. A common pattern I noticed is going non-stop for n days working and not doing anything on other days of the month, calling it a burnout break. If you had planned it properly you could have spent the whole month working enough and still enjoying the process.
• Another stupidity I was doing as part of my pseudo hustle is working all night thinking that I am Mark Zuckerberg building the next big thing from my bedroom and feeling sluggish all morning and most days dozing off. Biggest stupidity. Since I am not a night person, I am used to waking up early in the morning whenever I had any exams or needed to get things done. I am extremely less productive at night. I could have accomplished the tasks in a few hours if I had had a good sleep and woken up fresh in the morning. I now strongly believe in this: A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one. My whole day should revolve around my health.
• Even though I suck at following it, I firmly believe in routines. Sometimes I feel that we were able to do a lot more things efficiently back in school because of fixed routines. It just takes away doubts about “is my day a productive day or not?” I feel routines reduce a lot of cognitive load. But as an adult we get ad-hoc problems so our routine should have a lot of buffer time in which we can fit the sudden tasks. Keeping all of these pointers and the phase of life I am in, I decided to try and structure a protocol for a month considering all of my self-introspection.
  
• I understood my job is not that intellectually stimulating at this point because of the sudden market slowdown. So I fixed a 3-hour workday every single day. Wake up, first 3 hours work. The main reason for pseudo hard work/productivity is because it is a feeling/emotion which is not quantized. So I started to quantize it. Instead of too much focus on time, I started to calculate tasks done per day. This gamified my day. The night before I would plan to do xyz tasks, next day I wake up and start doing the task, I try to force myself to get that done within the 3 hours, even if it exceeds I am fine with it and I would go ahead and borrow hours from my leisure quota to finish that task. I learned this technique (slightly modified for myself) from the most inspirational person whose work I look up to sunil pai’s tweet. I just keep things time-bound and try to push myself every day. Some days my planned task would be done in 2 hrs. I will rethink; did I plan my day properly? Because now an hour is wasted and next day I would add or reduce workload accordingly. Similar to a work estimation timeline you give to your manager at first you are terribly wrong but you get better over time. If you are a software engineer smashing Jira tickets this technique is even easier for you because you have less thinking about what you should do next day since you have fixed tasks to be done. Unfortunately I am on the other end of the spectrum: research where I either have to deeply think, architect and build or I would be reading/running research experiments. In these cases all tasks are running for weeks so it is tricky to pick a task. I am getting better at this but still have a long way to go. Some days will definitely be longer but it doesn’t feel like a burden. I split my work across all 7 days so it feels a lot easier.
• This also helps me to look deeply at where my time is spent, but at the same time not be very critical of myself when I spend time on my non-trivial activities. I hate social media detox and other productivity crap because anything I can’t stick to long-term is useless for me. The last thing I want is to be a person who can’t understand meme references.
• Now I have a boilerplate like this: there is a dedicated chunk for every important task I need to do, and if I miscalculated it I can always buy some time from my leisure hours which are the hours outside the block. Some days my day job might stretch to crazy hours and I am okay now because I know once that phase is done I am back to my blueprint.
• This solves a few problems for me. First, now I feel better and not lost because I know as long as I am following close to my blueprint I am on the right track.
• I am starting to understand the value of consistency. Especially after doing a startup you have to be consistent with the efforts and go all out every day. I have 35+ years of coding career left. This is a long game so having fun while consistently improving every day will eventually put me in a good spot.
• I still firmly believe in hard work just like this quote I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. Without hard work I am not who I am today, but having the right systems around which enables me to push to an extent where I am not feeling mentally worn out or pushed while still working hard is where I wanna be (sweet spot). If I have fun along with working hard towards my goal of chasing excellence in computer science then I feel I am not missing out on anything and I can do this consistently in the long run.