I used to work till late hours. That is - extremely late, I could stay up until 4am, have 6 hours sleep and then work the next day. That is not to say that I was working this whole time, I used to waste some of that time - like play chess every once and again, read HN post...
This will not come as surprise that I realized this hurts my family and so I decided I have to change the way how I organize my day.
I managed to change my life style to start work early (I wake up 5am and I'm in the office at 6am so I can finish at 3pm) and then spend quality time with family (quality that is I'm not tired or under phone / email). Once kids are in bed and I still feel like checking in I give myself 1 hour before 9pm, I go to bed not later than 9pm so I fall asleep before 10 so I can wake up at 5am again.
Everything would be fine if only I had shorter warmup time. That means when I come to the office at 6am I often need around 30 minutes of wasted time to make my mind to actually start working. What do I do during that time? I waste it to play mahjong, sometimes chess or read HN post...
I tried different things to fight these bad habits. One post here on HN suggests to maintain a TODO list, so first thing you do in the morning is to curate that list and keep it up to date in terms of priorities. This helped a bit but I still find it difficult to just jump straight in without having some of my time wasted.
If you still read this you might probably suspect that this warmup time is not just morning thing. Every distraction during the day (i.e. meetings, standup etc.) make me to waste some time to go back to the flow...
What are your ways of reducing this warm-up time? Or maybe I'm just lazy and nobody else have this problem?
