Day 178: The Silliness of Sustained Sprinting

It’s been over a month since I started thinking about Browserflow, the idea to end all ideas.

One of my current housemates joined our house around the same time, and about a week or two in, he asked me if I always worked this hard. I laughed and told him no; he had just caught me at a time when I was newly possessed and sprinting as fast as I could. I assured him that once I had the core product built out, I’d mellow out and work more normally, that is, taking breaks, eating proper meals, and not staying up for hours to work long after everyone else had gone to sleep.

That never ended up happening. I’m still sprinting and working all day, every day.

It actually feels counterproductive now — I don’t have a good way to measure this, but it feels like I’m taking significantly longer to complete tasks. That sense is probably also created by the fact that I’m in the middle of a major refactor and fixing regressions is a slog, but there’s also a sense that my mind is becoming less nimble and creative.

For the sake of covering as much ground as possible, it’s like I decided to run nonstop without taking breaks for meals or sleep. Now I’m spending a whole day crawling to move the same distance I could’ve accomplished by lightly jogging for a few hours.

In my experience, letting things simmer in the subconscious often lead to better ideas and product insights compared to actively thinking about them all the time. It’s one of my favorite side effects of having a stable exercise routine — I surprisingly do some of my best thinking and come up with solutions to difficult problems in between sets when my mind is not occupied with anything in particular.

Over the last month, I’ve removed all that dead space by racking up endless hours of active work, and it feels like I’ve lost something important by doing that. I’m eating a lot, not moving, and turning into a blob. I also feel like my writing is becoming fairly repetitive and has the constant theme of “boy I really should sleep and exercise more! I’ve only written about this a hundred times!” because I’m not letting my mind wander and explore.

I’m looking forward to seeing how many hours I worked this past month when I do my monthly review. I’ll likely never work that much ever again — not because it’s hard, but because it just doesn’t make sense. I’m glad I did it so that I can learn from this experience: Hyper-optimizing for short-term gains at the expense of long-term progress and well-being is plain silly.