Day 8: Cursed by Excitement

It’s 10PM, and I lay down to sleep. I’m excited to go to sleep early so I can finally correct my sleep schedule and get back to waking up early.

“Hey,” the voice says.

I ignore it. Not tonight.

“C’mon, it’s really important.”

Damn it. “What?”

“So I think that if you give everyone a 7-day free trial of the premium features for Hide Feed, you’ll have people who just uninstall and reinstall the extension every week to get the premium features all the time.”

“Not right now,” I say. “It’s time to sleep.”

“But there’s a way you can largely prevent this by having people sign up for an account when they install the extension. That way, the hurdle will be much higher to get the premium features because they’ll need to create a new email address every time that they reinstall the extension.”

“But I don’t want to require people to create an account unless it’s absolutely necessary. This isn’t a good enough reason to put up a huge barrier to having people try out the extension.”

The voice smiled in the way only an invisible, fictional voice created for the sake of narrative can. It had me.

—

I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I’ll often lie in bed for hours with my mind devolving into a mosh pit of ideas, problems, and their potential solutions. Sometimes, I’ll just accept defeat and get up and start working through those ideas on my laptop, and at other times, I’ll force myself to stay in bed in the hopes that sleep will finally come. Most of the time, the wait takes so long that I later wish that I had just gotten up instead.

My great gift and curse is that when I’m excited about something, I become hyper-focused for long stretches of time. It allows me to enter deep flow states while working, but it also makes me irritable when I’m interrupted. It’s a large part of why I can be quite sensitive to distractions and led me to adopt practices like keeping my phone on Do Not Disturb all the time. It’s also what constantly produces the stream of thoughts around whatever I’m working on, regardless of whether I’m eating, driving, working out, on the toilet, or trying to fall asleep. It’s like my mind has background processes that’s constantly working through the latest challenge, and I wish there were an easy way to invoke kill -9 so that I can be a normal human being sometimes.

At the same time, I’m thankful that I can get excited about the things I work on. As annoying as waking up at 3AM and having my mind immediately foreground a feature suggestion can be, it’s certainly better than working on things that I don’t care about.

The question is, can I find a middle ground where I can be excited without turning into a fork-bombed zombie?