schedules

I’ve been back home from my internship for over a week now, which has been an interesting transition for me. One thing in particular is that I typically woke up at 7:25AM EST for my internship. Translating this to Cali time, it’d be the equivalent of waking at 4:25AM for the past 10 weeks—I’ve been sleeping in, and the net effect is that I’ve now been waking up at around 6:30-7:30AM PT each day.

Last year, I tried becoming a morning person, which I talked about in a blog post on 11/28/2020. At the time, I was trying out different ways to challenge myself and become a more productive person, and becoming a morning person was one of the more stereotypical ways of achieving that (it was one of the most challenging things I could think of, and achieving it would’ve personally been very fulfilling). In the end, I didn’t radically transform into a morning person, and the habit died after a month or so.

This past week or so, I’ve had a pretty consistent, nice morning routine. I typically start my day off with a walk in the park near my house, where I’ll bring a book and a bottle of cold brew that I prep the night before. I’ll walk around, spend time thinking about what I wanna do in my life, both in the short-term and long-term. Once I’ve reached a point where I’m satisfied with the amount I’ve thought through things, I’ll find a nice spot in the park to read until I get hungry, thirsty, or need to use the bathroom. Since I chug water when I wake up and coffee makes me wanna pee, this typically isn’t much longer than 1-2 hours.

There are benefits to this that I’m realizing from this past week. By doing my walk in the mornings, typically the sun isn’t super bright yet and there’s fewer people—just makes for a much more pleasant experience in terms of thinking/reading. The day also feels longer—noon will roll around and I’ll feel good because I’ve already done a good amount of work with quite a bit of the day left. In general, it just feels good to have this morning routine and to feel like I’m being productive—this was a challenging thing for me to achieve in the past, and it’s fulfilling to have made a large improvement over time.

morning clout

I find the fact taht being a morning person is held in high regard quite interesting. My general take is that for virtually everyone, the easy thing to do is just to procrastinate on important tasks. Being a “morning person” means that one is able to beat one’s procrastination tendency and finish all their important tasks early on in the day before nighttime arrives. Generally, this implies that one has incredible discipline, which is very respectable. It also exhibits a general self-awareness on what’s important in life, and a character disposed towards then working on those things.

I’ve never really been a morning person, and it seems like the reason why my subconscious found becoming one attractive is due to the above reasoning. Yet, thinking about it more, I realized that I actually know very few morning people.

At a particular moment, people are separated into two groups (rather by definition, and not to say people can’t jump from one group to the other):

  1. morning people

  2. not morning people

Quite profound, I know haha.

Within group 1, I know maybe three people personally who are morning people, and I’ve seen one person on TikTok that just makes daily vlogs that embody this sort of lifestyle. All of them are/were athletes—if athletics are important to you, then being a morning person makes a lot of sense. In the morning, you haven’t done anything else since waking up, so you have the most physical energy and the weather is generally nicer (sun isn’t brutal yet). I’m sure there’s a culture component to it as well, but it’s not a technical reason so I’m not going to include it.

Within group 2, I think most people are like me and just end up as not morning people because of it’s just easier not to be one. It’s super hard to schedule optimally and have the required discipline, and most people just end up as not morning people, myself included. Even now, my schedule slowly shifts more and more back each day. But yet, the people I respect the most mostly fall into this group 2. They are definitely not procrastinators, and are at a level of productivity that’s simultaneously admirable and a bit scary. This contradiction with my earlier general impression of why morning people are impressive is what is so interesting to me. If I think being a morning person is impressive/respectable, then how come basically all the people I respect are not morning people?

One of the key reasons why the mornings are so effective is that there’s nobody else awake to really distract you. This same logic applies to working super late at night—athletics is the exception here (due to weather and you have more physical energy when you wake up versus at the end of the day). For most people, I think it’s still better to get most of your work done during the morning/day—there’s a reason why procrastination is such a negative force and being able to defeat that tendency has huge benefits to one’s life, both logistically and emotionally.

For the really driven workaholics that I know, a nighttime routine actually arguably makes more sense. If you really care about what you’re working on, it’s pretty hard to drop what you’re working on and go to sleep. Working through the night, there truly isn’t anything to distract you—you’re just in your room in front of your computer working on what you wanna work on. Then, your free time is the entire day, where you have all the daylight hours to explore and have fun. Compared to the evening, a lot of places are already closed, although you may have a bonus of more of your friends being free.

productivity outlook

I guess realizing my goal of becoming a productive morning person over the past week has made me realize that chasing productivity goals has been fun in a challenging way, but a lot of my motivation for doing so has been primarily for this fun challenge appeal. I’ve been thinking a lot more seriously about doing quant vs. startups for my career, and a big part of this is simply thinking about what I wanna do and why I wanna do it. This shift in mindset has seeped into a lot of my life—I think the change in my thinking about being a morning person is a small example of this.

This summer internship was really fun—I had a really good time, and I think a big part of it was being able to not worry about what I had to do. I describe it as “turning my brain off,” which obviously isn’t true—during the internship, I had to think relatively hard when doing projects or during education/whatnot. But there was this huge aspect where pretty much my entire life was set for me, and I just had to follow the schedule well—it was very comfortable and was almost a vacation in a way (vacations sometimes feel weird to me because I feel guilty if I don’t do any work for a super extended time period). But in this case, it was 10 weeks where I felt like I was learning, doing work, hanging out with/making new friends, and getting paid the whole time. Again, just a great summer experience.

Coming back home felt like a snap back into reality/the end of a nice vacation. Between recruiting again, mulling over startups, and a bunch of logistical planning, it’s just been a lot more uncomfortable and I’ve had to quickly shift gears and turn my brain back on. In general, all my time now is completely unstructured, and I need to figure out what things I should spend that time on and why I’m choosing to do so. It’s been a challenging task, but I’m quite happy with how far I’ve come compared to 2 years ago when I first started trying to manage unstructured time.

One of my goals for this week is just to use my time well on things I care about—a part of that is just to read/learn as much as possible. I’m thinking of adding just a mini blog post at the end of each week just to track what I’ve read/learned just to keep myself accountable and make it more fulfilling to stick to this plan through the semester. It’ll also probably make me blog more, which I’ve found really helpful in elucidating my thoughts.