I used to feel that I had only three or four hours a day to concentrate on creating things. The rest of the day was broken up by exercise, walks, cooking, scrolling through short videos, doing nothing for a while, and taking a nap. What bothered me was how little time seemed to be left for my work. Looking back at that list now, I can see how little attention I was paying to the differences between those activities, because I was mostly concerned with how much time they left me for creating something.
With that way of counting, it was easy to overlook how much of the day I spent mentally occupied. I was counting the hours spent doing an obvious task, while leaving out the time spent thinking about one, taking in new information, or trying to work something out. So even when there were gaps in my schedule, those gaps didn’t necessarily give me much of a break. Some of what I called free time was already occupied before I decided what to do with it.
The Work I Wasn’t Counting
For example, I used to pick up my phone as soon as I woke up and keep looking at it during breakfast. At the same time, my mind would be running ahead to the day’s work. If I was going to write code, I would mentally go through what I needed to do and how to do it, rehearsing the task before I had actually started. I could already feel tired before beginning the work itself, but that preparation was easy to leave out when I looked back at how many hours I had worked.
Then, when I felt too tired to do anything, I would lie down and look at my phone again. After watching short videos for a long time, I sometimes found the more stimulating ones still playing in my head. I could put the phone away and close my eyes, but the images were still there, and I didn’t feel settled. Time had passed without me doing any work, yet I hadn’t come out of it feeling rested, and there was now even more going on in my head.
This becomes harder to notice when the things we do are interesting or useful. A personal project, a technical article, or a video about something we want to learn can feel like a welcome change from paid work. But interest can also keep us going when we’re already tired, especially if there’s another detail we want to understand. We may spend an evening moving between several things we enjoy, while continuing to ask questions, take in information, and work through problems the whole time.
When Work Filled the Whole Day
I saw another part of this during a period when I was working on my own. After leaving a job, I moved to a city far from home because I wanted somewhere quiet where I could concentrate on creating content. I knew no one there. I cooked or ordered food, bought daily necessities online, went out for walks, and sometimes did a little bodyweight exercise at home. The rest of my time went into coding, writing articles, and making videos, which looked like a fairly disciplined way to live.
At first, there were things to buy and unpack, and I had some contact with delivery drivers and food couriers. About a month later, I started recording a new online course and decided to finish all the lessons before releasing it. During that time, I also stopped posting the public content that had given me some interaction online. As I put more of my attention into the course, I was also losing some of the few points of contact I had.
After about two months of this, I woke up one day feeling awful. From the moment I got up, I could already see the whole day through to bedtime: breakfast, recording lessons, lunch, more recording, a walk, cooking dinner alone, more course work, and then sleep. There were breaks in that routine, and I did leave the house, but almost everything still revolved around the same project. I hardly talked to anyone, and even away from the work itself, I kept thinking about what I was creating.
When I stopped, I became very aware that I was alone and had no one to share any of it with. The work could still have value, but that didn’t make the rest of the day feel satisfying. Gradually, I did fewer things outside my work and felt more exhausted, until even a little work on the course left me feeling weak. Having control over my schedule hadn’t given me the kind of daily life I had expected, because I had made plenty of room to create things and very little room for anything else.
Things gradually felt better after I moved back to a place where I knew people. Being around familiar people gave me a sense of safety, and my sleep slowly improved too. That experience made me pay more attention to what was actually happening during the hours outside work. Quiet, time alone, and the freedom to arrange my day had all seemed helpful for concentrating, but I also needed contact with people and ways to come out of the state of thinking about my work all the time.
Looking Beyond Working Hours
For programmers, I think this is one reason exhaustion can be difficult to make sense of. We can finish a workday and still be turning over an unfinished problem at dinner, reading about a new tool afterward, or planning tomorrow’s task while supposedly resting. If we work independently, the hours may be even harder to distinguish, because the project we want to work on can fill the spaces where other parts of life used to be. The work has continued in several forms, although the hours we count as work may look quite modest.
So if some of this feels familiar, I would start by looking at the part of the day already marked as time off. Before deciding that we should have achieved more, we can include the time spent rehearsing tasks, researching, worrying, and trying to settle down afterward. Those parts of the day were easy for me to miss because they didn’t always produce anything I could point to. Once I began noticing them, I had a clearer idea of what I was asking of myself, and why leaving the desk hadn’t always been enough to feel that work was over.
I wrote more about these experiences and what I changed afterward in The Overloaded Programmer.