Good Jobs #88: Bad habits

Ed Sheeran is right. Bad habits lead to late nights. [Also: Good jobs at Zennify, Wikimedia, Hubspot, Super, Aya Healthcare, and more]

Jun 02, 2023

A nightmarish still from Ed Sheeran’s music video “Bad Habits”

I have this pretty bad habit of working late into the night. I might be working on work work or house work or side project work. (Like this newsletter.)

Then when I try to go to bed, I can’t, because my mind is still going a million miles an hour so I end up falling asleep a couple hours after I should.

This deficit of sleep turns me into an grump monster (what my wife would describe as An Asshole™) in the morning which then bleeds into the afternoon. The grump monster then becomes the norm and I, and the people around me, suffer. It’s fun.

But I’ve been working on it.

A friend of mine—not Ed Sheeran—turned me on to habit tracking. He had some bad habits he was trying to break and suggested I give it a try too. [Side note: I grow violently ill when someone suggests self-help content. Mostly because I find the people who talk about it insufferable… wait… am I that guy now?]

I’ll cut to the chase.

I set a goal of stopping all work before 9pm every night. Over the the past 5 months I’ve been tracking my progress with this confusing and over-designed app called Way of Life. Here’s how it’s going:

The green bars are all the days I stopped working before 9pm. The red is abject failure.

It started out a bit rough. The first couple months I was averaging about two nights per week of working late, which might not seem like a lot but they bleed into each other and poison the entire week.

Then around April the trend started to shift. Since I had written down the goal and tracked progress every night, I felt like I had good reason to say no and stop working. Pretty cool! Striving for zero next.

This new habit does come with side effects. I find myself going to bed earlier. I also find myself watching more TV (anybody watching Dave or Attack on Titan?) and buying more LEGO sets to build before bed.

Onward,

Loren

P.S. - Happy Pride 🏳️‍🌈

P.S.S. - LEGO does not count as work. I don’t want to hear it. Let me have this.

DEV

Senior QA Engineer at Drata

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