Average Day
General Notes
- During each “work block”, I generally try to work in chunks separated by 5-10 minute breaks of staring into space/annoying my sister/throwing a ball at the wall. Ideally, these breaks are supposed to be no-screen breaks and strictly less than 10 minutes, but I only manage to stick to both rules ~40% of the time. The chunks are as long as I can maintain attention, which I’ve found is pretty reliably ~50 minutes for my deepest work (ML, competitive programming, the hardest writing) and ~70 for everything else (though I usually have to take longer breaks because I enjoy them less than deeper work blocks). I have a hard cap at 105 minutes because at that point I’m usually just kidding myself and my eyes are glazing over the screen every few minutes.3
Average Summer Day/School Weekends
I spent several weeks’ worth of time very unproductively during the summer of 2024, so this isn’t completely accurate, but I think it’s representative of ~70% of summer days and ~85% of school weekends.
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I wake up somewhere between 6:00 and 7:00. If it isn’t really cold, I try to get out the door within a half hour to go biking. Otherwise, I’ll do some form of cardio indoors.
- Note: I’ve made it a rule that on school weekends/summer days I can only listen to my favorite podcasts while exercising or completing chores. That’s been really good for motivation, and I find that I often prolong the exercise to finish podcast episodes.
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I finish this around 8:00. I always try to get to work as soon as possible away, but between spending time with my sister, showering, breakfast, and reading I actually sit down at my desk at about 10:30.
- This is one of the biggest things I want to change about my average day. I’ve noticed that I’m most productive before 12, but fitting around my family’s schedule makes it hard for me to start much earlier.
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10:30-11:00: Anki (and reading interesting blog posts I’ve saved)
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11:00-2:30: I try to spend at least 170 minutes here on my highest priority and most cognitively demanding work done here. That’s generally competitive programming or something ML-adjacent.
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2:30-4:00: Lunch + chores + more annoying my sister.
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4:00-~8:00: I generally spend some time on another high-priority + concentration-demanding task. It’s generally either competitive programming or something ML-adjacent (whichever one I didn’t do in the morning) or blogging.
Once I feel satisfied or I don’t have the cognitive capacity anymore, I batch through a lot of shallow work. This is usually homework (ideally not, because I try to get all homework over the weekend done on Friday night), hackathon organization, guitar, working on my Hack Club, or lighter blogging work.
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8:00-10:30:
- Ideally: Dinner + annoying my sister + journal + reading + going to bed
- Really: Dinner + annoying my sister + texting friends + checking email + realizing it’s already 10:30 so I now have to choose between sleeping well and journaling and reading.
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Overall I generally spend ~6.3 hours of real time “working”.
- I can keep track of all of this because I use Toggl religiously. Ideally you’d want the metric you’re tracking to be in quality-adjusted units of work done than in units of time spent, but tracking units of time is good enough for me.
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I wish I was kidding about how much time I spend on an average day annoying my sister. If you feel bad for her, she spends more time annoying me.
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This is not really what most of my days look like, but it’s probably what you would get if you averaged all of my best days.
Average Weekday During School
- I wake up at ~5:30.
- ~5:45-7:15: Generally either competitive programming, ML-adjacent, or blogging (CP 60% of the time, ML-adjacent 20% of the time, Blogging 10% of the time, something totally random 10% of the time)
- 3:30-4:30: get home, shower, eat a snack, annoy sister, and read.
- 4:30-5:00: anki
- 5:00-6:00: Some kind of high-concentration work (tough school homework or ML-adjacent)
- 6:00-8:30: Mid-concentration work (generally as much school work as I can find. If there’s no school work left, anything else productive depending on how tired I am.)
- 8:30-10:00: Dinner + annoying my sister + journaling + reading
- Overall, I spend ~4 hours of real time “working”.
- This is actually a pretty close map to what most of my days look like. I generally can work for longer chunks, keep breaks a little shorter, and generally be more self-disciplined on weekdays.