I slept, but at what cost

February 14, 2025

The cost of sleep deprivation

It always catches up to you. Thursday sucked. It doesn’t help that they’re doing industrial level retrofitting on the floor above our office - jackhammering concrete walls, using concrete saws to add windows. It’s LOUD. What a nightmare.

I had a couple of beers as soon as I got home and then went to sleep really early. Woke up around 7am today feeling much better. Lose an entire day of free time, work life balance in shambles. Productivity at work goes up 👍😐.

But the alternative when you’re awake late at night and have work the next day isn’t living. It’s the twighlight zone. It was managable at two days in the office. Now I’m at three and I’m coping with booze and back on energy drinks. It’s not horrible chemicals and terrible habits - I’m just using a solvent as a solution to put down that which has been chemically resurrected before I’m finally ground to dust like the walls they’re knocking down.

I figured out that drinking if I’m not already fairly exhausted doesn’t work. To force myself to sleep last Tuesday I gave it a good effort but I just ended up lying in bed drunk. It’s not a perfect solution, just one piece of the puzzle.

Current plan:

  • Keep trying to recognize my bodies ebbs and flows - catch a whiff of sleep and drop everything for a nap or a sleep. The more rest I can get the better.
  • No self hatred - radical self acceptance. Live in the moment.
  • It doesn’t seem to make a difference if I get sloshed, or just have a couple of beers, so be strategic.
  • Keep the finger on my pulse. The goal is to come back to the world of the living, and I need to be aware of myself to pull it off.


Work

I volunteered to be the guy for one of the services the previous guy butchered with his ad-hoc implementation-from-the-hip.

I really wanna get hands on down and dirty with the tech, spend a few weekends fixing up the egregious mess made by my previous colleague, and leave this thing configured properly. Then tell everyone “Now it’s servicable - but this is garbage and let’s plan a move to –industry standard–” but my boss wants me to approach it by working with their sales team to up our commitment, and then their engineers to get it up to scratch.

He’s got a point - we have money but not enough time. For this - getting their engineers in and saying “here’s where it’s fucked, here’s the struggle, here’s what we want to achieve” then working hand in hand with them on the implementation will be a better outcome. And it’s a force multiplier - there’s only so much of me to go around.

If I can ensure I don’t get tied up in meetings over this and get a better outcome from their manpower than just going gung-ho myself, then I can also apply that to a couple of the other areas I’m working on that have been neglected.

Here’s the plan:

Agendas

  • Every meeting needs two things - Agenda before, action items after. If you want the benefit of my time - you’re giving me the courtesy of knowing what we’re going to spend that time on. And I’ll hold us both to the outcomes we decide upon. Pointless meetings makes pointless people.

Documentation

  • Document, document, document. When I need to justify why we should keep going with one vendor or should go with one of my preferred alternatives, every broken or kept promise from the vendor is one more bullet in my chamber.

Vendors

I’ve got experience holding vendors to account. But what I don’t have is experience translating my experiences with those vendors into convincing arguments for or against them. This is something I’ll need to work on but I’m pretty confident I can go with the flow.

Summmary

Things are rough. But there’s good things happening. Somewhere.