Trying New Things

Waking up is hard to do

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I can’t remember the last time I had a good night’s sleep. It doesn’t seem to matter when I go to bed, when I wake up, and whether or not I use an alarm; I always awaken feeling groggy and struggle to start my day. I limit myself to one cup of coffee in the morning, my diet is fairly healthy, and I get a decent amount of exercise, but to no avail. I even tried participating in a sleep study once, but I was so uncomfortable from having electrodes stuck all over my body that I maybe slept for 30 minutes the entire night.

At this point in my life, I’d be more surprised if I woke up feeling refreshed than if Bigfoot came crashing through my front door riding on the back of a unicorn.

Despite this, about a year ago, I thought I could train myself to become a morning person. My motivation: I got a job in which my typical workday began between 5 and 5:30 a.m.

I’m still not used to it. I struggled for months to get to bed early enough to even have a shot at around 7-8 hours of sleep. At one point, I found the discipline to go to bed by 8 p.m., fall asleep within about 30 minutes, and wake up at 4:30 a.m. It never got easier, and after about two weeks, I got sick and needed extra rest to recover. I never managed to get back on track.

This month, I decided to try and get to the bottom of the issue. I did some research on sleep monitoring apps and downloaded one called Sleep Cycle.

The basic premise of the app is that we sleep in cycles, sinking into deep sleep and returning to light sleep approximately every 90 minutes. If we are awakened during deep sleep, we will feel less rested than if we’re awakened during light sleep. This means it’s best to wake up at the end of one of the 90-minute cycles. For example, in theory, 7 1/2 hours of sleep is better than 8 hours of sleep because 7 1/2 hours is five 90-minute cycles while 8 hours means you’re interrupting your return to deep sleep. Unfortunately, the duration of sleep cycles varies from person to person, and it’s hard to control exactly when you fall asleep, so it’s very difficult to know the optimal time to set your alarm to.

The Sleep Cycle app tries to eliminate the guesswork. It includes an alarm function, but after you set your wake-up time, the app will try to wake you as close to that time as it can (without going beyond) when you’re in light sleep. If you want to get up by 5 a.m. and the app thinks you’ve ended a sleep cycle at 4:40 a.m., it will wake you at 4:40.

This next part may seem like another sign that robots are taking over the world, but I was desperate. The way the app monitors your sleep cycle is through your phone’s microphone. You leave the phone charging near your head with the microphone pointing towards you. It listens for sound patterns to indicate when you’re asleep, and then it begins taking measurements. When you wake up the next morning, you’ll see a graph of how you slept as well as various other data. It also records audio if you snore or talk in your sleep. I actually paid for the premium version of the app so it could use these invasive spy tactics.

Here’s what an (almost) ideal night looked like:

According to the graph, I started falling asleep right around 9 p.m. and woke up just before 5 a.m. In between, I had five cycles where I achieved deep sleep. Granted, it looks like I may have woken up briefly around 1 a.m., but if that’s true, it didn’t last long.

What really surprised me was that the app caught me snoring that night, not once, but 18 times! I had been convinced that I only snore on rare occasions, but apparently, it happens almost every night. It’s not an aggressive snore, but it’s still troubling.

Nonetheless, it felt like an achievement to sleep for almost 8 solid hours. The best part was that I actually felt a little more rested than usual when I woke up.

Too bad that was the best night’s sleep I had all month. A more typical night looked something like this:

Here you can see I didn’t get into bed until after midnight and still had to get up around 5 a.m. Also, where the app claims I was talking, I was actually watching a video on my phone because I had woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep. 4 1/2 hours of interrupted sleep can’t be good.

Sadly, this was closer to the norm–most nights I went to sleep after 11 p.m. and woke up by 5 a.m. I did, however, find that waking up during the light end of the cycle seemed to help. Even on 5 hours of sleep, I usually felt lucid enough to run an early meeting or two. But most days, I couldn’t make it to lunchtime before the fog rolled back into my brain and I had to take a walk or a nap.

I’d love to say I had a breakthrough this past month and solved my sleep problem, but I haven’t. Lack of quality sleep continues to impede my quality of life.

But thanks to this app, I now have new insights and new hope. I think I’m on board with the idea of an adaptive alarm clock. I seem to feel better, at least temporarily, if I wake up while in light sleep. I also have proof that I snore, which also affects sleep quality and is worth investigating. I’m starting to believe that with the right habits and treatment, I might one day achieve the mythical “good night’s sleep.”

Of course, it would help if I didn’t stay up late trying to wrap up this post the night of my publication deadline.

There’s always tomorrow . . .

Why my 17th “moving day” will be my best

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If my memory is accurate, I’ve changed residences sixteen times. I should be an expert at it by now. Instead, of all the recurring events in my life, moving day is probably the one I dread the most.

I’ve had loved ones wait for hours while I scrambled to finish cleaning up on the last day or get into brutal arguments with me after they made the mistake of volunteering to help. I’ve paid companies hundreds of dollars to take stuff I couldn’t get rid of in time. And yet every time I move, I seem to leave with more than I started with, half of which never left the boxes it arrived in.

I’m about to move again. Only this time, I actually feel optimistic. One by one, I’ve looked at each of the mistakes I’ve made in the past and come up with a better alternative.

Test drive before you buy

As if moving out of my current place wasn’t hard enough, I have the added challenge of not yet having a place to move to. But this time, I’ve removed a lot of the guess work.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the experiment in which I stayed at a couple of Airbnb’s to give me a feel for what it would be like to live in different neighborhoods. That experiment was a success: the first neighborhood was so-so, but I loved the second one. This eliminates one big decision: now I just need to find a place I like in that part of town.

Plan around stress

Whenever I decide to move, I begin to worry about all of the things that could go wrong. What if I’m not ready in time for the movers? What if I don’t find my new home in time? What if I find a place too soon and have to pay for two residences at once? What if I don’t find a way to sell, donate, or safely dispose of the things I no longer want?

My solution: plan for multiple outcomes. I gave myself two moving deadlines: an ambitious one and a “drop-dead” one. I have plans for when and how I’m going to look for a new place, as well as places to stay temporarily if I don’t find a home by moving day. And I’ve found a packing strategy that gives me a good chance of leaving with less stuff without having to sweat it so much if I have to keep more than I’d hoped.

Follow the 80-20 rule

It may be one of the most overused concepts in personal productivity advice, but the “80-20 rule” still holds up. It has different versions, but the one I subscribe to is that for a given task, 80% of the total results will come from 20% of the total effort (and, conversely, it will take 80% of the effort to accomplish the remaining 20%).

In the physical sense, about 80% of my space is taken up by about 20% my possessions. I’m much better off dealing with the big stuff first, like furniture and appliances; and saving the tiny stuff like papers and photographs for later. In the emotional sense, I know I’ll spend 80% of my time struggling to part with mementos and other objects that hold personal meaning, so I set those aside while I tackled the rest.

By following this approach, I’ve managed to go through almost everything I don’t need on a day-to-day basis, and I’ve already cut my memento boxes in half. I’ve also disposed of loads of trash and recyclables.

Then there’s the matter of where I put everything so I’m not climbing over boxes until moving day.

Designate a place for everything

In my garage, I have three large, wooden pallets. I’m using each one for a different purpose. The one in the back is for things that are ready to move. The one in the middle is for things I want to process. The one in front is for things I’m ready to get rid of either through sale, donation, or specialty disposal services like e-waste and paper shredding.

Every time I add something to the “ready to go” pallet, I feel a small rush, knowing I don’t have to think about it again until I unload it from the moving truck. Every time I add something to the “get rid of” pallet, I feel even better because I know it’s going to find a new home that isn’t mine! Meanwhile, the to-be-processed pallet keeps getting emptier.

I still have a lot left to go through, but at this point, even if I run out of time and have to keep the rest, I feel like I’ve already won.

My "get rid of" pallet is running out of space!
My “get rid of” pallet is running out of space!

I’m almost ready

I now know when I’m going to move: about halfway between my “ambitious” moving day and the “drop-dead” date, give or take a week. I could probably finish in time for the earlier date, but I decided to give myself a little more breathing room so I can split my time between preparing to move and enjoying my final days in this city. I’m proud of the progress I’ve made and I know that even if things don’t go as well as I hope they will between now and my move, I have other options to fall back on.

Now, as I begin to count the days until moving day, instead of being filled with dread, I’m actually starting to get excited!

Reflecting on my first year of consistent blogging

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Several weeks ago, I told a group of fellow writers that I was having trouble coming up with a topic for this month’s post. “Why don’t you write about writing?” one of them proposed. At that moment, I wondered, how many months in a row have I been posting? I checked the history. Since I started my blog back up, the first post I published was on August 31, 2020: exactly one year before I’d click “Publish” on the post you’re reading now.

On this monumental occasion, I decided to reflect on what I’ve learned after a year of consistent blogging.

One post per month is enough.

This is actually the second incarnation of “Trying New Things.” Nearly a decade ago, after years of telling people, “I work in Information Technology, but my real passion is writing,” I was part of a “workforce reduction” (a.k.a. laid off). I decided it was time to try writing for a living, so I conducted a one-year experiment as a self-employed copywriter. This blog was supposed to be a vehicle to help me promote my business.

That year sucked almost all the joy out of writing for me. I spent a lot of the time trying to promote myself with little response. I did land a couple of good clients, which was fun. However, most of my prospects had unreasonable demands: some wanted to pay me a fraction of my rate, while others wanted me to basically lie about what their product could do in order to lure in more customers.

Then there were all of the “experts” out there with infallible formulas for generating blog traffic. One of the keys, many insisted, was to write as often as possible so subscribers would be perpetually bombarded with new content and my high activity level would boost my ranking on search engines. The notion of constantly churning out new content felt like a chore, and I only published two posts on my blog that entire year.

When I restarted my blog a year ago, I decided to give myself a clean slate: I archived my posts and rewrote my “About” page to focus on helping people with no strings attached. Knowing my tendency to overcommit, I decided to start with the humble goal of publishing one post per month. But as I went along, I realized once a month was perfect for me: it alleviated the pressure of “publish, publish, publish” and instead allowed me to take my time with each topic. If I wrote every day or even once a week, I wouldn’t have time to really process what I was writing. But after a month, I’d not only have a more thoughtful post, but it might even change my own life for the better.

This leads me to my second realization.

Writing helps me learn.

When I was in school, I always did better in classes that favored writing essays over taking standardized tests. I assumed this preference was due to my love for writing. But this blog helped me realize there’s more to it. When I write about a topic, it forces me to put ideas into my own words and to relate new ideas to things I already know. It’s these mental connections that make the difference between storing information in short-term memory (i.e., just long enough to pass a test) and in long-term memory.

For example, I wasn’t a very good student in science classes. My grades were average at best in biology, chemistry, and geology. I always found either the teachers or the subject matter boring. The one exception was a particular assignment in my physics class. We had to measure the relationship between the slope of a ramp and the speed of a marble rolling down the ramp. In retrospect, it seems like it should have been tedious–setting up the ramp, measuring the angle, measuring the time the marble took to roll to the bottom, tweaking the angle slightly, and starting again, and again, and again. But because our main assignment was to write an essay on our findings, I was able to turn the experiment into something personal. I wrote a thorough analysis and my teacher gave me a perfect score along with one of the most glowing evaluations of my academic career.

As with that paper, every blog post I’ve written in the past year has been a learning experience.

I’ve been trying to “hack” my clutter problem for most of my life, but it wasn’t until I decided to write a blog post about it that I took the time to dig beneath the symptoms and unearth some of the root causes.

Before I wrote about my experience climbing Half Dome in Yosemite, all I could focus on was getting lost in the woods on the way back down. But once I drafted my post and shared it with some colleagues, they showed me what I couldn’t see: reaching the summit was a big accomplishment, regardless of what happened afterward.

The 3-part series I wrote about exploring career paths taught me more about how to find fulfilling work than I got out of decades of job hunting and reading self-help books.

But as rewarding as writing these posts has been for me, that has never been my main motivation.

I’m a people pleaser, and that’s OK.

I’m much more likely to get something done if I feel like I’m accountable to someone else. Ever since I recognized this tendency, it’s bothered me. Why does something have to benefit someone else in order to be worth doing? Why isn’t doing it for myself enough?

For years, I’ve seen this as one of my deepest flaws. But recently, I decided to just accept this weakness and use it to my advantage. As much as I enjoyed writing, I had never managed to stick with a writing project for more than a few months. Then, late last year, someone introduced me to the concept of a “writing mastermind group.” Think of it as a support group for writers: we get together, share our writing goals, and then hold each other accountable and help each other overcome whatever obstacles we might be facing. My goal was to maintain a habit of publishing a post per month throughout 2021.

My group checks in once a week, and each week we share how much progress we’ve made and help each other get “unstuck.” We all feed off of each other’s momentum, so I feel like I need to stick with my commitments in order to help the rest of the group stick with theirs. I think a big part of the reason I’ve managed to publish a post every month this year is because I don’t want to let my group down.

Even the “trying new things” theme, at its core, is based in accountability: I believe that in order to persuade you of the benefits of trying new things, I need to lead by example. This drives me to not only stick with my monthly publishing schedule but to really think every post through before I click that “Publish” button. I spend almost the entire month thinking about my topic, drafting ideas, challenging them, learning about the subject, and learning about myself. I make sure every post I share is about something I strongly believe can help my readers.

But as with every other post, developing this one helped me discover a valuable lesson. Yes, I’m a people pleaser. But doing things for other people feels good. It validates me as a writer. It helps me feel like I’m able to do something meaningful, and possibly even leave a positive legacy someday.

This blog is my gift to both of us. Thank you for making it worthwhile.