Sleep IoT Quest - Day 15 Progress Update
Day Summary
Today started a bit bumpy. Yesterday I cut into my wind-down to finish my blog post because I didn’t do my Daily Quest early, so I did it late. My wind-down was supposed to start at 18:00; instead of shutting the laptop, I “just” wrote the daily log — took ~30 minutes — which reduced wind-down by half an hour. Active reading while fighting tiredness + creative writing wired my brain, and when I finally sat down for a no-screens wind-down I was in a heightened mental state with less time to land. Result: just over six hours of sleep. The pattern holds: I must protect wind-down, which means doing the work early, not late.
Timely Start got a little screwed up today, too — I fell into a productivity/management theory rabbit hole for a couple of hours before starting my Daily Quest, so I lost another execution point there. The session itself was great, though. Because I was a bit underslept, I varied the structure: 60 minutes (as 3×20), then a 10-minute break (ate something, drank water, prepped food), back for another 20-minute session, a 5-minute break to eat, and then a final 10-minute session. The result was surprisingly strong: I engaged much more deeply with the chapter than yesterday. The lever seems to be a 10-minute break after 60 minutes, plus quick refuel/move/drink. Snacks were tiny (a hard-boiled egg; later some crispy bacon from the air fryer while I kept working), and ~200 ml of water.
Now, with the total 90 minutes done — and after writing a blog post — I still feel great. I actually have energy left and could continue, which is not my usual post-90 state. Normally 90 minutes is a bit stretchy; I can push to two hours, but then tunnel vision kicks in. (I’ve had 11-hour marathons before, but those were manic and not sustainable.)
Conclusion: 1 hour work → 10 minutes rest is the sweet spot for staying fresh without needing a one-hour reset. I’m going to apply that cadence starting next week.
- Daily Quest: 90 minutes (completed).
- Timely Start: missed (late start after management-theory digression).
- Reading: 70m, +10 pages (active notes and comments).
- Guided coding: 20m interleaved with reading.
- Cadence: 60-b10-20-b5-10 → 90 work / 15 break = 105 total.
Context
- Started late, then ran a structured cadence that felt sustainable and ended with high energy.
Reading
- +10 pages with a read → implement → debug → generalize loop.
- Worked straight through the material—no pruning.
Coding Practice
- ~20m integrated/guided: typed examples as they appeared, ran them, fixed issues, and applied the fix pattern to related code.
Reflection
- Cadence > grind: 60 min work + 10 min break outperformed 90 min straight for both quality and energy.
- Naming clarity: Many APIs repeat generic names like
new()across types, which forces extra qualification and hurts readability. I’ll prefer explicit, unique names in my own modules to reduce ambiguity. Similarly, avoiding ambiguous file/module patterns (e.g., many identical “mod-ish” entry points) improves orientation.
Key Learning
- Micro-breaks preserve focus and help finish strong.
- The read–code ping-pong cements understanding better than pure reading.
- Favor explicit naming in my codebase to avoid unnecessary qualification.
Total Time Spent
- Work: 90m (Reading 70m + Coding 20m)
- Breaks: 15m
- Session total: 105m
PCT (Project Cumulative Time): 21h29m