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Comment by wmt | Hacker News Reader

I’ve worked 80-hour weeks for the past decade (occasionally 100-hour weeks)

Wow. This if anything will screw you up. 12 hours of work + 8 hours of sleep per day 7 days a week leaves you with 4 hours for commuting, showering, making dinner, doing laundry, working out and relaxing.

Doing eighty hours per week can be wonderfully efficient - for a few weeks. After that you start to get sloppy, and soon you're performing worse than those doing a 40 hour week. Work a not a sprint, and not even a marathon, and more like running around the globe because you like to run.

Work shouldn't even be means to an end of becoming rich, and being rich without a respected job you're proud of is boring and hollow. Unlike prestige, once your income or wealth exceeds the limit where you have to stress about money, having more money won't make your life happier.

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40 hours of solid, uninterrupted work is worth 80 hours of procrastination/interruption-filled work. You have to choose those hours carefully. I remember when I worked in an office, we would always go out to lunch at 12:00 and the resulting 3 hours would be destroyed for me by a food comma and the disorientation from leaving my desk for an hour.

That probably says more about what you ate for lunch than the time.

Just a rack of ribs, nothing out of the usual

What do you mean "just".

Having a food coma for three hours is a flag for your meal being "unusual".

Or undiagnosed medical conditions - I am very careful not to eat to much at lunch for that reason.

20 hours of 100% focus a week >>> 80 hours

I happen to work at a place where I'm inclined not to do more than 40h/w, and working 50+h/w is simply not possible. The fact that you've so "little" time to code taught me and my colleagues to be brutally efficient and disciplined in the workplace.

Regarding the food coma, i had great success just by not mixing proteins with carbohydrates (and not thinking that fats in general should be avoided). It's basically as simple as that - just stop eating combinations that make you tired. This is especially true for fast metabolizers that get higher blood sugar faster from the same meals that a slow metabolizer has no problems with.

It's carbohydrates and fats together that are the problematic pairing.

Thanks for calling out my inaccurate comment. What i really wanted to say: don't eat a big pile of meat with a big pile of simple carbohydrates all the time. And eat the dessert/sweet stuff separately, presumably in the afternoon, but not too close to dinner. This will work wonders.

And again, never view fats as something to avoid completely. If the fat is of good quality, it is a nutrient and an essential part of the diet.

sorry for not providing any links, i can not find any good english source materials at the moment. PM me if you want to get some more info. keywords: food combinations, chronobiology, glucose reception

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