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Comment by es7 | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing, also.

Until I read your original comment I sort of forgot about that sort of feeling since it's been months of normal daily grind. I wonder if anyone has done serious study into this type of performance.

Some things I've found:

- Waking up way earlier than usual works for about 1 day a week but then I'm more tired the next few days.

- Hydration helps me. A big cup of water is more important than coffee in the morning.

- Caffeine is great. I want to try a detox and re-introduction.

- Socialization is a double edged sword. I find it easier to be hyper-productive when my life has enough interpersonal connection, but being with people is fun and the more I socialize the harder I find it to settle into flow at work

- Eliminating distractions is really important for me (or maybe it's a side effect?) but in my times of hyper-productivity there is no distractions or desires for distractions (ex: video games, social media, etc)

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A thought occurred to me today: could it be some kind of "sugar high"? If I'm getting my timeline right (this was 7 years ago), my hyper-productivity period happened about when I stopped being on a ketogenic (carb-minimizing) diet, and got back to eating high-carb food.

(During my time on keto, I didn't feel any significant energy loss below the baseline; but I wonder if reintroducing carbs after being deprived of them for a while could have created a temporary state of high energy?)

I know for me there is a definite diet aspect on a daily basis, but I don't remember if that's been the case during any of the weeks where I've felt invincible.

But on a small-scale basis: - Eating a big simple-carb-heavy meal will absolutely ruin my energy focus the rest of the afternoon - However if I've been running a deficit and feel low-energy, a moderate meal of complex carbs (ex: bowl of pasta) will give me enough energy for a few hours of high-energy focused work

I've done keto once or twice at various points when I was more into fitness and there's something nice about the consistent levels of energy.

Have you tried going on keto again? I wonder if there's some magic recipe of cycling on-and-off carbs that can fuel extreme bouts of energy without negative health implications

I haven't tried keto again. I'm married now, and any dieting has to be coordinated for two people (to save on cooking efforts). My wife doesn't like the kind of foods that form the core of the diet. So instead, I'm just looking at calorie-intake-minimizing diets.

Agreed on big simple-carbs meals; that's a sure-fire way for me to shut down my brain for a couple of hours.

Replying in parallel, because I have further thoughts to share. Ever since this comment thread started I've been thinking a lot about those times of hyperproductivity I've described, and I've identified couple things that were true in both cases, and thus are hypotheses worth checking out:

- In both cases I had a hard deadline and a well-defined set of goals, but there was a big gap between "minimum acceptable outcome" and "best possible outcome", with rewards scaling with the outcome. Something back then made me set my sights on the high end of that spectrum.

- I wasn't really blocking other people - if I didn't meet my deadline, I'd suffer some limited (and mostly non-financial) loss, but nobody else's work would be destroyed by this. I.e. in one case my work was irrelevant to anyone but myself, and in the other it was an optional (though strongly desired) dependency.

- I had people to impress. In one case personally, in the other I wanted to make our group look impressive in the local community.

- Both cases have had a significant "like hell I/we can't do it, just hold my beer and watch this" factor. I.e. the deadline was tight, and relevant people didn't believe it could be done in the time remaining.

These factors are a bit harder to reproduce. Most of situations I encounter these days don't have truly hard deadlines ("there's a release next week" is almost never a hard deadline in practice), and yet at the same time involve potential losses to other people (if the release actually happens and I don't deliver, I might derail it). There's little space to go above-and-beyond, in a way that doesn't feel like setting yourself fake goals for the purpose of self-gamification.

I'll be thinking about ways to test these hypotheses and, if any of them turns out to be a significant factor, to engineer my life to make use of it.

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