[jamwt]

Exercise hard in the morning.

At 8:30p: Last big glass of water. Put phone on charger in non-bedroom and don’t touch until 7a. Keep the lights low and warm. Do low stimulation activities like reading fiction or watching semi-boring TV or chatting with your family. Lay down when you can’t keep your eyes open anymore.

Big change for me. The phone especially is poison for evening tranquillity.

[panax]

Also try a multi day hike through the wilderness to reset your circadian rhythm. This combines heavy levels of exercise, no phone access, and you wake up/sleep with sunrise/sunset.

To maintain your circadian rhythm during normal times, try to wake up and go to sleep at the same time every day and eat only during three meals per day at the same time each day, avoid caffeine later in the day and also follow the advice of others here. Keep the room you are going to sleep in very dark and quiet. Don't go to bed until you are ready to fall asleep - don't use tv/phone/computer in bed.

[jayd16]

>Exercise hard in the morning.

Reminds me of my career military grandfather. It was something along the lines of "march long enough and you'll have no problem sleeping."

[PuppyTailWags]

Helpful to know: Exercising hard in general I think is helpful. I am not a morning person but I sleep extremely well when I go climbing in the gym for ~2 hrs or so in the evenings, after dinner. I pretty much have dinner, go there, warm up and climb, go back, shower and sleep, and that guarantees a deep sleep for me. I also tend to wake up with a clear head and can easily solve stuff I was struggling with the day before.

[dkersten]

I’m also not a morning person, but another reason why hard exercise wouldn’t work for me, in the morning, is that after hard exercise it takes a few hours for my brain to function properly again (someone on HN a few months ago explained its because the body prioritises getting oxygen to the muscles instead of to the brain). At least, I’m unable to work for a while after going to the gym. For this reason, I bow only go to the gym after work.

Light exercise like going for a walk is ok though.

[Swizec]

Another benefit of gym/exercise after work: Makes a great barrier between work life and home life. Ensures you don’t bring work home.

And if you work from an office “I have gym at X hour” is a super socially acceptable reason to leave on time. Nobody questions a gym schedule. Especially if you have a class.

[dkersten]

Those are some great points!

[gmadsen]

just food for thought, there is quite a bit of research showing that hard exercise right before bed is not optimal. i think its fair to say any is better than none, and if it works for you, it works for you. but the argument is that hard exercise raises you metabolism and body temperature, which is in direct opposition of what your body needs to do to enter deep sleep (lower body temperature)

[s1artibartfast]

Not sure what optimal means in this context. Optimizing for how fast you fall asleep?

[gmadsen]

sure, how fast you enter deep restorative sleep. If you measure your HRV, you can definitely see the effect

[gmadsen]

are you retired? I think many do not physically have the time to follow what you are saying

[oh_sigh]

How many hours are you working that you can't shut off at 8:30PM until 7am? That's not normal.

[corrral]

Parents basically can't do anything leisure-related with electronics or the Internet, at all, if they shut that stuff off at 8:30 every day.

Which might be for the best anyway, but it is so tempting to still try to keep up with movies, TV, video games, side-projects, social media, et c, even though you're effectively working damn near an 80-hour week. Easier to fit in exercise after the kids are asleep, too, unless you save all that for the weekend or take time out of paying work to do it instead. Or get up stupid early. Like, much earlier than 7.

[gmadsen]

id say its fairly normal to at least answer slack between 700am and 9pm, and thats excluding any recreational/personal non rec screen time after or before those hours

[Sohcahtoa82]

> id say its fairly normal to at least answer slack between 700am and 9pm

Uh...it really isn't.

Unless your job requires being on-call, such as IT, incident response, or site reliability, you shouldn't be getting Slack messages that late. There's no reason a software engineer should be responding to messages 14 hours/day.

[Larrikin]

It's not normal to answer slack anytime you're not working unless you're on call. Messages after five get answered at 9 am.

[unethical_ban]

Let's start by saying "the world isn't IT" and thus the idea of answering Slack at all is a trade-specific thing. Many people are not as wired to their computers for work. That said:

Do you get paid oncall for your availability past 8 hours?

I'm a consultant (get paid salary but work at a customer site) and I turn off Slack notifications and Teams after 5pm. My boss and core team know how to reach me if something critical comes up. The only time that isn't the case is when I'm oncall, which I don't do in my current role. I'm also not an account manager, but I also don't get paid half a million a year.

And the answer to "screen time afterward" is "don't use a phone screen". The point is to avoid the interactivity of the phone at night. Grab a book/e-book or put on some longer-form video such as a TV show.

[gmadsen]

screen time after is not just entertainment. do you schedule doctor appointments or do taxes on an ebook?

[midasuni]

9-5 work time, gives you 3 more hours for scheduling doctors etc until 8

[wazoox]

So you're working 14h/day? You should reconsider for your own health, and if you're not self-employed, your level of exploitation.

[midasuni]

That’s not normal at all.

[BaculumMeumEst]

In addition to this, I stop letting my mind wander to challenging/interesting/stimulating topics in the last hour of the day. That makes a huge difference, at least for me.

[alar44]

Shut down at 830? Yeah not gonna work for me. Or anyone with a job.

[ishjoh]

> Or anyone with a job

If you are young and grinding to climb up the corporate ladder or in an executive position at a default dead startup and happy doing it then your comment makes sense to me.

If you're not either of those things then your comment is extreme and sounds like you'd be happy in a 996 company. If software was 996 everywhere I would find a different career as I enjoy the rest of life too much.

[l33t2328]

I don’t think gp means that they are happy to work until that late, I think they mean that they regularly use their phone for non work communication that late because they spend their day at work.

[alar44]

So you go to work, come home, and got to bed? I work until 6 and then do other things with my life.

[ben_w]

That leaves 2h30 between you finishing work and putting the phone down. It’s not even like @jamwt said “go to bed at 8:30” or even “no screens at all after 8:30”, just put the phone away and chill.

[corrral]

8:30's about when dinner's been cooked, eaten, the kids are in bed, and about 50% of the day's mess has been cleaned up (you'll get the 250% of a day's mess that remains, after 5 week days, cleaned up on the weekend—at least, that's the lie you tell yourself)

I get almost no personal screen time—or other personal time, for that matter—before that (aside from time I steal to post on HN, like everyone else)

[sxv]

I've worked in tech since 2008 and only for 2 of those years have I had to be "on call" past 6pm. ymmv.

[alar44]

I don't mean on call. I mean, work til 6, eat dinner, check the mail. Do a couple chores and bam, it's 8:00. Shutting down at 8:30 will work if you have no friends or family I suppose.

[Taywee]

I have friends AND family and I manage it. If you wake up at 6 AM and go to bed at 10 PM, work 9 AM to 6 PM, and shut down all your screens and stuff at 8:30 PM, that gives you 8 hours of sleep a night, an hour to work out in the morning, 2 hours to eat breakfast and do morning stuff before work, 2.5 hours every evening for dinner, chores, screen relax time, as well as communication with friends and family, and then another 1.5 hours for low-stimulation home family time and reading. Sounds perfectly fine for a weekday.

Giving a very generous 1 hour for every meal and daily 1-hour workout, that still gets you 12.5 hours of non-working screen time for your work week, and 7.5 hours of lower-stimulation entertainment. And then you have your weekends for weekend stuff. What does your schedule look like where this is a serious problem?

Being constantly socially online with people you don't live with is honestly overrated. Cutting out social media is a good first step, and strengthened my most important social connections, and completely eliminated ones that I hadn't realized were empty and meaningless (do you really need to be "friends" with everybody you knew from high school?)

[jgwil2]

If you work until 6 then you presumably don't start until 9:30-10, so you can probably sleep until 7:30 or 8 in the morning. So do the same routine and move it back an hour or so.