How to Work With the Clock Instead of Against It
Protect sleep against the meeting clock; circadian rhythm is not a timezone setting you can toggle for a standup.
[ journal ]
My body wanted 11pm. The standup wanted 7am local, which was someone else’s afternoon. I set three alarms and called it professionalism. By Thursday the sentences were thin and I was snapping at a ticket that did not deserve it. The meeting clock and the circadian clock are not the same instrument. One of them will injure you if you let the other win every day.
I protect sleep as infrastructure. A hard lights-out, even when a US thread is still moving. Do Not Disturb that I do not override for “just one more ping.” Morning light if I can get it, especially in Aotearoa summer when the evening tries to keep you outside. The dual-zone calendar is a different note: labels, titles, which zone a deadline lives in. This one is the organism. You can annotate a meeting in two zones and still destroy the person who has to attend it.
What works: batching the painful overlap into as few days as I can negotiate, then giving the other mornings to deep work at a human hour. What fails: “I’ll sleep when the sprint ends.” The sprint does not end. Relocation from Louisiana toward Tāmaki Makaurau made the gap wider, not more romantic. I have done the 5am review. I can do it as an exception. As a default it is just unpaid night shift with a nicer bird chorus.
Caffeine after a late call is a trap I still walk into. So is a “quick” walk at 10pm that turns into 11:30 because the light is still going. I write a stop time on the stay’s first day and treat it like a deploy freeze. If a true incident needs me, I am up. If it is a thread that can wait eight hours, it waits. People who cannot wait eight hours are asking for a timezone I do not live in. That is useful information.
Jet lag gets a recovery day. I used to pretend I could land and perform. I landed and performed poorly. The clock is not an enemy if you stop treating your nervous system like a settings panel. Meet the overlap you promised. Keep the sleep you need. Let the rest of the work live in async, which is what made the move possible in the first place.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.