Controlling Your Work!

This is article was spun out of the blog post on 04.01.2026.

I'm really getting into writing here now. Although I didn't get to work on any interesting projects last year, nor start a website successfully, I'm thankful to the me of 2025 for doing enough work for me to be to carefree in the lead up to exams. I know some people who will be stressed, grinding exam papers for the next 80 days. They're not wrong to do that, but besides one exam, I'm no longer feeling the pressure. I took a holiday, to Bala, in the middle of my GCSEs, but not before I knew I was going to be okay. I'm not going anywhere physically different this year until summer, but I'm obviously not grinding exam papers all day.

Admittedly, that "one exam" is quite a nasty one. If I hadn't sorted everything else out until now, it would truly be over for me. I'm making good progress, and on one of the problems on the paper (STEP II 2018) I did this morning, I cut my time down from 4 hours to 19 minutes. To be fair on my old self, my last (successful) attempt was two years ago, and so it was quite a difficult problem for me at the time. It's lovely to measure the progress I've made in such a clear-cut way like that, even if I'm still struggling on some questions. I got a simple maximisation problem wrong today, about a gambling game. It's not looking good for my future career as a casino owner!

It's important that if you do well in something, you don't reward yourself, or let someone else reward you, with more work. For example, if you're in school, don't get onto the hideously boring "extension" task that's set for you, unless you actually care about the topic. Sort out what you have to do first, but afterwards, experiment with a different with a project, learn something you aren't expected to, or just have some fun. Too many people say they'll enjoy themselves in 'N' seconds (where N is large, typically between 10^6 and 10^9), but then (N+1) seconds pass, and they're as joyless as ever. Maybe they really do need to work more and harder, in which case they should've realised it earlier, and planned their time accordingly. But what's more likely for someone like me is to finish one thing, and glide along the natural progression into infinity. There's rarely a natural ending point, and the work will hardly ever disappear if you look away from it, so it's okay to refocus on other things.

On the other hand, personally, I can't start my day with "fun". I'm conditioned so that if I try to play games for 12 hours a day, I'll feel bad, and then I'll feel even worse trying to do work once I've already started playing! I had to confront this dilemma towards the end of last year. I couldn't afford to wake up and neither want to work nor have fun, because that's a recipe for going on Reddit! I had become too used to not doing anything when I woke up arbitrarily late, because it had become a habit. My solution was to get up between 5:00 and 6:00, giving myself a new environment in the fourth dimension, a whole new set of times in the day! The key was to start the most "serious" and resistive work in the morning, when I have the most willpower, and to glide through it until I've completed what I need to, and get bored, which naturally happens towards noon. I follow that up with a mixture of fulfilling side "work" and learning, like I'm doing on this website, as well as entertaining myself with more traditional leisure activities. I find that getting just over seven hours of sleep is optimal for guaranteeing I have enough energy in the morning to get started, and I'm tired enough at night (21:20-22:00) to want to go to sleep. If I slept for as long as my body wanted to, I'd be living 32 hour day,s split 20/12 between being awake and asleep. There's a case to be made that we should have 32 hour days, because we don't need to be afraid of the night anymore, the future is now. Unfortunately, we live in a world where something like the construct of a day is very difficult to change. Many people find it weird that it's always a different day in a different part of the world, but they'd find it more weird if the sun rose at 22:00.