The west coast hours on east coast experiment - 2 month update

For almost two months, I’ve been living in New York City while attempting to work west coast hours. My hope for this experiment was to shift hours to a schedule that what I believe is my natural preferred work hours. I wrote about my experiment last month at my one month check-in. Last month, I wrote that it was a mixed bag of results which some nice things, but some not great aspects. Unfortunately, things maybe have gotten worse since then.

Here’s some of my notes and thoughts on some of the aspects that I was hoping would improve with this experiment.

Sleep - By far my biggest disappointment has been related to sleep. I was hoping that I would be able to sleep better at night, wake up to no alarm clock, and be much more energized throughout the day. It’s almost been the opposite effect despite the fact that I am a night owl. I tend up to stay up later due to work and I don’t get time to wind down before bed. Because of that, I’ve taken much longer to go to bed than usual. I haven’t been able to sleep in as well on the mornings - yes there have been a few mornings where I wake up feeling great, but it’s been so inconsistent that I am typically feeling worse on a day to day basis.

Exercise - Probably the best part of working west coast hours is that I get to go to the gym in the morning. It’s really nice being able to wake up, get a sweat in and go to work uninterrupted but I also feel slightly less energetic in the mornings. While more consistent, my work outs feel less impactful.

Work hours - This is something that I knew was going to be a challenge and it has been a struggle. I’ve been pretty good at blocking off my mornings, but occasionally I’ll have a meeting during my mornings that I was supposed to have off. That of course expands my work day. Furthermore, working through the evenings have been anything but enjoyable. My best hours to get stuff done is typically between 6pm-9pm. What I found is that it’s perhaps not the hours that make it my most productive, but the fact that there’s less distractions during those hours. It’s been tough working until 9-10pm every day.

Given that it’s largely been a negative experience for myself, I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I have a theory that a lot of these issues could just be stemming from the fact that my life has been insanely busy in New York and I’ve just been exhausted overall since I got here two months ago.

I’m excited to continue the experiment in Playa del Carmen where things are hopefully a bit more relaxing than New York. Perhaps that’s when the true productivity is going to come from this experiment.