David R. MacIver's Blog
Current thinking 2021-08-22
This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/current-thinking-2021-08-22.
Hi everyone,
I’d like to get back on the paid newsletters habit, and I figured a good way to do this was to start doing a less structured newsletter with some of my thoughts in progress, with a couple bits in them that are more in line with the sort of thing I write on the notebook blog.
These past few weeks there have been two main things on my mind: Caffeine withdrawal, and how I can make a lot of money. I’m also, as usual, thinking about life directions and planning and such.
Caffeine withdrawal
First off, let me teach you an important piece of etiquette: When someone tells you they are trying to quit something, mentally substitute the thing they are trying to quit with “cigarettes” and see if the thing you’re about to stay still sounds appropriate.
Which is to say, a lot of people respond with something like “But coffee is so good!” every time I talk about quitting caffeine, and then I try to set them on fire with my mind. I am aware coffee is good, thanks, but I need to quit for mental and physical health reasons, there’s no need to rub salt into the wounds.
But anyway, I quit coffee on last Sunday, so this is the week mark. It still sucks, although not as badly as the first day. Theoretically I’m planning to stick with it for good this time, but that’s been the plan before and it hasn’t worked so far.
Currently I’m in the phase where I’m no longer exhausted enough by caffeine withdrawal to be sleeping 10 hours per night, and also no longer have the caffeine withdrawal cued sleepiness that normally hits me at night because my morning coffee has run out, so my sleep for the last couple of days has been garbage.
I seem to get unusually bad caffeine withdrawal, which is unfortunate because I’m also unusual in that I seem to really easily build up caffeine tolerance and get to a point where caffeine does more harm than good - serious quality of sleep issues, high anxiety levels, focus problems, etc.
Unfortunately because of the pain of caffeine withdrawal I often stay in that state for quite some time.
Anyway, there are a couple of plausible explanations for why I get unusually bad effects from caffeine, but my best theory is that I’m actually not that unusual, people just don’t notice. Quality of sleep issues, high anxiety levels, and focus problems seem to be pretty much the norm for people with caffeine addictions (which is most people), they just maintain that it’s not because of the caffeine.
The caffeine withdrawal I get might be unusually bad, but honestly I think it’s just relatively unusual for people with longstanding caffeine addictions to try to quit at all, and most people I’ve talked to who have actively tried to quit caffeine describe it as much harder than quitting cigarettes, so my guess is that there are a lot of people walking around like me.
So, uh, if you have a lot of anxiety and/or wake up feeling like death every morning, try quitting your caffeine habit? It sucks and I can’t really recommend it, but it might be better than the alternative.
If you decide to give it a go, here are my best tips from my own experience:
The first day is going to be a write off. Ideally you would be able to take two or three days as write offs.
Have access to effective painkillers, especially for the first day, because the headaches are not at all fun. I personally use co-codamol for the first day or two (which is available over the counter in the UK) and ibuprofen thereafter.
Supplement with DLPA (DL-phenylalanine) during at least the first week and for as long as you need to. This is very much bro science rather than anything particularly well verified, so I was pretty sceptical when I first tried it, but it really does make things better.
As to what helps stay off it in the long run? Pass, honestly. The longest I’ve managed without caffeine since I was 18 was about two months. Hopefully I’ll be able to tell you about how I managed my new record in a little over two months time.
Currently I’m experimenting with a buddy system - I’ve agreed with a friend that I will tell him every time I drink coffee or otherwise consume caffeine, and he will non-judgmentally acknowledge this and take no further action. I’m reasonably hopeful of this approach, but we’ll see how it goes.
Working with software teams
A recurring albeit minor theme (e.g. You should complain about it, How to teach the local style, Norms of Excellence) in my writing is company and community culture, and how to do them better.
Between this and the coaching, and the fact that I’ve already done group training of software developers (in using Hypothesis), and a bunch of other factors, I’ve been pivoting a little bit recently to doing more work for companies. Still early days, but tentatively it’s working out quite well.
This has more or less two major knock on effects for the newsletter and my writing in general.
The first is that the question of “Is this sustainable?” is instantly solved. As long as I’m doing a decent chunk of work for companies, it’s easily sustainable, because I can do more hours of work for a corporate client (because less context switching) and charge more per hour, I very easily clear my financial goals that I needed to meet by the end of the year.
As a result, I get to keep doing more or less what I’m already doing, hopefully indefinitely. Hurrah.
The second knock on effect is in that “more or less” part. The thing about what I do is that everything I do feeds into everything else - I don’t really consider the lessons I learn from playing Slay the Spire separable from the lessons I learn from writing, or cleaning, or therapy. But each feeds into the other, and whatever I work on tends to take on the shape of the things that are occupying most of my thoughts.
This new work probably means I’ll be reading a lot more about software teams and culture, and probably have a lot more thoughts influenced by that. If nothing else, it will inform my reading list, and that tends to have knock on effects.
The good jobs strategy
Speaking of having knock on effects on my reading, I finished reading The Good Jobs Strategy recently. I very much liked it, and think it pairs well with a bunch of other more academic books I like.
The book argues the very reasonable claim that actually treating your employees well is good business, and that retailers who have done this have made a great deal of money out of it, because having skilled employees who are empowered to do their jobs well ends up both making you a lot more money and saving you a lot of other costs through losses etc.
Specifically what she describes is the combination of aiming for operational excellence (i.e. doing a really good job of what you do) and providing good jobs, because this lets you really benefit from investing in your employees, and it gives them somewhere they’re proud to work for.
She goes through a lot of specifics of how this works, and draws on real examples of various retailers including Costo, Trader Joes, Mercadona’s, and Zara. It’s a very readable and interesting book, and I can heartily recommend it.
Also I mostly already agreed with the broad thrust of its conclusions, and this combination compels me to argue with it because I wouldn’t trust myself saying this otherwise.
In particular I noticed a couple of things about it that I felt were limitations of the strategy, applied more broadly. Some of them she tries to gloss over, some of them she doesn’t even acknowledge.
The first (which she does mention, if only in an aside) is that a strategy of continually investing in your employees only works if you can continually promote your employees. This requires continual growth. Otherwise, at some point your employees get to the point where they need to leave or effectively stagnate.
The second is that I couldn’t help but feel like the good jobs strategy as she describes it only works because other people are providing very bad jobs in contrast. This gets you a lot of candidates for every job opening, which allows you to be selective, and massively increases employee retention because people know full well what’s waiting for them if they leave.
I still think this is a good strategy to pursue, but I do worry that the problem with pursuing it uncritically at e.g. a software development firm is that you would invest a lot of time and effort into an employee and then when they had got good they would leave for somewhere more exciting. And by “worry” I mean more “this is what I’ve seen happen”.
In general it’s interesting to notice that many of the upsides she’s selling of treating people well seem to be ones that partially come from comparative advantage.
On the other hand, perhaps part of why you need that comparative advantage is that you’re also having to shoulder quite a lot of the cost of training. If everyone was like this you’d probably have a lot more capable people coming in, and so the costs would be a lot lower.
Reservations aside, the book does make me more optimistic about work, and hopefully provides a lever to move the world in a better direction.
Postscript
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