For most of the past semester, I’ve been operating at about 85%. That’s pretty good! You can operate at 85% your whole life and feel pretty satisfied. It takes a lot of effort and careful maintenance to continue to be able to operate at 85%. I’m not saying that improvements aren’t possible. I’m just saying that you’re not likely to get an order-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency. I mean this literally, for the first time in my life, I’ve been spending, like, 2/3rds of every day in a productive manner. I define productivity slightly differently from many people (I include reading, doing chores, social networking, many forms of socializing, blogging, etc) But the point remains that by my standards, I’ve been very productive.

That all took a nose dive these last two days. I went down to maybe 55%. All I did was sleep! I didn’t even have the energy to begin to think about doing all the things I wanted to do.

Not sure why. Might partly just be sleep debt. I also think some of it was a subconscious realization that I’d gone down a false path in my current project. Working harder on it just would’ve meant more words that I would’ve needed to delete. After I took to my bed and reimagined the project, I felt much more full of energy.

Anyway, it’s just a reminder that I can’t be at 85% all the time.