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So, starting next Wednesday and for the week after, I’ll be on vacation. And by vacation I mean not doing much except maybe finishing my taxes, if I don’t finish that this weekend.

There’s now a daily ritual of me barely waking up in the morning, feeling tired, being awake after lunch, being tired at 4PM, and being exhausted by 6PM when I leave work. But worse, since last Thursday or so, I get dizzy from time to time, at time having difficulty standing up. Though it has been better today, I may have to resort to a combination of sugar and caffeine, something I normally avoid because those beverages make me very “gassy” and are quite acidic.

And this has been my “Achilles' Heel” in my field: 8-9 hours of work per day is the maximum I can do consistently. If I work beyond that, well my productivity on the next day will be as if I worked less hours, so it averages out. Working overnight and the weekends “the hacker’s way”? Nope, never could do that.

It’s true that, as if to compensate, I can work at a shockingly fast speed. I can’t boast that much about it since in the end other programmers end up working for longer hours, which objectively on a “hours-worked” mode of evaluation works against me. But it is comforting in a way to know that the quality of my work doesn’t depend entirely on “brute force programming”, but more on creative, cleverly designed software engineering. And after that period of concentrated brilliance, my brain becomes some kind of half-melted jello, so in average it all balances out.

So, here goes two days of rush work, two days for the weekend to not fall sick, two last days of zombie-like confusion, and I can finally rest.