The Final Round Up

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Hey Everyone,
Today marks almost 4 weeks since I started this silly Caffeine experiment. I’ll speak more about that later on. I’ll also be talking about the future of what this newsletter may look like. It’ll likely change quite a bit with each edition going forward.

Caffeine experiment update

I am trying to figure out if Caffeine is hurting my sleep and productivity. To do this I am tracking the following metrics on a daily basis:

On the 12 of July (Monday), I’ll be cutting coffee from my diet for an entire month. I’ve been tracking the aforementioned key performance indicators for the past month to establish a baseline.

Our electricity went off for 12 hours and I didn’t have coffee for a majority of those 12 hours. I got a headache which means my body is definitely dependent on caffeine.

I have also realized that coffee isn’t just a hot beverage I enjoy, it’s an excuse to give myself a break from work. I often get up from work and make some coffee just to cut through the monotony of the day. I am going to have to find alternative ways of doing this like taking a walk or drinking water.

Here are my results so far:

Also here is a graph for those so inclined:

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My Caffeine Addiction in a colour graph

A note on “productivity” metrics

Productivity is a very vague term. I’ve been using rescuetime.com to track my productivity using their built in “productivity pulse”, however there are lots of variables that make this metric unreliable. I am confident, however, that if I cut caffeine I’ll sleep better. In theory if I sleep better, I should be more focused during the day and more “productive”.

Why the world is running out of airplane pilots

The world is running out of airplane pilot, and it’s no surprise considering the long work hours, the incredibly expensive educations costs (up to $200 000) and the low entry level salary. After studying for 5 years an American Commercial pilot will be paid only slightly more than someone that works for Mcdonalds 🤯

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This Newsletter going forward

Over the past few weeks, I haven’t sent a Round Up email. I have been wrestling with a “quantity vs quality” conundrum. There are 2 schools of thought here:

  1. Release content regularly (weekly) so that your audience doesn’t forget about you. The other advantage to doing this is that you get more experience writing and sending newsletters.
  2. Release only when you have good content. The idea here is: only release content and send newsletters when you have quality content.

This newsletter is a lot of work. It requires anything from 1 – 2 hours of work a week. This includes collecting stuff to share, writing and research. This has meant that my other platforms such as my blog and Youtube channel have taken a hit. I just don’t have the time to be writing blogs, making Youtube videos and writing newsletters every week. All this over-and-above my fulltime 45 hour/week job, isn’t sustainable.

Recently I’ve been following a blog called the “Slate Star Codex” (rebranded to: Astral Codex Ten) which talks a lot about various topics such as geo-economics, psychology, politics and if strict lock downs were really effective (hint: they were): Lockdown Effectiveness: much more than you wanted to know.

But, I digress, the writer behind Astral Codex Ten treats his blog like a newsletter. Instead of posting only his best content to his blog and then “lesser” content to the newsletter, he treats everything like a newsletter. Meaning, his best and worst content are sent as a newsletter and a blog.

In the past I have treated my blog as my best content. And this newsletter has been a mashup of random things that I’ve found through out the week. What I hope to do instead is find an even middle ground. Going forward I’ll be posting blogs more regularly, but they’ll be slightly less polished. I’ll also be sending this newsletter out less frequently.

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