Green tea 🔗
Years and years ago I went through a series of prescriptions for ADHD. Each med either did nothing much for me, spiked my blood pressure, or did something to my sleep that required a second med to offset it. No thanks. I learned over time that I did about as well as the best medications by minding my sleep, keeping a lot of carbs out of my diet, and doing a lot of walking and running. I also self-medicated, mostly with coffee.
I was never much of a tea person because I never really had good tea until I was out for breakfast one morning and the restaurant’s description of its loose-leaf Irish Breakfast sounded so compelling that I gave it a try and ended up converting, while remaining convinced that the best self-medication was still strong coffee.
Coffee might offer the strongest kick, but it’s also a very spiky caffeine delivery mechanism. Tea has a smoother ramp and falloff, so getting a few cups in me up through late morning does a good job of helping me stay focused without feeling amped or dealing with a hard mid-day crash.
I do go a week now and then where coffee seems more compelling, but with the CGM and more real-time feedback I noticed that coffee also seemed to be contributing to spikes in my glucose levels. A little research suggested I was on to something there, and also put me on the path of considering green tea, since a few studies indicate it can lower your A1C and fasting glucose levels.
So I started ordering samplers of green teas, including Gyokuro, which is different from many other varieties of green tea in that it is grown under shade. That stimulates higher amounts of theanine and caffeine, and gives it a different, more savory flavor. It is also very expensive compared to other varieties.
But in addition to costing a lot and tasting good, it’s a nicer, steadier, more stable ramp than coffee. And since adopting it as my preferred morning drink a few weeks ago I’ve been seeing a change in my blood glucose stability: It looks less spiky, when there are spikes they are shorter, and my overall number of “stable hours” each day have gone from six or eight to 16 or 18, and sometimes entire days with no spikes. Some of that is just a natural outcome of having a GCM and getting fast feedback: I’ve made a few other adjustments that are probably having an effect, too. But there’s an added layer of calm to everything that seems to have come from cutting coffee out, so I’ve moved coffee into the category of things I try to pair with some extra exercise to help blunt the spikes.
Gyokuro, tho … spendy! Open to recommendations for other green teas. I think I made a mistake starting with the super good stuff.
Deciding is work 🔗
I don’t know where I heard this advice, and wish I had heard it earlier in my management career, but I found myself offering it to someone else again this week, so I’ll repeat it here:
New managers should write down decisions they make, even the small ones.
Management in general is poorly understood, often badly done, and suffers from the necessary involvement of humans. In the tech industry, it is further set back by the fundamentally screwy ideas of the people with power in tech, whether that’s formal (reporting structures and institutional authority), or informal (the things that get you social capital and standing in a tech environment).
By “screwy” I mean utterly misguided conceptions about why we have managers, what they are there for, and why you should or shouldn’t want to be one. There is no real agreement on what value a manager provides. People toss around phrases like “working manager” to suggest that you have to make a special effort to note that a particular manager works at all. People will calmly tell you that a manager who is not as narrowly specialized as they are is not qualified to manage them.
When people tell me they want to manage, I feel the most divergent feelings – a running in opposite directions simultaneously, and a deep curiosity about why. Because sometimes the motivations aren’t great: They’re not about making a better work environment, or helping people unlock their own potential, or improving x,y and z outcomes, or any number of concrete and pro-social objectives. Sometimes, though, they’re just about getting to be the boss and issue orders, and not even to do things that will make the business better, but just to have the final say in some issue of personal comfort or preference. And that’s a level of venality that flies, because nobody’s super clear about what it is a manager is for, anyhow, so why not personal enrichment and veto powers?
Assuming a management role in that environment is hard. It is a constant process, if you have a scrap of self reflection in you, of reminding yourself what you’re there for. In the early going it is a constant process of realigning your inner voice to a new conception of what makes you valuable.
Your decisions are what make you valuable. And you probably make a lot of them. They’re a meaningful unit of value. It takes labor to produce them. In the absence of decisions – guiding, directing, weighing, delegating, prioritizing – teams will not achieve their potential. And that doesn’t just mean their productive potential. They also won’t live up to their potential to be places where you can do your best, most satisfying work.
So, on the days when you are feeling a little small, or beleaguered, or uncertain of what it is you’d say you do, it helps to look at a list of decisions you made – they’re a record of the things you unstuck, clarified, or got back on track; catastrophes averted, outcomes improved, opportunities made good on. They’re why you’re there.