I’ve been completely obsessed with work for the past few months, writing on a book about Chinese grammar using romanisation (Pīnyīn), and writing software to be able to actually write in Chinese Pīnyīn. I was working to the point of madness. Only with a short one week holiday in Taiwan to sort out a visa issue, debounce, and catch up with good friends.

Turns out, both my new book and new software are far from finished. What could have finished, or “ended” to use the right term, is my health. So I take a step back, take the time to write a blog post, and summarise what I’ve learned:

1. Going to bed early is important

As Dr. Neal Bernard once pointed out, in his book about hormonal health, going to bed at 10pm seems right for him. Because if he sets his mind to go to bed at 11:30pm then the next thing you know, it’s a half hour past midnight and your whole next day is messed up.

2. Eating early is important

My grandmother used to have her last meal of the day at around 5:00pm, for which she usually had more of a snack, not a meal. Usually that was a slice of old, dark rye bread, with butter on it so thin… well as a kid I always doubted it was worth the effort to go and fetch the butter from the pantry and also the work it took to clean the butter knife. Butter usually sticks to the knife and you need a sponge with liquid soap, and then you need to clean the sponge properly or your hands will be all sticky and smell like you touched a cow. As a kid I was thinking a lot about that.

In hindsight, and from decades of personal experiments, I find a small meal at 4pm helps my sleep and recovery the most.

3. Good things come to those who wait

Growing a book and a software so fast, with daily 4 to 10 hours of adding to it, naturally creates a large, messy code base. And now, of course, I ran into software performance issues. How could I not. The profiler says that my software will perform poorly on slower systems.

And for the book I need to go through all chapters AGAIN and clean up the mess I left behind, too. Making it better, and better.

Maybe it’s also a form of obsessing over details, or trying to achieve perfection. Just for example, I went through 26 iterations for the app’s icon. On the upside, the names for the software and the book came to me naturally, and I’m really happy, excited, and satisfied with them.

Trying to achieve perfection? I say, what else do we have in life, if not the pursuit of happiness, striving for meaning, beauty, harmony, and satisfaction with our creations? Or is this the talk of middle age? To me it really feels good to think about a difficult, structural problem, and sort it out, make the solution beautiful. And there’s the age old question: What have the Romans REALLY ever done for us?

There’s more. But I think this is a good time to end this blog post, or diary page. I’m very happy I didn’t use ChatGPT, or any LLM, for this blog post, for anything, not even for a spell-check. THIS feels amazing, too. It’s all me. My achievements, my mistakes, my own expression of beauty, of coherent, accomplised thinking and writing.

Wish you a great day, and take good care of your health!