This was going to just be a simple post on Mastodon, but it doesn’t quite fit into a 500 character limit.

I have a bit of a struggle with insomnia, caused to some extent by the stress of the job I do. While I could say quite a bit about the cause of this and ways to deal with it, this isn’t an advice column.

This post is about an annoyance of living with a chronically disrupted circadian cycle.

In my specific case, I very often go into circadian low at around 3 PM. At this time I struggle to focus, which is a real problem with the complexity of the work I do, especially since I also have a sneaky little bit of ADHD going on. I also tend to, possibly because of my trouble with focusing, tend to get a little irritable around this time.

A question that might come up in the gentle reader’s mind about now is one about adjusting my work flow to allow for this unusual cycle. Yes, it makes perfect sense to just avoid doing complex tasks after 3 PM, and I’ve made some attempts at communicating (via the correct channel of my direct superior) this with the people I work with. So here’s the irritation factor: Some of the people I work with seem to sit on complex questions all day long so they can ask them after 3 PM.

OK, so maybe they don’t do that on purpose and it’s just an artifact of those people’s work flow. Maybe they are doing all the stuff they are great at all day long and get to the complicated stuff that needs input from me toward the end of their day. But it’s still annoying because of the different way I see the work I do. Someone will come to me with a question that, in my mind, has a pretty obvious answer that can be arrived at with a bit of careful logic, but to them there may be no clear path from question to logical answer. I could teach them how to arrive at the kinds of answers I arrive at with the thought processes and knowledge in my mind, but not at a time when my brain is desperately trying to go to sleep.

Feeding into this is how I (fail to) communicate the knowledge and logic in my brain. I’ve been doing this IT stuff for over 30 years now, with over 20 years in the organization I’m with, and most of what I know and take for granted is self-taught (some even self-designed) over that time. I find it a bit of a challenge to keep reminding myself that the people I work with don’t have the experience in my field that I have and may not see the path from “problem” to “solution” in the same way I do. Often I will be presented with a problem that I can describe the solution to in 10 words or less, but those 10 words represent years of experience and learned knowledge the people I’m trying to say them to don’t have. In some cases, in the field I work in, some of the thought processes I use to arrive at the answer may not make any sense at all to the people I work with and am trying to explain the solution to, they may even go counter to the extensive knowledge and experience they have. Then it becomes a question of trying to understand the assumptions on both ends of the conversation and coming to a mutual understanding of the best solution to the problem. With a brain that’s crying for sleep by this time.

Recent case in point. (Here I will put stuff that was in my head but not explicitly communicated in italics, to illustrate) I asked for a new virtual server to be deployed to replace an old one. I gave the machine specifications I needed and asked the team that does that stuff to roll with it. Now, this virtual server has a slightly odd network interface configuration, with four network interfaces instead of one. I asked for only one of them to be enabled and provided a temporary IP configuration for it, because I have a plan in my head for how I’m going to enable the other three interfaces and change the settings on the server when the time comes to move the workload from the old one to the new one. The deployment team came back with a couple of questions about the extra network interfaces, asking what the IP configuration on those are supposed to be. They also asked me to clarify the configuration of the main interface because my spec for that was something like “IP 10.2.3.4/16 with the normal gateway and DNS (I know where the normal gateway and DNS are documented)“. These questions, arriving while my brain was crawling out my ear to go to bed on its own, wound me up quite a bit because I thought I’d given them all the information they needed and thought they should have deduced the bits I didn’t say from the bits I did say.

And all that, friends, just adds to the stress induced insomnia.