People who knew me well at university know that for a short while (about a term), I graphed my sleep in order to figure out the relationship that my productivity (and enjoyment of life) has with my sleep levels. Anyone who's studied at Cambridge knows that terms are notoriously irregular - you'll start off with no work and then a week later find yourself trying to finish three sets of supervision work in one night. This makes it almost impossible to have a 'normal' week and to sleep the same amount every night.

When graphed and analysed, I noticed a few interesting facts-
- At that time, I used to sleep in multiples of 1.5 hours - and if I woke up a multiple of 90 minutes after I went to bed, I'd wake up feeling good.
- One day of good sleep often wasn't enough to reset my fatigue levels - I needed three nights of solid sleep to feel at the top of my form. This rarely happened during term.
- Even if I slept for 12/13 hours after an all nighter- it still wasn't enough. All nighters were disastrous for my productivity for the rest of the week.
- Generally 7.5 hours of sleep was good enough if I hadn't been training (i.e. cycling). If I had trained, I would require 9 hours.

This worked well for a few years and I've been tweaking my 'rules' as I go - I know the effects of caffeine and alcohol on my energy levels and try to adjust where I go. The irony is that, lately - mainly since starting work, I don't often get very good sleep. I've always been a light sleeper but generally I've always managed to sleep through the night.

It's been hard to pinpoint the reason and during a routine medical, the blood test revealed my thyroid levels were a bit off. To cut a long story (spread over six months) short - I've been diagnosed as hypothyroid. Standard treatment of hypothyroidism is the synthetic hormone levothyroxine. This is working, but with some annoying side effects. I've been finding it harder still to sleep - waking up in the middle of night regularly. I've also had some sort of headache constantly. Now with enough time, my doctor will probably be able to tweak the dosage so that these can be avoided. But the point being, I can't adequately control my energy levels as I used to, which is most likely now going to be the case for the rest of my life.

The constant process of diagnosis, especially for a condition like this has got me thinking - it must be very difficult to be a doctor indeed. Not purely from the sheer amount of knowledge you need but the feedback loop you have from your patients. Administer some medication, wait six weeks, take a blood test, look at a number and re-evaluate. On one hand it is a straightforward process but on the other - it is slow, prone to error (I was almost misdiagnosed when the wrong blood test results were used) and there's no instant gratification. Software development on the other hand gives you an answer in minutes, occasionally hours and very rarely days. There's no waiting required. And finally - there's always a logical or rational reason for something to happen the way it does. This is not always true in the human body and there's still a large amount of the 'unknown'. The human body is non deterministic.

That, dear readers, is why I'll never be a doctor.

Anyone who knows me well knows that-
1) I love biscuits.
2) I have to drink milk while eating biscuits or cake.

Mid last week I had a (mini) epiphany. I was at my cousin's house for her birthday party and for the first time in an immeasurable amount of time, I had cake without milk. Surprisingly, it was good. I spent much less effort trying to coordinate milk-drinking with cake-eating (it's the same really as the cereal and milk problem - you don't want to have extra milk or extra cereal left at the end...). Only concentrating on the cake meant I was able to really enjoy and appreciate it.

I guess this points to a wider trend in my life - that of multitasking. I'm notorious for doing multiple things at the same time and not just while at work. At home I've got a ridiculous three screened set up (and four if my laptop is up) and normally I'm doing a dozen things at the same time. It's probably because I spent so little actual time at home but I can't help thinking it's detrimental to the quality of how well I accomplish various tasks.

Admittedly a lot of what I do at home doesn't require much intellectual concentration - the last couple of hours I've been editing photos while watching television and catching up on reading - but I worry sometimes that this way of working carries itself over into other parts of my day.