I was eight when the headaches started.
They never really left. Chronic migraine. Most days of the month my head hurts, and stress or tiredness make it come faster. So since I was a kid I’ve had a small window of useful time each day before the pain wins.
I taught myself to put my time where it gave me the most value. It started the way things start for kids: with wanting to play.
Duty first, then the clay
I wanted to sculpt. Clay figures, drawings, paintings. Homework was the thing standing between me and that.
So I made a deal with myself: get the homework out of the way, avoid the scolding at school and at home, and the afternoon is mine. Sometimes I finished it at school, before anyone came to pick me up, so I’d get home with nothing left but what I wanted.
The wants changed over the years:
- clay and drawings
- the bike
- burritos with a friend
- Halo 3
- Dofus with a bunch of friends
The deal didn’t. Duty first, fast, then the want.
The forum in my room
Studying worked the same way. I couldn’t study for long, so I learned to study differently.
I read for keywords and threw the rest away. My notes had footnotes, diagrams, lines and comments on the side. Then I walked back and forth in my room, eyes closed, explaining the topic out loud to a forum of… me. Many versions of me, asking questions, and me answering them.
The rhythm of walking and talking helped too. My head took longer to start hurting.
Oh, and to be clear: when something is hard to understand, I slow down and read it again, as many times as it takes. The goal is to understand, not to read.
It wasn’t a weird trick. Researchers call it self-explanation, and a 2018 meta-analysis of 64 studies found it improves learning (Bisra et al.). I just didn’t know it had a name.
Failing, then the global exams
This doesn’t mean school went great. I failed several subjects at university.
To avoid graduating years late, I took global exams: one exam for the whole subject. I studied a few days before each one, from the books, not just the topic list. I didn’t want to get tired. The goal was to arrive on exam day with nothing left to review.
The night before, I went to sleep early. I wanted to stretch the migraine-free time into the next day.
My friends ended up borrowing my notes. Little French-notebook sheets nobody understood at first, until they noticed that what was on them was exactly what the exam asked.
I scored above 90. Not 100, I didn’t care about 100. And yes, I did globals several times, because I kept failing things jajaja.
The night she turned off her phone
My wife studied business administration. One teacher, across about three subjects, gave exams that were pages of the book with blanks: fill in the words, the commas, the periods. From memory.
She always needed to be the best. Grades meant a scholarship, in a family where money was tight and being a woman made everything harder. She learned to have to instead of want to. Her friends were the same: competition, who’s best, never look weak. They met in a tiny house to read in silence until late.
I told her many times to relax. To learn how to learn.
One day she said yes. Partly because I offered to help, partly because she was just tired. We went for a walk, then coffee, then dinner, talking about the material on the way. No forcing it. At the coffee shop it was “ok, take out the book, I’ll ask you questions from it.” I asked her to reason, to explain things to me. When the exact wording mattered, she gave me the quotes from the book.
She still studied. Just not until dawn.
Her friends kept texting her: they were still at it, deep into the night.
“Ay ya,” she said, and turned off her phone.
The next day I picked her up after class. She came out super happy, full of energy. Her friends came out wrecked. Dark circles, defeated, grumble grumble. She did better than all of them.
There’s data behind those tired faces. In a diary study of 535 high school students, on nights they traded sleep for extra study they reported more trouble understanding class the next day, and more struggles with assignments and tests (Gillen-O’Neel, Huynh and Fuligni, 2013).
The decision was always hers. I was just an annoying trigger and good company.
The week that didn’t count
Work brought its own version.
At a consultancy I worked for, a client wanted everything out fast. They asked us to stay late all week to hit the date, and my company backed it. I worked a ton of hours. I delivered what they asked.
Then their product owner told us:
“Ah, we moved the release to next month.”
Their CEO didn’t like the design and wanted to change it.
No manches. A full week of late nights, for a date that disappeared in one message.
After that, when someone asked me to stay late, a voice in my head said “npn” (you don’t want to know what it stands for). Out loud I said something more polite:
“No. If it’s not important, no.”
“Important things get planned ahead, and planned right.”
“If it’s urgent, we look at it. But it can’t be for later. Urgent is a reaction, like production going down.”
I’m committed. I care. An emergency gets my attention, gladly. That’s exactly why the important things get talked through, prepared and planned.
I’ve learned that having something urgent every day usually means nobody is fixing it at the root. But that’s another story.
Effort moves left
With AI, planning first stopped being my workaround and became the method.
At a later company I joined a team in late 2025 and picked up a service the previous team had already estimated. Their expectation: the base ready by February 2026.
I planned it. Structured it. Split it into phases with verifiable results and gates, and let Cursor agents execute with TDD and Rails practices while I stayed in the loop reviewing.
By December the base was done, plus two of the four phases.
I can’t tell you that was the plan alone. It could be the context, the team, a hundred things. What I can tell you is what changed for me: I wasn’t actively coding and holding every implementation detail in my head all day. The effort moved left, into planning and review, and the day-to-day got lighter.
That helped with the migraine. From where I sit, that’s what matters most.
Yeah. The kid who did his homework at school to have the afternoon free is the same guy who now plans so the day costs less.