u/ihavereadit26

moving from Manchester in 3 weeks, give me the ONE thing to do in my first week when I land there?!

Living near aldgate east, work near hammersmith

everyone I know has sent me a super long checklist. i don't want that lol. just the one thing that actually made london feel less like a city you're surviving and more like somewhere you live. (i've already prepped for my bank account becoming an abyss very soon)

what's your take?

been having a weird few months, not terrible, just not quite right. low-grade fatigue, the 3-4pm wall, sleep that's fine but not great. decided to actually get a proper blood panel done via healf rather than guessing - so ->

everything came back great except three things: low vitamin D, high bilirubin, and high iron. the doctor wasn't too alarmed but it got me curious about whether any of it might be connected to how i've been feeling!!

things that have genuinely helped in the meantime (none of these are fixes, just things that take the edge off):

• getting outside early in the morning, even 10 minutes. this one makes a noticeable difference to how the rest of the day goes
• keeping a window open at night
• drinking more water, honestly i've been drinking less than i should and when i up it, i feel it
• talking to people, sounds obvious but genuinely helps more than i expected
• magnesium glycinate before bed - sleep quality is slightly better, nothing dramatic

still haven't cracked the afternoon dip though.

the bilirubin one is what i'm most curious about, it's not dangerously high but it was flagged. anyone dealt with elevated bilirubin before? did you notice anything symptom-wise, or did it just show up on a test? not looking for medical advice, just curious if anyone's been in a similar spot and what the experience was like???

saw the thread a few weeks back about how many people use Claude at work and it got me thinking about this from a ground level. so....

i'm at a small startup - no enterprise restrictions, no compliance department, basically free rein. so i've been able to go properly deep on this in a way a lot of people in bigger orgs can't!!

honest review after 6 months;

what actually stuck:

• writing and editing - this is the obvious one but it genuinely saves me hours. not the first draft, the iteration. getting from ok to good used to take me ages.

• building small automations - i've built monitoring tools, digest scripts, reporting pipelines.

• stuff that would have taken a developer weeks i've knocked together in evenings. some of it breaks, most of it holds.

• thinking through problems - this surprised me. explaining something to claude forces you to articulate it properly and half the time i solve the problem in the explanation.

  what didn't last:

• using it for research without verifying. i got burned a couple times early on trusting summaries that were subtly wrong. now i treat it as a starting point, not a source.

• trying to delegate judgment. anything that needs actual strategic nuance - it can help frame it but it can't make the call. learned this the hard way

the honest bit:

• the gap between people building this muscle and people not is already pretty visible. i've worked with people across industries and you can just tell. it's not about tools, it's about reps.

for those of you in places with degraded models and rate limits - are you finding ways to build the muscle outside of work, or does it just not happen? genuinely curious whether the org restriction is actually damaging long-term or whether people find workarounds??

small vent + genuinely asking.

I work at one of the big banks. i get why AI adoption is slow there - the usual - regulation, compliance, data risk, all of it makes sense on paper. but the reality of it day to day is kind of grim icl.

we have microsoft copilot. sounds good right? except it's a degraded model with rate limits so low it's basically useless. so in practice i'm sitting there manually typing things up, manually cleaning documents, manually writing stuff that would take me 5 minutes with the right tools. stuff i do at home in no time!

what's getting to me is the long term thing. like AI is a skill now. using it well, prompting well, knowing when to trust it and when not to - that takes reps. and i'm not getting those reps at work. everyone outside is building that muscle and i'm notttt

starting to genuinely wonder if staying somewhere like this for too long is quietly damaging my career even if everything else about the job is fine.

has anyone been in this position? did you find a way to work around it, push for better tools internally, or did you just end up leaving? really curious what people did!!!

<plaese no ads>

okay so hear me out.

I've been in this weird phase for about 6 months - working 2 jobs, one fullt-time 9-5 at a big bank and then one part time but it doesn't really feel that way. high pressure, lots of context switching, and i'm also waiting on a visa so there's background stress that never really switches off.

stuff i've tried: magnesium glycinate before bed - this one actually worked, sleep got noticeably better pretty quickly. lion's mane - honestly couldn't tell if it was doing anything. rhodiola - felt something for maybe 10 days then nothing.

the thing i can't crack is the 3-4pm crash. tried moving meals around, tried not eating lunch, tried eating more at lunch. nothing's been consistent.

what's your go-to when life's just a lot for an extended period? not looking for a stack that works for a week, more interested in what's held up over time. drop your protocol, happy to share more of what i've tested too!!