I need to manage your expectations here, because what I\u2019m about to describe sounds ridiculous. I know this because my mother saw a photo of my \u201cwork setup\u201d and called to ask if I was having a breakdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s what a typical Viking day looks like for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wake up around 6:30. No alarm. (If you need an alarm, you\u2019re not sleeping enough, and if you\u2019re not sleeping enough, nothing I write here will help you. Go fix that first, then come back.) I check the weather. Not the way normal people check the weather, to decide between a jacket or no jacket. I check it the way a ship captain checks it. Wind speed. Precipitation probability by the hour. Trail conditions. UV index. The two biggest influences on my workday are now storm probability and trail ratings. If you\u2019d told me this two years ago I would have mass-blocked you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By 7:15 I\u2019m out the door. Phone in a magnetic neck mount. AirPods in. A small daypack with a portable battery, a water bottle, and sometimes a packable laptop if I know I\u2019ll need to sit down and type at some point. I look exactly like a tourist who\u2019s about to livestream a mediocre sunset on TikTok. This is the Viking disguise. It\u2019s not intentional, it\u2019s just what happens when you strap technology to your body in ways that consumer electronics were never designed for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first mile is warm-up. Physical and mental. I usually spend it reviewing where I left off yesterday. I pull up my last Claude conversation and have it summarize the state of things. What did we build, what\u2019s broken, what\u2019s next. This is the equivalent of sitting down at your desk and opening your IDE, except my desk is a forest path and my IDE has birds in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By mile two, I\u2019m working. Actually working. Talking through architecture decisions, debugging logic, brainstorming features, sometimes dictating entire blocks of documentation. The voice chat function on modern LLMs has turned my phone into a coworker who never interrupts me to talk about their weekend, never needs a stand-up, and fits in my pocket. I talk, it responds, I think while I walk, I respond back. The walking is not incidental to the work. The walking IS the work environment. My brain operates differently when my legs are moving. Not vaguely \u201cdifferently\u201d in a wellness-podcast way. Measurably, noticeably, can\u2019t-go-back differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Around mile four or five, depending on the trail and the complexity of what I\u2019m working on, I\u2019ll find a bench or a rock or a log and pull out the laptop for twenty to thirty minutes. This is when I need to actually look at code, review a PR, or type something that voice can\u2019t handle well. Then the laptop goes back in the bag and I keep walking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I usually clock between eight and fifteen miles a day. Not because I\u2019m training for anything. Just because that\u2019s how long it takes to get a full day\u2019s work done when you\u2019re moving at walking pace and thinking at full speed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m home by early afternoon most days. Showered, fed, and done. Not \u201cdone\u201d in the way where you close your laptop at 6pm but keep checking Slack on your phone until midnight. Done done. Trail-tired. The kind of tired that earns you sleep instead of stealing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you saw my output metrics you\u2019d assume I\u2019m chained to a desk fourteen hours a day. If you saw my Strava you\u2019d assume I\u2019m a hiking guide. The Venn diagram of these two assumptions is a single weird circle, and I live in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I need to manage your expectations here, because what I\u2019m about to describe sounds ridiculous. I know this because my mother saw a photo of my \u201cwork setup\u201d and called to ask if I was having a breakdown. Here\u2019s what a typical Viking day looks like for me. I wake up around 6:30. No alarm….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":494,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":516,"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions\/516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viker.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}