I've been a coffee drinker for most of my adult life. While I'd love to wax philosophical on the history of my relationship with coffee, let me instead cut to where I was just about a month ago: My morning routine involved making a pour over coffee after breakfast, running 23 grams of ground (by me, of course!) beans through a Chemex. But alas, going into Ramadan, I had to decide how to adjust my caffeine intake in wake of my daily fasts.

There are two ways to approach it: Either you ditch the caffeine completely (ideally weening yourself off of it for the days leading up to Ramadan, unless you want to be slammed with the worst caffeine headache on the first day of your fast), or you continue consuming coffee outside of daylight hours (either early morning before the first light of dawn, or in the evening after sunset). Having tried both approaches in the past, I've found that ditching caffeine altogether is generally more pragmatic, but... it's also less fun. This year, before getting hit by the DST switchover, sunset was around 6:15 PM -- early enough to have a coffee after dinner without it totally disturbing my sleep. So I decided to take another stab at that second approach.

And it worked out remarkably well! So well, in fact, that I'm committed to continuing with this evening coffee routine indefinitely. During the month of Ramadan, I was able to focus and be productive during those golden, morning hours, even without any caffeine, so long as I came into the day with a good night's rest. Both in and outside of Ramadan however, I'm usually pretty wrecked by the end of the day -- brain fried, socialed out, and just low on energy. By the time I put the kids to bed, I don't have much stamina to do much more than veg out. But coffee suddenly made me productive and ambitious during the evenings. I was plowing through chores, busting open my work laptop for fun, and even excited to jump into more mentally intensive forms of media/entertainment (e.g. Talos Principle II DLC!).

Sure, I love coffee for the taste, but I'd be lying if I said that the "perk up" didn't matter. This whole experience made me ask the question: "Have I been wasting my caffeine shot during the time of day that I need it least?" With this new routine, I have a more consistent energy level across the day. The one caveat that immediately comes to mind though is that even though I'm able to fall asleep with caffeine in my system, I found myself more likely to head to bed late because I don't get tired at night as early as I normally would. And if I'm hitting the sack at 2:00 AM, then the whole thing collapses like a house of cards because my golden, morning hours are no longer quite so golden. Alas, I'll see how this goes, but until it falls apart, you can be thankful for late night blog posts (like this one!) which would have otherwise never happened. :)