[userbinator]

When the end of the day approaches, start finishing up whatever you were working on, and mentally prepare for what you'll be doing the next day. Then forget everything until tomorrow morning.

There's a huge amount of variability between developers, so don't think that the "workaholics" doing 50+ hour weeks are necessarily being more productive than you; unless you actually compare, they could really be struggling and just trying their hardest to keep up with everyone else. In the past, I've solved problems in minutes that someone else on the team had spent many long-houred weeks and eventually given up on.

[thrower123]

> When the end of the day approaches, start finishing up whatever you were working on, and mentally prepare for what you'll be doing the next day. Then forget everything until tomorrow morning.

Be prepared to either let go of whatever plans you have made, or to stash them in actionable form in longer-term storage for a rainy day, in the event that you start work the next morning and are thrust into reactive triage mode. It can be immensely frustrating if you are anticipating and have expended mental energy planning tasks A, B and C, and attempt to juggle completing them with surprise Sev 1 priority tasks X, Y and Z.

[Terr_]

Another trick is that when you're near the end of the day, deliberately stop partway through a problem and write down something about the next steps for yourself to read when you get back in.

This can help short-circuit some obsessive "just one more X" behaviors in night-owls, and makes it easier to get back into the groove the next day.