[weehobbes]

Few thoughts: For me personally, I experience a lot of ego depletion during the day. But having kids tends to do that. There's no way I can write at the end of the day, I'm just way to mentally tired. Also as someone who both codes and writes, writing is far more emotionally taxing. Coding is problem solving - there is usually a clear path to follow and I generally know when I've solved a problem. Writing for me is unclear and amorphous. There is almost never a road map, and I never really know when I've "finished." Finally, I think that lark/owl stereotypes are overblown. Up through college, I was absolutely an owl and did my best work from 10pm to 2am. Once I entered the workforce, I was forced into becoming a lark and after a painful transition, loved mornings and did my best work from 6am to 10am. 18 years later, I'm still a "lark" but from time to time, I have to pull late nights and my "owl" tendencies come back quite easily for short periods of time. But I need 8-9 hours of sleep... I can't do both lark and owl at the same time. I think studies show that the vast majority of people are in the middle - neither larks nor owls, and for those people, I believe you can train yourself to be whichever one you want.

[chrisweekly]

I'm reading a terrific book -- "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing"[1] -- that reviews the literature on this exact topic. Recommended.

1. http://a.co/hY8eixX

[HenryBemis]

A book that I have read and has changed my life is: "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast" by Laura Vanderkam. This book changed my "overtime work" from being a night-owl, fighting for efficiency, to early bird (catching the worm) in just a few days.

The aforementioned book in combination with "The art of not giving a f..." by Mark Mason, and the "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferris made me change my working habits to the better/more productive.

I now spend more time on journaling on my ideas/results, and find myself being more focused. I guess that journaling is "some kind of writing" (I am not a writer), but it helps that when I write and immediately read something (a paragraph, numbers, rough pen-and-paper diagrams,bell-shaped-curves/sweet spots).

I suggested the "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast" book to (former) fellow night-owls to switch their 10pm-2am routine to a 6am-10am. Most who actually tried it are enjoying the benefits. I do understand that this depends also on other factors (health, workouts, driving kids to school, daily commute, walking the dog, morning workouts) but a balance can be achieved so that one can fit a 3-hour-work without impacting other functions.

[haddr]

Any takeaways from that book?

[chrisweekly]

Disclaimer: only 1/2 done reading it. So far, the biggest actionable takeaway for me is the importance of taking breaks. I have the luxury of working for myself, mostly from my home office, which allows me the oppty to experiment w/ different ways to manage my workday. At some point I will write something longer-form about my system...

[alsetmusic]

Is that a URL shortener? Please post the link with a fully disclosed address. I’d like to see the content on the other end, but don’t know where it’s going to take me.

[philipbjorge]

It links to Amazon Kindle. I believe this is the link that their app spits out.

https://urlex.org/ can expand these for you.

[jason_slack]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072Q985YX?ref_=k4w_ss_details_rh

[ascom]

I still have no idea where this link is going to take me.

a.co links always go to some illegible Amazon URL, so I think it’s fine to use them.

[jason_slack]

I guess, but...

1. You can see it is Amazon

2. If you click it and are expecting "product A" and instead you see "product xxx" you probably won't proceed further.

3. This is Amazons fault, not those that have posted short URL's. There simple is't a longer URL that says: http:// amazon.com/this-is-the-product-you-were-after-just-in-case-you-are-skeptical-of-a-short-url-given-to-you-byu-someone-you-dont-know-beware-danger-will-robinson.

[fjsolwmv]

3. Whar do you mean?

Example: https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-70UK6570PUB-70-Inch-Ul...

[chrisweekly]

Sorry about that, it's an amazon url shortener; was in a hurry and just c/p the link from ios kindle app. Others have posted the url for you.

Slainte

[fjsolwmv]

Don't apologize to the ornery whingers. URLs are addresses, not content. There's no reputation or credibility issue with URL paths, they are totally arbitrary. Only domain names have credibility.

[Swizec]

Same experience here. Always an owl, always easier to stay up than get up. But damn these days I’m just tired at the end of the day and writing is hard. I can pull it off but it hurts.

In the morning writing is a lot easier. But mornings are also a lot harder to clear up. Girlfriend waking up, bird waking up, gotta shower and stuff, get to the office.

Very easy to fritter away a whole morning and get nothing done. Plenty of emails and tweets and such waiting from the previous day.

Anyway lark and owl is just a timezone. If you can switch 9 timezones when traveling, you can switch the 2 or 3 timezones from owl to lark and back.

Just don’t do both at the same time. That never ends well for me

[ghaff]

I write a lot. (It's a good part of my job.) I basically can't write in the evening and really haven't since college. (I did code in the evening for a number of years when I had a shareware business.)

Ideally, I have coffee/breakfast, take care of any outstanding items that have to be dealt with, and start writing for most of the day. That's a constructive day. In practice, I often have time getting into the flow and end up doing "research" for at least some of the morning before buckling down to what really has to get done.

[drieddust]

I struggle with same issues everyday. Job, marriage, Kids, and life in general does not allow me to have a fixed schedule.

The thing is in today's world of small apartments, noisy kids, and demanding jobs does not allow having the luxury of following a fixed schedules. I see blocks of time during the day getting wasted and I am not able to muster enough courage to claim those. On the other-hand is Cory Doctorow who is able to use these 20 minutes time blocks[1].

On the problem of not able to finish. I think Peter Elbow in his book Writing with Power[2] suggests many different strategies but they basically boils down to separating writing from editing. One technique he suggests is to divide the available time into 2 parts. Write uninhibited during the first time period and only do the editing in second half.

[1] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writi...

[2] https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/writing-with-power-97801...

[matwood]

> Job, marriage, Kids, and life in general does not allow me to have a fixed schedule.

The way I fixed this was to get up early. If I get up between 5-6am, I easily have 2-4 hours of time before anything attempts to derail me. During these hours, I go to the gym and then get my most focused productivity of the day done. The rest of the day is flexible depending on what's going.

Before someone chimes in that I'm going to die from lack of sleep, I'm in bed between 9-10pm every night and get 7-8 hours sleep.

[jonaswouters]

If only my kids would sleep to 7 am every day... Our youngest (2y) is awake between 5-6am every day. Both go to bed between 7-8pm. Not much time before and after unfortunately.

[drieddust]

Exactly my point, I am trying to work out how to manage despite these interruption. Cory Doctorow's suggestion seems reasonable but personally I need more structure so not able to implement his advise.

Biggest issue is energy. One bad day of unhealthy eating because I got too busy simply screwup next few days. Sometimes I feel I need a drill sergeant to keep me ontrack.

[moonhorse]

I too find that after a 10-hour day, I can not do anything productive. My best time is morning till early afternoon. I think ego depletion definitely has some anecdotal evidence. Most of us can only do quality focused work when our mind is clear after sleep.

If you look at the data gwern provided, some of the supposedly owls actually sleep till noon, and do work immediately after waking up. That is not an "owl" in my opinion ... I too can do work at night if I spend the day wandering around. An owl is someone who could pump good work after a taxing day.

[romanticComedy]

I disagree.

On a fundamental level, there's no way to draw a line demarcating owls, and otherwise non-owls. It's a false dichotomy, founded on behavior alone, which is subject to peer influence, and other sources of behavior modification. All people lead lives distorted by circumstance, particularly when it comes to circadian rhythm. The behavioral effects of daylight savings time prove this. Casual caffeine consumption is another fact to poison the well.

Anyway, I'm routinely up until three or four in the morning. I despise getting up for a nine to five work day, but I do it. Every chance I get, to sleep in, I take it.

Many times, what's really going on, I've discovered, during periods of extended vacation or unemployment, is that I wind up in rotations that push my bed time forward by a couple of hours every day, and then I sleep for any number of hours, until my body need me to get up, and begin my routine. This pushes me all the way from a midnight bed time, around the entire clock, realigning with a midnight bed time in less than two weeks.

Technically, this is classified as a disorder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep-wake_disorde...

When I get locked into as static 9 AM, alarm induced wake pattern, this frequently expresses itself as pulling an all-nighter, just to realign with the totalitarian nature of the work week, such that I might arrive to work on time, for some bullshit, daily 10 AM scrum stand-up, or whatever. It also leaves me really fucking moody, including symptoms of seasonal affective disorder.

But you know what? I'm not crazy. I'm not sick. I'm just forced to live my life on other people's terms for economic reasons, because I wasn't born into a trust fund, and I'm not otherwise independently wealthy. So, by corollary, I cannot tolerate the idea of being taxed financially, to treat something medically, when it should not actually require medication.

Anyway, you have to account for the proper modular math, when declaring that night owls "simply do not sleep in" nor can you claim that your supposed version of a night owl never experienced fatigue, after 10 hours of undescribed daily activity, due to the psychological cost of an ego facade, or whatever.

[iN7h33nD]

Not really a reply to your point. Thanks for your post, I think i finally understand my sleep "problem" now. I think I have the same "disorder"

[LrnByTeach]

This brilliantly captures my own experiences with "writing & coding".

> There's no way I can write at the end of the day, I'm just way to mentally tired. Also as someone who both codes and writes, writing is far more emotionally taxing.

> Coding is problem solving - there is usually a clear path to follow and I generally know when I've solved a problem. Writing for me is unclear and amorphous. There is almost never a road map, and I never really know when I've "finished.