Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
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Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
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Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#2I've noticed the night effect for a long time too, and while the lack of interruptions might have something to do with it, I don't think it nearly explains my 3x boost in productivity.
I think there's something biological going on as well. Around 1 or 2 am, I sometimes get a bang of energy and creativity that I never get during the day. It's the "second wind," the injection (possibly) of cortisol and other stress hormones that cause my body to go into stress-protection mode. I become hypervigilant, which causes fewer bugs. I think more quickly, writing code faster and coming up with amazing design ideas instantly.
If you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, it makes perfect sense-- in the animal world, when you become stressed (i.e., a tiger comes up behind you, or you get exhausted looking for food) the outcome is binary: either you die or you live. So the body does extraordinary things to keep you alive, like make you temporarily smarter and more focused.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps, the body has developed in such a way that the lack of sleep for some number of hours (for me, almost exactly sixteen or seventeen hours) triggers the release of stress hormones which sacrifice the body's current state for mental and physical agility.
When will someone figure out how to hack my brain to make it like that all the time, without the nasty side effects (sleep deprivation) the next day?
More info:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/502825
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine
I should do more research on this.
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#3Coding at night is good. But I noticed another thing: texts written at night suck. In the morning you will inevitably be ashamed of what you wrote. The best time for blogging or writing emails is the beginning of the day. I wonder if it's the same for other people, and why this is.
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#4Coding at night is good. But I noticed another thing: texts written at night suck. In the morning you will inevitably be ashamed of what you wrote. The best time for blogging or writing emails is the beginning of the day. I wonder if it's the same for other people, and why this is.
Oh that is so true. I avoid writing emails, blog posts, or anything public at night.
The upshot is code docs don't get written during a night-time hacking session.
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#5An significant factor might also be that when you are tired, you want to get the job done quickly and you spend less time thinking about the options and more time just going ahead.
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#6Night-time is best for my writing but worst for my coding - go figure. If I have a big backlog of emails, or I'm trying to write a journal paper, I don't even bother trying during the day anymore, unless there's a deadline.
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#7In the daytime, you're supposed to work, whether you're in the flow or not. At night, if you're coding, it's because you're in the flow. So the phenomenom is explained by a biased sample.
Order people to work at 2 am and see what remains of this productivity boost.
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#8Funny, this has never worked or made much sense for me. I have always been able to kick butt from 6 a.m. until as late as midnight, but after that, forget it.
Then when I read the author's reasons for being so productive at night, I realized that you can do all of that during the day. I never IM, text, or RSS, only a few people have my cell phone #, I only check email (and hacker news) every hour or two, and the door is closed. Works great.
Whatever works for you, do it.
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#9Funny, this has never worked or made much sense for me. I have always been able to kick butt from 6 a.m. until as late as midnight, but after that, forget it. Then when I read the author's reasons for being so productive at night, I realized that you can do all of that during the day. I never IM, text, or RSS, only a few people have my cell phone #, I only check email (and hacker news) every hour or two, and the door…
I was a night person until the final year of my PhD. Something about that year made me switch to being a morning person, strange as it sounds.
Now I get my best stuff done before most people wake up. I start to slow down a little after lunch. After about 7 or 8pm I find it hard to get any good work done.
I was just trying to find a quote I used to like, about it being uncivilized to expect people to work after lunch... I think it was by a famous mathematician or philosopher, but I can't find it now - does anyone know who I'm thinking of?
Re: Night Hacking (the productivity boost of 2 am)
#10I think this is because your inner voice is doing this at late night:
"Dude, what the hell are you doing at this ungodly hour?"
"I am trying to get _____ done"
"Oh okay"
So, you are continuously conscious and aware. Naturally you are more productive. I create the same phenomenon during the day too by using a simple tool that I wrote for this exact reason: Smacklet http://www.smacklet.com
( shameless plug, but I mean it )