I notice that I am the most productive when it's past 12AM (like right now) -- meaning that my brain is starting to stay calm and think cool, and that's the time when I can do most of my productive activities. It's a bit of inconvenience as it's past bedtime. I don't want to go to sleep because I want to do more work, but I have to because I need to be up for work tomorrow morning.

Once, I created this unusual sleep cycle just so that I can stay up at 12AM. I'd go to sleep around 6PM, and have about 2-4 hours of sleep. Wake up around 9-10PM, stay awake till 3-4AM, then fall back to sleep again to wake up around 8, and go to work.


What's your productive hours, and how does that affect your schedule?

I always think I'm productive when working at like past midnight. But when I look at what I did the next day I'm often like "what was I thinking?"... Well, actually I tend to get a lot of stuff done in that time. But I ends up slightly messy. So if I wrote some text I always have to go over it the next day since there will be weird sentences that end differently than they started and funky typos etc.
I think what actually happens with me is that I somehow get very motivated and "into it" at that time, but I don't actually produce better results.

I am also more productive at night, but I don't think that it's mainly a physical matter (indeed, I'm more tired), in my case it's because I have no interruptions in that time slot.

Double post (why can't I delete a post from my phone?)

My most productive hours are when I'm at the office. It's not as much because it's a particular time of day but a sense of, 'this is what I should be doing here'. If I'm at home and there's a personal project that I want to work on I have to take myself out of the room where ordinarily I'd be playing games and watching TV otherwise I won't have the discipline to stay focused. The distractions don't have to be completely removed, I just need to be somewhere that feels like it's supposed to be a work space.

That being said, when it comes to programming, there's something about a mind when it isn't at what people would expect it to be at its optimal operating conditions that produces optimal results. This would be the classic example. I'm inclined to think that it has something to do with being in a state where you don't over think things as much as you would ordinarily. The result is that more work actually gets written down. The trick is to get enough things written down before you hit the point where everything you write down makes no sense.

I'm similar in that I find myself more motivated to work after midnight, but similar to japro my technical work isn't the highest quality. I tend to think best in that period, the most creatively, so it's good for design and writing and stuff. But something like coding I find I do better in the mid afternoon or evening.

I try to avoid chopping up sleep time, as quality and type of sleep are more important than just tallying hours. But I hate that my best work time is locked up when I'm at the office, so I often stay up late and do a flurry of work, and try to do more technical design work on a notepad when things are slow at my job.

Similar schedule (from the original thread) here. Although I do find that sometimes I'm even more productive going early to bed and then waking up early (6-7 am), calmly drinking coffee and then going to the PC.

That having said, the time at which I'm serisously productive is after drinking a tiny glass of licour or whisky (or any other beberage with high alcohol in a small dose). It seems to grant me superhuman coding abilities. And I'm actually not kidding. My brightest lockless and highly scalable parallel algorithms have been coded under the influence of alcohol. Not only I write more code in fewer time, but the code itself contains less bugs than usual.
The xkcd's joke about Ballmer's peak may actually be true. I don't do this often though.

At night is when I seem to program the most. Take the past few nights. I stayed up until 5 AM then went into work at 10 AM then stay until 6. Seems to work well. I'm in the short sleeper group so it's never bothered me.

As soon as I wake up. This is so inconvenient because that is when I need to get my son ready for school, and get ready and go to work myself. Then, by the time I get to work, I can't focus any more :/

But for some reason, during that just-woke-up time, my brain works amazingly well, as long as I don't stop. It puts together things and solves problems in minutes that I would struggle with for far longer - even hours - at other times of the day (esp. after 12am).

I'm definitely most productive at night.

For me the reason is the total lack of external disturbances at night. At daytime, you are constantly interrupted by phone calls, emails, people coming into your office with stupid questions and whatnot. And even if you put that "don't disturb me or I'll rip your head off" sign on your office door, the simple fact of knowing that something could potentially interrupt you at any time puts your brain in an annoying state of alertness that disrupts this special kind of 'flow' you need for programming.

All that are non-issues at night. Your subconscious knows that no external event will interfere with your activity for hours on end. And that tremendously improves productivity for me.