Like a lot of people, I do my freelance work in the evenings and weekends outside of the normal work hours of my day job. In doing so, I’ve recently come to a conclusion in my moonlighting work habits. There were days I could go until 4am easy and wake up at 6am to start again. No longer. A combination of kids, older age and lack of a 2.5 hour commute to nap on have forced me to make this decision: I will no longer work past 12am. If I do, I have found certain things happen that are obvious reasons why I shouldn’t. Here they are:
- Productivity slides down. For example, what normally took 5 minutes to do, will now take 7 minutes. This time deficit increases as 1am approaches, and by 2am I’d say I am operating at half speed compared to when I am fully alert. Troubleshooting CSS in IE6 is hard enough in the afternoon, and near impossible at 2am.
- Morning hangover headache with a side of crankiness. This was a bearable consequence in college, but in college I only had myself and my headache to worry about. I actually have to focus on caring for other little humans at 6:30 every morning, while Playhouse Disney blasts through the house, and screams of tormented siblings fade in and out of the pounding fog in my brain. Coffee helps…but not that much :-) This also isn’t fair to my wife, who although extremely supportive, finds the accompanying crankiness she gets from me for the entire next day mostly unbearable.
- 3rd Day recovery time. I can usually force myself to run 2 full days in a row working late, but on the 3rd day…well, I can’t make it much past 8:30 before I just want to lay in my bed and pass out. So I basically sacrifice the 4 hours operating at 100% efficiency on that 3rd day, in order to have worked the extra 4 hours the previous 2 days at a much lower efficiency scale. Math dictates my decision to work later than 12am is a stupid one.
I made this decision a week or so ago, and have since pushed it to 12:30 a couple times just to finish a particular task. But so far, I am not regretting my new rule.