Work Like a College Student: Late Nights

For several months I was getting frustrated with my work schedule. I felt like I wasn’t getting enough done at the office and was constantly going home feeling like I didn’t accomplish much.

Advice from my Dad and the rest of his generation is to get up earlier. After many failed attempts, I’ve decided this isn’t for me. I will never consistently get out of bed before 8am.

Staying later also wasn’t an option as I leave every day by 5pm to make sure I have a couple hours to spend with Conner and Max before their bedtime.

Along with this I was wanting to give Candace some time to herself during the week. She stays home with our kids and never gets any time for solitude and study.

Then a re-read of the Four Hour Work Week got me thinking about how I worked when I was in college and back before I hired Joseph and was pulling 60 hour weeks. I seemed to always get a lot done when I was forced to work between the hours of 10pm and 3am.

Hmmmm.

So about a month ago I decided to stop working on Tuesday and pull a late night on Monday and again on Wednesday if necessary. I’ve been doing this for over a month and here’s a few observations:

  • No distractions – I get no emails, Twitter is silent and everybody is asleep. It’s not even hard to cut out distractions and focus.
  • High motivation for productivity – One of the problems with going to the office every day is knowing I’ll probably sit there until 5pm.  If I don’t have a lot to do I tend to get distracted knowing I have plenty of time.  When it’s the middle of the night I work quickly through my list knowing I get to go to bed when it’s done.
  • My sleep is more productive – When I first started pulling late nights regularly, I was dragging during the day.  However now my body has adjusted and I feel completely functional even when I only get four hours of sleep for a couple nights in a row.  I’ve done some reading on training your body to enter into REM sleep cycles more efficiently and I can say it’s definitely been working for me.
  • Tuesdays are very fulfilling – My wife spends the morning in personal solitude and study and I spend the afternoon doing the same.  This is very refreshing and keeps me from getting overwhelmed by the stresses of life.

My next goal is to continue to increase efficiency at work and drop another day in the office.  In my opinion, three days at the office should be plenty if I’m planning correctly and working efficiently.

One Response to “Work Like a College Student: Late Nights”

  1. Jason  on March 31st, 2009

    This is pretty interesting. Do you have any links/titles to the reading on REM you mentioned?

    I know someone at my office who arrives at work around 6-7am and they probably get more done in those first 3 hours than I do in 6.

    Most often I find my self getting home late, and feeling like productivity takes about a 50% hit after 8 hours in office. Getting home late, eating late, and catching up on news/twitter/facebook at night keeps me up late enough to struggle getting up early.

    Personally, I think taking a half day on Wed would be enough for me to catch up on things I would usually do late at night, and in addition allow me to get chores done stress-free. I’ll call it the “4.5 hour work week”. Now, if only I can get that by my boss/hr/company :)


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