> 1st key to succeed here was to work from 4-5 AM to 8 AM before my day job. This was a massive helper. It was truly amazing to see how much these little chunk of time ad up and become HUGE amount down the line.<p>This is the frame of time when I get substantially more done at my job. Well, for me it's more like 5am to 9am. It's a sweet four hours of no interruptions, no meetings, and no BS. I still work for the remainder of the day, but things are much more relaxed because I'm always able to accomplish <i>something</i> during the early 4 hours. In contrast, if I were to start work at 9, there's a good possibility that my productivity will get swallowed up by spurious questions, standup, meetings, meetings that suddenly appear on my calendar, @here, bug reports from customers, HR insisting I fill out yet another sentiment survey, maybe a 1-on-1 with my manager, careful rebasing after someone merged a humongous PR, deployments being broken because someone pushed a change to the configuration, and so on. Friends and family are either asleep or getting ready for their day, so my phone isn't frequently buzzing. I can't go back to working normal hours; work sucks when the day ends and you didn't actually get any measurable unit of work done.<p>I can see how that would be the perfect time window for working on some other project while still having a day job. Although these days I don't have the will to take on that much programming work.
Do people go to bed at 8PM or something?<p>What is the point of working on something if you're missing out on when your friends are doing stuff and hanging out in Discord?