<i>What happens when your startup has hit "cruising altitude"[1]?</i><p>I'm not there yet, so my daily life is:<p>(M-F)<p>1. Wake up after getting far less sleep than I really need, because I stayed up too late hacking on my project.<p>2. Go to work at $DAYJOB. Spend ~8 hours there, doing mostly mind-numbingly boring work. Drink too much coffee. Go for a walk around lunch-time.<p>3a. Leave $DAYJOB, drive to Barnes & Noble. Drink an espresso containing drink of some sort, browse the books and magazines, maybe buy something. Sit in the cafe and hack on my project for anywhere from an hour to 4 hours.<p>OR<p>3b. Leave $DAYJOB, drive home. Put on a pot of coffee, spend rest of the evening hacking, excluding time taken to cook dinner (and possibly walk to the grocery store for provisions.)<p>4. Stay up too late hacking, researching, reading, and wishing there was a way to magically shrink my TODO list.<p>lather, rinse, repeat. Sometimes steps 3-4 may be replaced with "Leave $DAYJOB, go to a user group meeting, or meet somebody for drinks/dinner after work."<p>Fri-Sun:<p>1. Get off $DAYJOB on Friday evening. Drive home, put on coffee, sit down in the chair with the laptop, start coding. Continue until bleary eyed and verging on collapse (usually about 6-7am). Get up Sat. about 12:00-1:00, watch tv, surf the 'net for a bit, idle around the house for a while to let the brain rest. About 3:00'ish, sit down and start hacking again. Go until 8:00 or so, get up, go to Barnes & Noble, drink a latte or something, code for another hour or two. Drive back home, watch a movie or something, then stay up coding until ??? (3-4am usually). Go to sleep. Get up Sunday, write more code for a couple of hours, then do laundry, then back to coding, and misc. "stuff" (plan schedule for the coming week, update TODO list, send emails requesting meetings, blah, blah.)<p>There are exceptions to that basic pattern from time to time, and that's obviously leaving out a lot of details, but that's the basic pattern of my life right now; FWIW.