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As a six year old I would frequently do nightly LEGO sessions. My ideas were just too exciting not to act on them. I’d keep building until I had a solid first version of my idea in bricks. Only then I’d get back to bed (and my parents never mentioned a thing!).
I still love getting work done in my evenings. But what makes night time so suited for doing work? And can you apply this to daytime too?
It takes two ingredients:
This is the obvious one: lack of external input. I have my internal distractions pretty well under control these days. But external distractions are more unpredictable and often harder to tune out.
As evenings are outside of office hours, there’s less chance of interruptions.
To get immersed in your work, you need to be able to have a long stretch of time ahead of you. One without an ending.
I’ve called it an unbounded time slot before, but the whole point would be that it isn’t a slot. You should be the one to decide when you’re done working, like I did with my LEGO. So it’s rather the absence of an end time.
Making sure you’ll be on time for your next meeting. Or having to pick up your kid from school are background processes in your mind that will work against you.
If you want to get into a state where you’ve lost track of time, you shouldn’t have the need to keep track of it.
And when are you most likely to find these periods of unbounded time? In the evenings.
You can, but only if you control your environment.
An open office is your ultimate opponent here. It is filled with external input, and often also brings a ton of schedule. Great if you plan for it.
But if you can control your environment it’s straightforward:
It’s possible that your brain is in a less alert and even dumbed down state in the evenings. And this could help to have good focus, even though that seems counter intuitive.
It isn’t so much about the night time but more about the circumstances it brings to do quality work. Analyse what the ingredients are for you. Low input was an obvious one for me, but the absence of an end time wasn’t.