For most of my twenties I worked at night, and I was certain it suited me. The house was quiet, nobody wanted anything, and the work felt urgent in a way it never did at eleven in the morning.
What I had mistaken for suitability was mostly adrenaline. Night work is easier to start because there is nothing else left to do, and it feels productive because tiredness narrows your attention to whatever is in front of you. Narrow is not the same as deep.
The trade nobody mentions
Night work borrows. It borrows from the following morning, which becomes a slow recovery, and then from the afternoon, which becomes a slow preparation for another night. Two thirds of the day are spent servicing the third that does the work.
When I finally moved the difficult hours to the morning, the first fortnight was awful and the third week was the most productive of that year.
The question is not when you can work. It is when you can think, which is a much smaller window and a much more valuable one.
Daylight is not a metaphor here
Some of this is genuinely about light. Working near a window changed my accuracy at the bench in ways I can measure, and it changed how long I could concentrate in ways I can only report.
But most of it is about position in the day. Whatever is hardest should meet you before the day has had a chance to make its requests. Everything that can be done tired, do tired. Correspondence can be done tired. Tidying can be done tired. Deciding cannot.
Protecting the wrong things
The mistake I made for years was protecting the quantity of my working hours instead of their placement. I had plenty of hours. They were simply all in the wrong part of the day, spent on the wrong kind of task, and no amount of adding more was ever going to fix that.
Written by
Tomas Reid
Contributing writer
Tomas writes about attention, tools, and the small rituals that make long work possible. He lives near the coast and walks before he writes, every day, in every weather.