I track my productivity very assiduously. For some tasks, such as writing, it is next to impossible to be productive for more than 5-6 hours/day. Your brain gives up after a while.
Except my days are not oranges where I'm trying to squeeze every last drop of juice out of them, leaving nothing but pulp, peel and seeds before I throw them in the green bin.
Life is most certainly a marathon where pace of play is far more important than local maxima.
As a founder you would probably spend more time on calls and other administrative tasks that don’t require much brain energy. That’s how you end up doing long hours.
I think this is an important comment. I used to be a late night worker but family and other commitments has made that impossible. I wake at 5AM to get a few solid hours of brain work in before the family stirs. This has been the best approach to retaining the 'late night work hours' and balancing family.
It really depends on the individual. My kids wake up between 5 and 6 and some weekends I might just tap away on my laptop while I sit in the front room with them with cartoons on (they're still too young to get up unsupervised).
However despite a few years of this routine I still find myself more productive at night than I am in the morning (or even during the day, unfortunately).
It depends. I am a night owl and if I wake up too soon I am really useless for almost the whole day. Instead waking up later than usual (like 11-12am) makes me hyper-productive until late night.
I guess each person has a different time of best performance, the problem is when you get a job in a office without flexible hours.
I tried to delude myself for years, telling myself that I'm not a "morning person". It was just an excuse to stay up late and watch garbage on the TV or scroll endlessly through Reddit.
Since I've forced myself to go to sleep no later than 11, I've realized that hey, I actually am a morning person.
I find my creativity peaks after 1 A.M.if I’ve been able to get into a state of flow. I’m certainly not at my most productive, but for work which isn’t time critical it’s a useful tool.
A combination of Toggl, Spreadsheets, and good old paper and pen. I keep a calendar that I mark every day as either green or red depending on whether I've met my threshold for a productive day (>6 hours of actual productive time - tracked using Toggl)
