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Comment by Ocerge | Hacker News Reader

None. After my first cup of coffee in the morning when I have artificial enthusiasm I always tell myself I will start when I get home, but after 9 hours of making somebody else rich, I am just out of energy, and not interested enough in software to push through.

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Sounds like me...only I procrastinate and spend all the time I would working on a side project --thinking up ideas, or 'researching' what others are doing so I can copy/make better/build it and make$$.. Seems I never get past that 'market research' phase .... spend too much time on hackernews/reddit/indiehackers.

Have I posted this while i was sleeping? It sounds exactly like me. I guess I am bitten by analysis paralysis bug. With hundreds of new frameworks coming out each day, one day you think to solve a problem with shiny new tool, next day there is a new one. I spend @ couple of hours each day "thinking" about items to build, unfortunately not been able to draw a line in sand and start it.

If I could program while exercising I would be incredibly productive. I normally go for a run after work, during which my brain gets a "second wind" and becomes super active in a way similar to how I feel in the morning.

Once I'm done though, that feeling is incredibly fleeting. That's when I normally just get dinner started.

I know what you're saying; your employer owns the most productive part of your day. The fix that worked for me is get up at 3am so I own the most productive first three hours of the day. Everyone's asleep then, so there are no interruptions. After the day job it's family time and exercise, then I'd be exhausted enough to be asleep by 9pm.

Doesn't sound sustainable unless you have the 4h sleep gene.

I'm a developer to the core, and I've been coding since the late 70s. But I also read a lot, and I've always fancied being a writer and cranking out some middlebrow tech flavoured stuff like Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams. So I've also read a lot of "how to be a writer" stuff. One comment from an established author stuck with me. When asked "how do you know you're a writer?", the reply was "because you can't not write". When I read that I realised I'm a coder at heart, because I can't not code. The ideas that come to me are software ideas, and they find their expression as code. It's an itch that needs to be scratched. It all comes down to how badly you need to scratch the itch. And I know that if I don't scratch it I'll go mad.

Interesting. I guess I'm not a "true coder" by that definition. I'm probably more of a pragmatist than I'd like to admit. I like the results of coding but not for its own sake. If someone has written a hashtable implementation I'll thank them but won't roll my own.

Took me a while to realise this. I kept kicking myself thinking I "should" be more interested in crypto, functional programming etc.

I think I don't like software quite that much, but enough to where if I did have spare mental energy, I probably would use it. That's an interesting perspective though, and one I see in many Type A coders. I just don't have it in me I don't think.

Wake up 2hours earlier. Ge a coffee, work 2 hours on your code, then go to work. It works.

This may actually be something I try. I don't need that much sleep, but I think it may hurt for awhile. I'll think on it.

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