I’ve found that my most productive time is in the early morning. I can bang out a lot of high-quality code, and find and fix very difficult bugs, before 10AM.

I find I’m most creative, though, in the afternoon. I often start something in the afternoon, then get it working, the next morning.

Also, I’m constantly in “ship” mode. I write all my code (even the experimental stuff) as if it is shipping code.

That means a lot of “stopping to sand off the rough edges,” as I proceed.

I seem to strike a decent balance between creating and delivering.