Unfortunately, in between there's sleep, which is the great feelings eraser / emotional cache flusher. So all that'll happen is that said "feeling of incompleteness" will distract me for the rest of the evening, then disappear at night. Come morning, it won't be there, so I'll have to read the plan to hopefully induce that feeling again.
When I return to the task, I get up to speed in ~10 minutes, and things way go smoother because a) I'll be rested, b) My brain would have processed the plan and came up with a refined version of it. When I read the plan I wrote, I automatically recall the refined version most of the time.
Then, I get to work and finish what I have started.
Interestingly, sleep doesn't erase my emotions, but pause them. I just continue from where I left.
as a non-morning person, it usually takes me about 4-6 hours to get up-to-speed. because there would be some unexpected twists and turns that will distract me from the task.
meanwhile, exact opposite. if i cannot "solve" an issue, if i just wait till the evening by going for a 100+km bicycle ride, i magically solve the problem in the evening (right about at dusk and after).
if you don't work in the evenings, which he explicitly mentioned he does
probably he does things easy tasks, things that can be done on autopilot, gradually moving on to initial attempts at harder tasks?
seems like they enjoy what they do and/or enjoy what they do, which is critical for non-morning people
I'm not a morning person either. Coffee doesn't really help. For me it not 4-6 hours, but 2 is common.
Sincerely, A true night owl.
If you are productive as a night owl, you will be even more productive this way.
I can easily sleep 10 hours, start at any time. It's not a problem of falling asleep, it's a problem of waking up :)
I lift weights, and I make sure to do big muscle groups. I wake up around the same time every day, ish. I do not drink coffee in the afternoon. I do not use blue light screens at night. And any number of other advice that people keep bringing up.
Like the comment above that says if you wake up at 06, you will be tired at 23. Yeah, sure, but you still won't be able to sleep. All that does is make you more tired permanently, but sleep still doesn't happen.
People just do not work the same, some people are really more active at night. And this advice is echoed constantly whenever this topic is brought up.
Just a few observations from one night owl to another; I can rarely go to sleep before 4 am.
Close to a decade of that lifestyle, and my body didn't adjust. In my case, there's no insomnia - I indeed start feeling tired around 21:00 - 23:00. Just that my performance curve didn't shift accordingly; only thing that's changed is that I had to give up my most productive parts of day (afternoon, late night), because I'm too tired to do anything at that point.
I'm open to suggestions on how to fix that.
I generally plan my next morning and half day before I go to bed. This allows me to create a routine with some flexibility for the morning.
While I can, and like to work, at nights, I do it less and less. Increasing the efficiency of my work routine is a more rewarding process for me. Also, I'm more conscious about my biorhythm now, so I want to give my bods enough time to detox itself, esp around 1-3pm, when your brain "takes the chemical trash out".
That is interesting for me. It's something I wish was the case for me, because I've been struggling with this a lot. I started referring to it as "lack of emotional continuity" or "emotional cache flush". It's like a context switch, but on emotional layer. I basically can't seem to hold on to my emotional state for extended duration, and in particular it gets reset at the day boundary (i.e. when I sleep). This affects both positive and negative emotional states.
Practical consequence of that is that I prefer "sprints" to "marathons" when dealing with tough problems, whether intellectual or emotional - it can take up to an hour for me to "work myself up" the right way to focus on a hard task, or to talk about some difficult personal topics, so I need to make the best of it.
I really, really wish there was a way to do the emotional equivalent of the "write down plans and thoughts at the end of day, read them again in the morning" trick.
I understand how your emotions/body work and how upsetting the current "configuration" is, but maybe it's the way because your body is trying to process or overcome something in the grand scale.
Did you try meditation, esp. not the canned ones from the apps, but a proper practice with a proper instructor and mentor? A good practice generally help you to understand what makes you tick, or live a more balanced inner life, which may help you reducing in this "work up" time, or change the things which you doesn't like about yourself.
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
How I obey this rule at the end of the day is to continue my code in the necessary points, interspersed with "blahs" if I am feeling verbose (and necessary means that nothing critical is left out, and nothing irrelevant is included in reminding tomorrow).
How I disobey this rule is to verbally say (out loud) the idea that comes to mind in odd moments, as they are prone, followed by "note this" (at which point everyone around you admires your incomprehensible spontaneous demeanor). This imposes a tag on the inspirational memory of perspective and involvement, and I find that I retain it until no longer needed.
This works for me.
I find that it can even ruin an evening. I'll find myself trying to solve a problem in my head rather than being present with my family.
The only thing that works for me is waiting for clean breaks that happen mid-late afternoon. As soon as I reach a happy stopping point, I must stop and switch to shallow work for the rest of the afternoon. Then it's easy to leave my computer at the end of the day.
It's hard but after years of struggling with this, I found a sustainable way to balance work and life.
I also track my consistency with doing this so that I notice myself slipping back and correct it before it becomes a problem.
(Back before that, in some previous night, my body would still take 8-10 hours of sleep if I let it, and the more I did, the more tired I felt throughout the entire day.)