The problems I am facing with being able to work whenever I want

My tips would be the following, but ultimately everyone is different:

- Don't be afraid of doing a 9-5. If you find that a struggle, it's generally suggesting that the work isn't engaging enough.

- Don't work weekends, or at least every weekend. You'll soon start to resent the personal time lost if ever you felt the need for a career change.

- Make sure you can get out the house. I rent a desk in a converted chapel in a cemetery and absolutely love going to work.

- If you spent time on weekends coding, then it suggests coding is a hobby as well as a job. You may have side projects or just want to learn something new. Don't sacrifice this time for your day job. It's probably one of the rare qualities that actually makes you good at what you do.

- An hour of work outside of 9-5 is usually preceded with an hour of "I must sit down and do some work" followed by an hour of "what was it I should do now that I stopped working" - so expect a 3 hour mental drain for work during your time off.

- Do you want to be doing this in 5 to 10 years time? If not, what do you want to do instead, then do that.

Your schedule may work for you, but just keep a look out for other areas of your life being affected and recognise the source. You'll find your fiancee will probably be the to give you signals.

As somebody that spent the past 1.5 year traveling around the world while working on a bleeding edge software that requires deep mathematical research and non-trivial integration, I came to the following:

- dedicate time during the day when you focus solely on the task you need to solve. Don't allow anything else to interrupt you nor do any interleaving with other activities. For example, you decide to focus between 7-11am, then do something else and come back between 3pm-7pm or any other time suitable to you. Don't slack off when you have to think, manage your weaknesses.

I found that this does wonders to my productivity. Often during the breaks/sleep I get excellent ideas and have enough power to carry them out. I also suddenly have a plenty of time when I can focus on my hobbies (a lot of them), persons I like to be with and on running my own business on the side.

There was some research in Germany comparing the lives of virtuoso pianists with average ones - the only difference was the virtuosos got completely immersed in their practice twice a day, whereas the average ones interleaved all kinds of activities with their practice.

This is coming from a person that prepared some of the most challenging and business-differentiating algorithms for a start up in the computer graphics area (mostly advanced geometry, SIGGRAPH Pioneer member), and still manages to dedicate time to fashion photography, making hyperlapse movies, composing electronic music, playing piano, fiddling with interesting technology like drones, writing training materials and e-books, place at the top 1% of multiple pilot MOOC courses and loves to socialize.

If you need to ask anything, let me know, I would be more than happy explain to you my recent nomad lifestyle! This is a throwaway account as I don't want to be easily identifiable ;-)

I was really pissed when one guy would blow 5-10 hours on something that he should have called me about... again and again. I couldn't get it through his head that remote != uncommunicative.

Basically, my requirements today for remote workers are (1) daily scrums and (2) bite-size deliverables. Keeps everyone on the same page. The guys that are good at it deliver x2-3 what I expect so that I am never concerned about hours worked.

Most importantly, do not work on sundays as a norm! It will completely wreck any vestige of being 'off work', and you'll catch yourself on a monday evening wondering how long has passed since last weekend.

YMMV, I'm sure there are plenty other people here who can give you good advice. Good luck and congratulations! :)

- Work in blocks, and don't let email/browsing/meetings interrupt that

- If you can at all help it, don't check email or have meetings until your first block of work is done. Getting up and right into work is very productive and minimizes impulses to procrastinate. If you check email, you get in a different mind space and can easily start following rabbit trails until you suddenly realize most of the morning is gone and you haven't done any real work.

- I work best early in the morning or late at night

- Having a specific item in mind is key when starting a block of work. Either one item that will take the entire period, or a list of smaller things to knock out.

- Figuring out what to do should be done at a separate time from actually doing the work. If you start to work, and then have to figure out tasks, you tend to procrastinate. If you know what you need to do, you can get in the zone and just do it. Spending a block on planning also allows you to get in the zone with that. If you try and context switch back and forth between planning and doing, you end up being far less productive.

- A mid-day nap gives my brain time to rejuvenate and get ready for more work. It also lets me get up early and stay up late (to hit my most productive times) while still getting enough sleep.

Based on that, my typical schedule has become:

- Get up early (say 6am) and work until noon in a solid block. That 6 hours is more productive than an 8 or 10 hour day when you have to go in the office, since its uninterrupted undistracted work.

- At noon, take a break, hit the gym, grab lunch, and take a nap

- After the nap, spend the afternoon catching up on email, integrating with the team, and polishing off any loose ends from the morning block

- If I feel I didn't get enough done in the morning block, I've got another uninterrupted stretch from 8 or 9 until midnight I can spend on work, research, or hobby coding. At that point, its easy to keep coding -- in fact, I'll usually have to make an effort to stop myself at 11 or 1130 so I can have time to relax and read a book, so my brain can calm down and stop coming up with ideas while I'm trying to sleep.

instead, what you seem to be doing is giving as much as possible to your employer. now it's difficult to separate american / startup culture from everything else, but it seems to me that is not fair.

you are entitled to a life outside work. and it doesn't have to be a second rate life. your time isn't yours only when you are exhausted. your time isn't yours only when you are useless to your employer. it's just, and fair, and right that sometimes, in your time, you feel smart, and useful. that you have time to learn, to explore new ideas. and, flip side, it's fair if some of the time you're paid isn't top time. people are not always at their peak and there never was any "agreement" that they should be.

so i think, quite seriously, that you're wrong here.

[i work from home, and i start at 9am, take an hour off at lunch and finish at 5 or 5.30, weekdays.]

[edit: ah, ok, sorry i misunderstood.]

I usually start the day around when they do, and engage in back and forth communication throughout the day.

I often find it helpful to disengage around 1-2pm and either go outside, go the gym, or work on some other project, and I don't come back until after they have all gone home for the day. Then I get a few more hours of work in before dinner.

Those uninterrupted hours after 5 are usually the most productive.

If you take a day or two off from a diet, you're more likely to quit the diet altogether. If you don't practice your instrument for a day or two, you're more likely to get rusty as you continue to rationalize skipping days. Weekends are normal in most work environments, but I wouldn't get too creative with your schedule.

I like the idea of two hour bursts followed by a break, as many have a hard time concentrating for more than a couple hours at a time. For coding specifically, this seems to make sense. With my job, I have to continue to keep tabs on certain ad campaigns all day long, so this schedule wouldn't make sense. I think it could be ideal for you. Try it out and adjust as necessary!

Working from X to Y seems silly to me now. I try to set a goal of what I want to get done that day, and when it's done I'm done. The switching costs are so high when changing tasks, it rarely makes sense to start something new at the end of the day. Sometimes I work 2 hours, sometimes 10 hours, most of the time though it is between 4-6.

All that being said, I'm not accountable to a boss and a paycheck. I didn't do any work today and yet my stuff is still selling itself.

By the end of the week, you may find that you don't "need" to work additional hours on the weekend. . .at least not every weekend.

Also, experiment with the times of day that you are most productive. You may find that at different times of the day. And remember that you may not always need 40 hours in a week to feel productive. Other weeks, you may have the energy, desire and drive to work for 60 hours.

(Follow up edit... I think I would personally drift into something like one day on, one day off)