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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

Ideally, when I wake up at 5am and my head is racing with ideas, I head to my whiteboard in my home office. I write and sketch it all down and three hours later I fall asleep again, waking up at 10 refreshed. Most of such work has really been my best, with proposals that were refined and made it straight to top-management. In some interviews when the question came 'what do you need to work effectively' I have tentatively asked about this - no early meetings, etc... but there was always pushback. My last company, a standalone Vodafone Group R&D lab allowed all of us researchers these luxuries, but was later consolidated and streamlined.

Is there any company that allows people to work this way? What are the best flexibilities that people have encountered? I'd be curious to know....

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Yes. On my team, we have (a) one person who drops their kids off at school, comes in late, leaves early to pick them up again, and works in the evening/night (b) one person who comes in before everyone else and leaves before four (c) several people who come in towards lunchtime and leave late (d) a couple of us who take the shuttles and have a thoroughly normal (8:30-5:30) schedule, and (e) one person whose sleep schedule drifts unpredictably, unmoored from normal daylight rhythms.

In other words, nobody cares as long as you're getting stuff done.

Also, in other words, you should come work here, at YouTube :-)

Need any project managers? :-)

e) totally sounds like me...

I'm working on a very tight deadline for the next couple months, so most of my time and thoughts are dedicated to the project I am working on...

I'm spending less time simply vegging and more actually thinking about what I am working on... as I'm now transitioning from the planning to development phase, my thoughts start to race when I come across an issue to resolve.

This week, I was up until 4-6a a couple days, and a few others crashed when I got home at 5-7p, then up again around 3-4a. Just this morning, I'd woken up around 2a to work through a problem then back to sleep about an hour and a half later...

I'd done a bunch of reading about MVI (Model-View-Intent) as an alternative to the React.js workflow and had some ideas on how to work around a) reusable models, and b) injection and dependency declaration with a system similar to React/Flux's... though it's too late to apply this to the project I'm on, it was an interesting thought exercise.

When left to "just work" instead of being expected to be "in the office" 9-6 it's harder.. usually I'm not "really" awake until after lunch... then I can get some work done, usually pretty productive (staying late a lot till 7-8 or so), and go home to do it again... still not nearly as much as when I'm left to sleep/work as needed/ready.

That's essentially true whenever you wake up. If you can remember your dreams you are at height of creativity wave.

Dreams are merely snapshots of random neurons firing, that your brain for giggles sort into a cohesive dream - because for it can't be symbolic.

I used to sleep a lot with South Park blaring in the background. From what I've gathered brain takes stimuli from the last 50 to 30 min, just before waking up and turn in into cohesive whole. How do I know? I read some research and additionally by accident, in my dream I recognized parts of it as South Park episodes (yay lucid dreaming) that ended in my dream. Since the playlist was going sequentially, I could track that it was from a previous episode, however the current episode was halfway done.

There's a weird quantic effect when recalling a dream, it has to happen half consciously. The moment I realize I'm thinking about dream parts, they evaporate and I can barely play the very first seconds in my head and trying to revive the missing part seems like a huge effort.

My company is 100% work from home, and we all have completely flexible schedules. Our leadership specifically makes sure to hire people who are self-aware enough to know when and how they work best, and they want us to find the schedules and methods that help us to offer our best work.

I am sure we are not alone in this, but I have found that in a small successful companies that let you work how you want, nobody ever leaves the place, so we tend to be hidden gems.

I'm currently at Upverter, where ~75% of the time, I arrive at the office around 3pm. The other ~25% of the time is usually one of: 4am, 11am, 5pm. Basically, it's completely flexible for me.

I'm pretty much ruined for working at other companies though...

Microsoft has an informal but firm no meetings before 11 pseudo-policy. All the white boards you can eat. General freedom to come and go and work when you want, most of the time. YMMV.

What org? Never heard of this rule.

>no meetings before 11 pseudo-policy

Not in osg they don't.

Not in asg either.

Nor in my research lab.

FYI, I have worked at several bay-area tech startups and none of them has meetings in the morning, probably because many engineers tend to work late at night.

As the article mentions, the best route I've found is through either working for yourself or freelancing. Other than that, it's almost the luck of the draw, as corporate rules/guidelines seem to vary over time (as do bosses).

I did work in a company that set its work schedule entirely based on Lotus Notes calendar. Hour-long meetings anytime but "lunch hour". Phone calls asking why I didn't respond to accept the weekly status update meeting invite. White boards and laptops newer than 6 years old were seemingly banned.

I've seen it work well with "core hours." ie. you had to be in the office, or on IM, between 10-3, and meetings could only be scheduled during core hours. That was a great, simple, rule.

Our company is completely distributed, and people choose their own schedule.

Self Employment.

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