23 Apr 2010
John O'Nolan on Working The Graveyard Shift
A year after writing about his average working day John O’Nolan gives us a follow up with an article on how things have changed since then.
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post about my average working day. I thought that today it might be interesting to have a recap on what my hours are like now and how productive I’m being. Has anything changed? Let’s find out.
With the frequency that I work from increasing, I found myself not only agreeing with what John has written, but finding that most of it is true, not only me, but a lot of Freelancers out there.
So as I was taking a few minutes to sit back and have a breather from work, I dropped him a response:
I too find myself working these odd shifts, when I’m not working from the office I’ll frequently do an 11am-3am shift, or until I get to the point where I’ve been staring at the screen for an hour and done practically nothing!The problem is you can’t constrain motivation, bag it up and say “hey I’ll use that motivation between 9 and 5”.
Some days I’ll wake up and look at my to do list, and have no interest for anything on the list. I’ll go fo a run, have some lunch and kick back for a bit. Most of the time after an hour or so, I’ll get a great idea, or some renewed enthusiasm and I’ll immerse myself in a project for not only the rest of the day but most of the night too.
I’ll challenge you to find any web freelancer that for at least part of their career haven’t fallen into this way of working.
The fact is though if you’re happy in what you do, then why try and force yourself to change how you do it, even if it seems completely crazy to everyone else!
Check out the full article over at John’s blog
