Daniel Crenna

Code Soloist #1: Don’t work at night

Your web business is a huge part of your life and you’ve undoubtedly set up a self-imposed deadline to get it out there. You did this because nobody else will do it for you, and you thrive under pressure. As you get into your stride and start pushing it out, you might catch yourself temporarily looking up to see the big picture. The big picture always looks impossible to achieve from where you’re sitting, so you do the math and get to thinking that more hours in is more value out, and start adding nights to your days.

It rarely works that way, definitely not often enough to make it a habit. The output you get from shorter concentrated bursts of focus when you’re fresh is far better than the sputtering phases of near-lucidity in the typical all-nighter. You might even spend a day trying to understand, or repair, what you did when your brain was mainlined with a caffeine and cortisol cocktail the night before.

Code Soloist is for single-person software development companies that are trying to start something big with their bare hands. In it, I try to impart whatever I’ve learned, for better or worse, doing the same thing badly.