A lot of the time, I’m not very motivated to work, at least on particular projects. Sometimes, I feel very inspired and motivated to work on a particular project that I usually don’t feel (as) motivated to work on. Sometimes, this happens in the late evening or at night. And hence I face the question: To sleep or to work until morning?
I think many people here have this problem at least sometimes. I’m curious how you handle it. I expect what the right call is to be very different from person to person and, for some people, from situation to situation. Nevertheless, I’d love to get a feel for whether people generally find one or the other more successful! Especially if it turns out that a large majority converges to a particular strategy. (Maybe someone has even experimented with this for themselves and tracked what happened?) My particular experience is mostly related to research and I would guess it mostly happens in the context of research but am also interested to hear from other cases.
I’ll make a comment for people to vote on whether they generally choose working or sleeping through the night in the situation I described. But I expect a lot of people’s experiences not to neatly fit into this categorisation and would love qualitative data as well! I’d encourage everyone to agree and disagree vote on the qualitative comments for more data collection. (Note that I would guess people have a higher threshold towards disagree voting than agree voting and encourage you not to do that.)
Definitely. And the balance changes as one ages as well. For me, there are some kinds of work where it’s very hard to get into the zone, and the cost of an interruption is very high. However, I just get less effective over long sessions, and this has gotten much worse in the last few decades. So the point of indifference between “I may not be able to recover this mind-state tomorrow” and “I may not be that useful tonight, and may not be good for ANYTHING tomorrow” has shifted.
I would recommend trying it at least a few times each year, in both directions. Don’t ever make one or the other the only option for yourself—it’s always a choice.
As someone diagnosed with ADHD only recently, as an adult, I can relate to having mental energy that is highly variable, and to having intellectual pursuits which are largely dependent on this energy. It would seem the vast majority of active participants on this website have no kids, so I thought it would be worthwhile to add my perspective, having 3 of my own, in my early 30s. Prior to having kids, I would often stay up until ~2am, deep in some sort of research, and occasionally stay up all night, tracking down and reading articles pertinent to my topic. Often, I would have a “crash” day, sleeping ~14 hours one day of the weekend.
After having kids, inertia kept my habits up for a while, but the all-nighters went away, and the 2am bedtime shifted closer to 11pm. (Total hours spent sleeping, of course, were lower, in spite of this, due to nighttime feedings.) With making up for sleep on the weekend becoming (understandably) less tolerable for my spouse, and having children who wake up ~6am or earlier and require an adult to be awake with them, regularity of time was imposed. But my mental energy still followed its own pattern. Melatonin has been helpful in forcing a “shut down sequence” on my mind before bed.
After being diagnosed and beginning medication, I have (aside from temporary side-effects from medications that were not ideally suited for me) found myself much more able to both apply a consistent level of energy to both professional and personal projects, as well as to keep a consistent bedtime, typically without the need for melatonin to “force” it. It also helps that our youngest is finally sleeping through the night consistently. Recently, I have even been considering waking up ~5am, to get some of the time back, after a night of good sleep. I plan to experiment with this, and see how it goes.
Behind these changes, it is difficult to disentangle from each other the effects of the child-imposed schedule, the medication, and simply the advance of time/age. How much people should try to change themselves to fit their circumstances, and how much people should try to change their circumstances to fit themselves, remains an open question for me. But those who choose to submit themselves to the needs of others in the ways that family life requires can still find time & energy for their pursuits… At least once the baby is sleeping through the night.