Eight months in, currently five weeknights plus Saturday morning, and the project earns enough to cover its hosting and nothing else. My partner has started describing the project in the third person in a tone I do not like. I am considering dropping to Tuesday and Thursday plus a long Sunday morning, but I am worried that at that pace nothing ever ships.
I ran five nights for seven months and then lost about six weeks completely, where I did not open the repo at all and felt sick when I thought about it. The lost six weeks cost more than the extra nights had gained, and worse, I came back to a codebase I had written while exhausted and spent another fortnight understanding my own decisions. If I could send one message back it would be that tired code is a loan with a bad interest rate.
Three years in on two weeknights and one weekend block, and the reason I am still here is precisely that I never ran five. I shipped noticeably less per quarter than the people posting five night streaks, and I also watched most of those people stop entirely inside a year, so my slower total is now larger than their faster one. The number that matters is not hours per week, it is hours per year, and hours per year is dominated by whether you quit in month nine.
Hours per year rather than per week is a reframe I needed. Month nine is unnervingly close to where I am.
It always is. The five night pace usually breaks about two months after it stops feeling exciting, which is roughly now for you.
Two nights and one weekend block, sprint harder for two weeks before a launch, then take a week fully off. I have kept that for four years.
I think the weeknight versus weekend framing is the wrong axis. Four scattered ninety minute evenings gave me four context reloads and very little real work, whereas one uninterrupted five hour Saturday gave me the only architectural progress I ever made. Now I do one long block at the weekend for anything that needs thinking and use weeknights only for small, defined, already decided tasks. Same total hours, considerably more shipped.
This matches me. Weeknights are for tickets I wrote on Sunday, never for deciding anything.
@first_dollar_fi · 2mo ago
Something nobody mentions: the partner comment in your post is the most important sentence there and it is not a scheduling problem. Mine said something similar and what fixed it was not fewer nights, it was making the project legible, so one evening a week I explained what I was doing and what would have to be true for me to stop. The hours barely changed and the tension went. Cadence is easy to tune later, resentment is not.
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