I sit down at 20:30 planning three hours. By 22:00 I am reading changelogs and moving trello cards around instead of writing anything. People online describe four productive evening hours routinely and I cannot get near it. Is 90 minutes what this actually looks like, or am I doing something wrong that other people have solved?
Normal. What is not sustainable is doing it five nights a week — three nights plus one weekend morning beats five nights when you measure it over three months, because five nights produces a week off every month or so to recover, and you never count that week.
Your day job is the same activity, which is the whole explanation. People whose day job is a warehouse or a classroom genuinely do get more evening coding hours out of the same body. It is not a discipline gap between you and them, it is a different starting state.
Log it honestly for two weeks with a timer. Almost everyone finds their real number, stops comparing it to a fantasy number they read somewhere, and immediately feels better about their project.
@ines_marchetti · 2mo ago · 3 replies
Ninety minutes of real focus after a full day of the same activity is not low. It is approximately the ceiling. Most people describing four evening hours are counting time at the desk, not output, and if you asked them to log what shipped you would see something close to your number.
Two adjustments that made mine feel bigger without being bigger:
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@crypt_cass · 2mo ago
The split is what I was missing. I have been spending my worst hours on my hardest problems and then concluding I am bad at evenings.
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@bedroomsynth · 2mo ago
Same rule here. If it needs a decision it goes on the Saturday list. Everything else is fair game at 21:00 and I stopped feeling bad about closing the laptop at 22:00.
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