The routine goes like this. Bath time at half six. Stories. The negotiations about one more story. The water. The specific cuddly toy that has to be in the specific position. The creeping out of the room. The return when someone needs a wee. The second creeping out. The sitting on the landing for five minutes making sure nobody calls out again. Then silence.
It's about quarter past eight by this point, sometimes half eight. My wife and I eat something. We talk about the day, which at the moment mostly means I tell her about whatever I'm building and she listens with a patience that borders on saintly. We watch something for a bit. And then, somewhere around nine, she goes up to bed and I open my laptop.
That's when the clock starts. I've got roughly three hours before my eyes won't stay open any more. Three hours to build something, fix something, ship something. The bedtime deadline.
The ritual
I make a hot chocolate. Always. Not coffee -- I've never been able to drink the stuff. Caffeine does something unpleasant to me that I've never fully investigated, so it's hot chocolate, in the same mug, made the same way. It's become part of the process now. The hot chocolate is the signal that the building window is open.
The house is quiet in a specific way at that time. Not silent -- London houses are never truly silent. But the kid's noise is gone, the TV is off, and there's just the sound of my laptop fan and the occasional fox screaming in the garden like it's being murdered. It's the only stretch of the day that's fully mine, and I've learned to treat it with a kind of reverence.
I don't plan what I'm going to work on during the day. I've tried that and it doesn't work. By the time nine o'clock rolls around, whatever I planned at lunchtime feels irrelevant. Something else has grabbed me. A new idea, a fix for something that's been bugging me, a feature I suddenly see clearly. So I sit down, open the laptop, and follow whatever's pulling me hardest.
What three hours forces you to do
When you've got three hours, you can't faff about. You can't spend forty-five minutes choosing a colour palette. You can't research seven different approaches to a navigation menu. You can't read three blog posts about best practices before writing a single line of code. There's no time. The constraint strips away everything that isn't essential.
In advertising, I'd spend entire days on a single presentation deck. Tweaking slides. Adjusting copy. Reworking the narrative arc. Fifteen years of that. Entire weeks disappearing into the process of explaining ideas rather than making them. Now I've got three hours to build an entire product, and somehow the products are better than most of those decks ever were.
The time pressure creates a specific kind of decision-making. You learn to trust your gut faster. Is this layout good enough? Ship it. Does this feature matter or is it nice-to-have? Skip it. Should the font be this one or that one? Pick one, move on. When it's 11:15pm and you're close to having something deployable, you stop deliberating and start deciding.
I built Oishii London -- a curated guide to Japanese restaurants in London -- in a single evening session. Three hours. The idea hit me during the day, I sat down at nine, and by midnight it was live. Not because it was simple, but because the deadline forced me to focus on what actually mattered: the restaurants, the design, the feel of it. Everything else got cut.
The 11:47pm deploy
There's a specific feeling to deploying something late at night in a quiet house. Your wife's asleep upstairs. The kid has been out for hours. The street outside is dead. And you're sitting there watching a Netlify deploy log scroll past, knowing that in about ninety seconds something you made is going to be live on the internet for anyone to find.
Nobody's watching. Nobody's going to see it until tomorrow at the earliest. There's no audience for the moment of shipping. It's completely private. And that privacy is part of what makes it honest. You're not building for the announcement. You're not building for the screenshot you'll post on LinkedIn. You're building because you had an idea and three hours and the stubbornness to see it through before sleep.
I check the live URL. Click through a few pages. Make sure nothing's obviously broken. Close the laptop. Go upstairs. Brush my teeth in the dark so I don't wake anyone up. Get into bed. And then lie there for twenty minutes because my brain is still buzzing with the thing I just made, and sleep doesn't come easy when you've just shipped something.
What it costs
I'm not going to pretend this is some perfectly balanced life. I'm tired. Properly tired, a lot of the time. Some mornings the kid is up at six and I've had five and a half hours of sleep because I was chasing a bug at twenty to twelve and couldn't leave it broken. My wife has been very understanding about the fact that I've essentially become a person who disappears into a laptop every evening, but I know it's not sustainable forever.
Some nights I sit down at nine and nothing works. The idea that seemed brilliant during the day turns out to be rubbish. The thing I'm building fights back. Three hours pass and I've got nothing to show for it except a mess of half-finished code and the frustration of wasted time. Those nights are harder than the ones where I ship something, because the time feels more precious when it's been spent on nothing.
But here's the thing: even the wasted nights are better than not building at all. A year ago I spent those same three hours watching Netflix and scrolling Twitter. Every night, without exception. Same sofa, same time, same nothing. The bedtime deadline didn't steal my evenings. It replaced the void with something that actually matters to me.
The constraint is the point
I used to think I'd build more if I had more time. A full day. A weekend. A sabbatical. Now I'm not so sure. I think the constraint is the engine. Remove the deadline and you remove the urgency. Remove the urgency and you start overthinking. Start overthinking and you never ship.
Three hours. Hot chocolate. Quiet house. That's all it takes. Not because I'm especially talented or fast, but because the window is small enough that there's no room for anything except making the thing. The bedtime deadline is the best productivity system I've ever used, and I didn't choose it. My kid did.
