I am not a full-time builder. I want to be clear about that because the internet has a way of making everyone look like they're doing this all day, every day, with nothing else going on. I'm a forty-year-old dad with a young kid in London. My days belong to my family. My evenings -- the tail end of them, the scraps -- belong to building. Every product I've shipped exists because I borrowed time from sleep.
It's not romantic. It's Tuesday night at ten o'clock and I'm trying to figure out why a Netlify deploy is failing while my wife is asleep upstairs and I've got to be functional enough to do the school run in eight hours. It's answering "what does Daddy do on his laptop?" with something a four-year-old might understand, and settling for "he makes websites" because the real answer is too complicated and also a bit embarrassing when you say it out loud.
The shape of a stolen hour
Not all hours are equal. A Saturday afternoon hour when the kid is at a birthday party is gold. You're fresh, alert, caffeinated on hot chocolate, thinking clearly. A Tuesday night hour at 11pm after a full day of parenting and job applications and life admin is a different thing entirely. It's slower. Your thinking is muddier. Your patience for debugging is almost zero.
But the 11pm hour has something the Saturday hour doesn't: desperation. You know there's no other time coming. This is it. Either you build the thing now or it stays unbuit until tomorrow night, when you might not have the energy or the inclination. That desperation creates a kind of brutal efficiency that I've never experienced in any other context.
In fifteen years of working in advertising agencies, I never once felt this kind of time pressure on creative work. There was always another day. Always another meeting. Always another round of revisions. The work expanded to fill whatever time was available, which was always more time than the work actually needed. Now the work has to compress into whatever time I can steal, and it turns out most work can compress a lot more than you'd think.
Single-session products
Some of the best things I've built came from single sessions. One sitting. Laptop open to laptop closed. The Forest Quiz -- a Nottingham Forest trivia game that I built mostly because I was missing football and wanted to make something stupid and fun -- was a single evening. Three hours, give or take. The London Pub Guide was similar. So was the first version of CultureTerminal.
The single-session products have a particular quality to them. They're tight. There's no feature creep because there was no time for features to creep. They do one thing, they do it clearly, and they're done. The multi-session products -- Modern Retro, Trove -- are richer and more complex, but they also carry the scars of being built across multiple nights with different energy levels and different states of mind. You can almost feel the seams where Tuesday night's thinking meets Thursday night's thinking.
What borrowed time teaches you
When time is genuinely scarce, you learn what actually matters. Not in a motivational poster way. In a practical, immediate, "I have two hours and I need to decide what to spend them on" way.
You learn that design systems are a luxury. You learn that the perfect database schema doesn't matter if nobody ever sees the product. You learn that a slightly wonky mobile layout is fine if the content is good. You learn that done is better than perfect, not because someone told you that on a podcast, but because it's twenty to twelve and you're either deploying this thing now or you're going to bed with nothing to show for the evening.
You also learn what you actually care about. When time is abundant, everything seems worth doing. When time is scarce, only the things that genuinely excite you survive the filter. I've had dozens of product ideas in the last month. The ones I actually built are the ones I couldn't stop thinking about during the day. The others died natural deaths, which is exactly what should happen to ideas that aren't strong enough to survive the competition for three precious hours.
The exhaustion is real
I'm not going to dress this up. I'm knackered. Properly, consistently, bone-deep tired. There have been mornings where the kid is bouncing off the walls at six thirty and I've had five hours of sleep because I was chasing something at midnight that I absolutely could have left until the next day but didn't because the momentum was there and stopping felt worse than being tired.
My wife has been understanding to a degree that I probably don't deserve. She sees me disappearing into the laptop every evening and she doesn't complain, but I can tell there's a limit. There has to be. The borrowed time I'm building with isn't really borrowed from sleep. It's borrowed from her. From us. From the evenings we used to spend watching telly together and talking about nothing important. That cost is real and I'd be lying if I said I'd figured out how to balance it.
Some weeks I take a night off. No laptop. No building. Just the sofa and whatever she wants to watch. Those nights feel strange now, like I'm skipping a gym session. Which is probably a sign that the habit has tipped from productive into something I need to keep an eye on.
Why it's worth it
A month ago I was a strategy director between jobs, spending my evenings scrolling Twitter and watching Netflix and feeling like I should be doing something more with my time but not knowing what. Now I've got fourteen live products, a portfolio that actually shows what I can do, and the genuine ability to turn an idea into a working thing overnight.
That transformation happened entirely in borrowed time. In the gaps between bath time and sleep. In hours that used to belong to nothing and now belong to building. The time was always there. I just wasn't using it.
I don't know how long this pace is sustainable. Probably not forever. Probably not even for another few months at this intensity. But right now, in this window, while the energy and the ideas and the tools are all aligned, I'm going to keep borrowing. The products are the proof that the time wasn't wasted. And the fact that they were built in stolen hours, by a tired dad in a quiet house after midnight? That's not the weakness of the work. It might be the whole point of it.
