9:14pm. The last story has been read. The water has been fetched. The monster under the bed has been checked for and officially declared absent. The door is pulled almost shut but not quite, because fully shut is apparently terrifying but three inches ajar is perfectly fine. I stand on the landing for a moment, listening. Silence. Not the silence of sleep - not yet - but the silence of a child deciding whether to push their luck with one more request. I wait. Nothing comes. The evening has begun.
I go downstairs, boil the kettle, make a hot chocolate, and open the laptop. It is 9:22pm. I have approximately two hours and thirty-eight minutes before I should be asleep. I'll use two hours and thirty-eight minutes. I'll regret this tomorrow morning at 6:15am when a small person appears at my bedside to inform me that it is breakfast time. But right now, tomorrow morning is a theoretical problem and the screen in front of me is real. The house is quiet. The ideas are loud. This is when the work happens.
The night owl's window
I've always been a night person. Even as a teenager - staying up watching late-night television, listening to the radio under the covers, reading by torchlight when I was supposed to be asleep. There was something about the night that made everything feel more possible. The world got quieter and the thoughts got louder. The late nineties dance music that shaped me - Faithless, Insomnia, playing at midnight in a bedroom in Nottingham - it wasn't just a soundtrack. It was a feeling. The feeling that the night hours belonged to you in a way the daytime never did.
That hasn't changed. The context has shifted dramatically - I'm not a teenager in Nottingham anymore, I'm a parent in London with responsibilities and a mortgage and a nagging awareness that sleep debt is a real thing with real consequences. But the feeling is the same. When the house goes dark and the only light is the laptop screen, something clicks on in my brain that doesn't click on at any other time. The ideas come faster. The connections come easier. The gap between thinking and doing shrinks to almost nothing.
I know the productivity people would say this is wrong. They would say I should wake up at 5am, do my deep work in the morning, front-load the creative hours. They would point to studies about circadian rhythms and cognitive performance peaks and the optimal time for creative thinking. And maybe they're right, scientifically. But science has never met my kid at 5am. At 5am there's no guarantee of uninterrupted time. At 9pm there is. The window is small but it's reliable, and reliability matters more than optimality when you're building in the margins of a life.
What three hours can do
There's a magic to the compressed creative window that I didn't expect. When you've unlimited time, you can afford to be precious. You can spend an hour choosing a font. You can debate with yourself about whether the hero section should be 80vh or 100vh. You can fall down a rabbit hole of inspiration browsing that lasts the entire afternoon and produces nothing. Unlimited time enables unlimited procrastination disguised as process.
Three hours doesn't allow that. Three hours forces decisions. Three hours means you pick the font in two minutes and move on because there are seventeen other decisions waiting behind it. Three hours means you ship the version that's eighty-five percent right because the alternative is shipping nothing. Three hours creates a pressure that I've come to depend on - not the stressful kind, but the clarifying kind. When the clock is ticking, you find out what actually matters to you very quickly.
I've built entire products in the nine-to-midnight window. Not over multiple nights - in a single sitting. Three hours of focused, uninterrupted, slightly-too-late-to-be-sensible building. The Forest flash cards app happened in one night. A layout that wasn't there at 9:15pm was a deployed, working product by 11:47pm. And the feeling of shipping something at that hour - closing the laptop, climbing the stairs, lying in bed knowing that something exists now that didn't exist three hours ago - is one of the best feelings I know. It's why I keep doing it despite the morning consequences.
The guilt
I should be honest about the guilt. It's there, every night, sitting on my shoulder like a small and persistent bird. You should go to bed. You have to be up in six hours. Your wife is already asleep. You're going to be exhausted tomorrow. Your son deserves a parent who isn't yawning through breakfast. You're trading sleep for side projects. Is that a reasonable trade? Is that a responsible trade?
The guilt isn't wrong, exactly. The maths doesn't work. You can't average five and a half hours of sleep and expect to function well indefinitely. I know this. I've read the research. I've felt the consequences - the foggy mornings, the short temper at the school gates, the afternoon slump that no amount of hot chocolate can fix. The body keeps a ledger, and the body doesn't forget.
But the guilt misses something. It assumes that the night hours are purely subtracted from sleep. That they're stolen time, taken from rest and given to a hobby. It doesn't account for what the night hours give back - the sense of agency, the creative fulfilment, the proof that I'm making things and not just existing. On the nights when I build, I go to bed tired but satisfied. On the nights when I go to bed at a sensible time having done nothing, I lie there for an hour unable to sleep anyway, thinking about the thing I should have started building. The sleep I sacrifice to building is better than the sleep I lose to restlessness.
The sounds of the night shift
There's a specific soundscape to the nine-to-midnight window and I've come to love it. The fridge humming in the kitchen. The occasional creak of the house settling. A fox somewhere outside, screaming like it's being dramatic for no reason. The distant bass of a neighbour's television through the wall. The tap of the keyboard - my keyboard, the only human sound in the house. And whatever I'm playing through my headphones, kept low enough that I could still hear a child calling from upstairs.
The music matters. House and techno at low volume - the same music I was listening to in my bedroom in Nottingham twenty-five years ago, except now I'm a grown man at a kitchen table in North London. The repetition of it helps. The four-on-the-floor beat, the gradual builds, the layers that come and go. It matches the rhythm of building - steady, iterative, always moving forward, never quite arriving but always progressing. I don't think about the music while I'm working. But I notice immediately when it stops.
Sometimes I think about the fact that there are thousands of people doing this same thing, at this same hour, across this same city. Other parents, other night owls, other people who have carved out a window in the dark hours to work on something that matters only to them. We're all sitting at our tables, lit by our screens, building things that the daytime versions of ourselves will barely have time to think about. A silent network of late-night makers, connected by nothing except the hour and the stubbornness.
11:47pm
The product deploys. I check it on my phone. It works. It looks right. Not perfect - never perfect in a single session - but right. The bones are good. The feel is correct. The thing that was an idea at dinner is now a URL that anyone in the world could visit. This transition - from nothing to something, in the space between bedtime stories and actual bedtime - never stops being remarkable to me. Not because the thing itself is remarkable, necessarily. But because the fact that it exists is remarkable. It wasn't there at 9:14pm. It is there now. I made it. In the hours that nobody sees.
I close the laptop. I rinse the hot chocolate mug. I turn off the kitchen light and go upstairs, stepping over the creaky floorboard outside my son's room. I brush my teeth in the dark. I get into bed. My wife is asleep. The alarm is set for 6:15am. That's six hours and twenty-eight minutes away. It isn't enough. It is never enough.
But the thing exists. And tomorrow morning, somewhere between the breakfast chaos and the school run, I'll open my phone and look at it one more time. Just to make sure it is still there. Just to confirm that the night shift produced something real. And it'll be there. Because the night shift always produces something real. That's why I keep showing up for it, tired and guilty and alive, every night at 9:14pm.
