Found a great Inc. article about Jason Fried, one of the founders of 37signals.
The article details Fried's unconventional schedule which I found interesting since I work one that's even more obscure than his. I always get more work done in the middle of the night, from about midnight until 5AM, than any other time of day. During the day I take all the calls, e-mails, meetings and conference calls. I try to triage and respond to all the "immediate" client needs throughout the day, but it's damn near impossible to do much of the creative work during "normal" business hours.
As Jason Fried sums it up:
"We rarely have meetings. I hate them. They're a huge waste of time, and they're costly. It's not one hour; it's 10, because you pulled 10 people away from their real work. Plus, they chop your day into small bits, so you have only 20 minutes of free time here or 45 minutes there. Creative people need unstructured time to get in the zone. You can't do that in 20 minutes."
I don't think anyone I know really understands my schedule, but this quote seems to capture the underlying principle of why I'm always on my computer at 3AM. The middle of the night is the only large block of uninterrupted time where certain things can get done properly.
I'm not up working every night, but that is still when the majority of our creative work gets accomplished. It started in college because I was freelancing at night and
I remember a time when Matt and I would play golf in the afternoons because some days we would run out of work to do before it got dark - seems absurd now but it really wasn't too far back. Some days I think "Thank God we found more work" and other days I think "I wish we could be playing golf right now."
Anyway, 37signals started as a web design firm and now they're a leading web-based software company. Their most recent project is called Haystack, an online directory of web design agencies and look who has their own listing.
