Last night was fantastic. After going to my 'normal' job for about 3 hours (I have an irregular work schedule), I was able to go home and chat with my friends/girlfriend for a while and then, amazingly, I had the rest of the night to myself. I grabbed a coffee, turned up some trance music, and worked on my website for nine hours straight. So awesome! I haven't been that focused and productive for months.
I've had this thought before, but last night really reminded me that productivity is like many other activities in that you need to warm up. Before someone sings, or plays guitar, or works out, they have to do warm-up exercises or stretches. So it is with sitting down at your computer and cranking out your next novel or a piece of software. Paul Graham explains it somewhere in one of his essays, I can't remember which one; he says that programmers need long periods of time in which to work. Interruptions break your concentration and make it very difficult if not impossible to solve the problems that one is trying to address. This seems like it is probably true for all sorts of jobs in which the output is creative or material, as opposed to jobs in which the output is something like helping customers or organizing documents.
Anyway, last night reminded me how high you can get from a productivity streak like that. I'm resolving to be more of a hermit in the future, so that I can allocate more of my time to these kinds of sessions.
Fight fight fight.
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