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Comment by hopeless | Hacker News Reader

We need less of these "how to be great in the morning" posts and more "how do you get through 8 hours of a mind-numbing day job and then kick-start your brain at 8pm when you can work on something interesting" posts.

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Invert your projects. Get up earlier and work on your project before you go to the day job. When the day job is done go home and go to sleep so that you get enough rest.

If your project is fun and exciting you'll want to get up to work on it.

Sorry if this next part sounds a bit harsh, I mean it in a positive way: Consider changing your username. Identifying as "hopeless" indicates a negative attitude which will almost certainly put an anchor on your whole life.

I took it as "hopeless romantic" where the romance is found in the ideal of a successful start up.

Take a 25 minute nap. Seriously, try it.

Good idea, as some researchers just showed that naps work:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8524549.stm

I usually tend to turn the 25 minute nap into 2 or 3 hours. My body just doesn't want to get up in 25 minutes.

Then I think you're doing biphasic sleep, something I want to try in the future

I did this the last time I had a full time job. 3-4 hours at night before work, 3-5 hours when I got home from work. It worked just fine except about once every week or two I would take my post work lap and accidentally sleep for 12 hours through the night.

I work at a massive Japanese company, and napping during lunch is an old trick of the trade. Between a quarter and a third of my coworkers power nap daily during lunch. We even turn off the lights for an hour, but that's meant primarily for energy conservation.

Would upmod you to heaven, were it possible! :-)

I'm in Asia and 8 hours is a fantasy, by the way. 10 hours to 12 hours is the new 8 hours here. HR folks' jaw drops when you talk about part-time, by the way.

Someone mentioned take a nap, and I completely agree. Here's what you do: pack your lunch every day (its cheaper, and you'll most likely eat healthier, both making you more alert). Go to your car at noon (or whenever you take your lunch break), put the seat down and take a 30-45 minute nap. Keep the AC or heat on, and if you're like me, turn the radio on and keep it on very low volume. Set your phone to wake you up.

Go back to work, eat your lunch in front of your work station (while working, responding to emails, tickets, etc.) and you'll be very refreshed.

Eat some foods high in natural fat (uncooked/unroasted raw almonds are great) later in the afternoon, but do not eat a lot of sugar or carbs.

This has been working for a while for me so when I get home I can still work away on personal projects.

I find that cycling home, then dinner when I walk through the door after having planned what I want/need to do in the afternoon mentally on the way home or during the workday helps me a lot with this.

However this is exercise, routine, early nourishment, and knowing exactly how I'm going to get stuck in -- all things the article touches on.

If you are motivated enough and the issue of not making non-job progress nags you day in and out, you _will_ work at 8pm.

A great tip is to work on something after reaching home every single day, no matter how trivial it might be. A regular schedule essentially translates your 8pm work into a regular job - so you have to do it.

After a long hard day at a job I dislike and a pile of my own hopelessly incomplete projects staring me in the face, I couldn't agree more.

I think it's about time to quit.

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