Working late is a habit, not a virtue

If you look at the timestamps on my emails, you'd think I live in another time zone.

I don't. I just work at night.

And for a long time I was a bit proud of it.

Where it comes from

I learned to build websites at twelve, with free courses, at night. Nobody in my family ran a business. There was no office, no timetable, no one telling me when to stop. Night was simply when the house went quiet and the computer was mine.

That habit never left.

Years later I'm still the same. Daytime is for clients, calls, messages, the hundred small things that come in. Night is when nothing comes in. No phone. No notifications. Just me and the problem.

So a lot of my emails go out at hours when decent people are asleep. To clients, to providers, to Yeray.

I used to read that as a sign of commitment. Look how much I care. Look how hard I'm working.

I'm starting to read it differently.

The badge that isn't one

Here's the uncomfortable thought. Working late doesn't mean I work more. It mostly means I work at a different time.

And that different time has costs that don't show on the timestamp.

I'm tired. Tired people are confident in a way they shouldn't be. Everything looks clearer at night, and some of it only looks clearer because half of my brain has gone to bed already.

I'm alone. At night there's nobody to say "are you sure?". Which is lovely for concentration and terrible for decisions.

And I set the wrong example. If a client gets an answer from me at an absurd hour, what they learn is that I'm available at absurd hours. That's a promise I never meant to make.

Working late isn't a virtue. It's just a habit with a good press office.

What I'm keeping, and what I'm not

I'm not going to pretend I'll become a nine-to-five person. I'd be lying, and you'd see the timestamps anyway.

Night is still the best time I have to think. To read code. To find the thing that's wrong. I'm good at finding problems when it's quiet.

What I'm trying to separate is finding from deciding. Finding can happen at night. Deciding, especially anything that touches a client, should wait for daylight and for a second pair of eyes. In our case, Yeray's.

A draft at midnight is fine. A sent email at midnight is a gamble.

And I'm trying to be honest about the reason. Some nights I work because something is genuinely urgent. Many more, I think, I work because it's what I've always done, and stopping feels strange.

That's not dedication. That's routine wearing a cape.

Why it matters for a company like ours

We don't have investors pushing us to burn ourselves out. That's one of the few luxuries of patient money: nobody is asking us to sprint.

It would be a bit absurd to escape someone else's clock only to build one of my own, set to two in the morning.

A small company that wants to last needs founders who last too. And that's not achieved by being the last one awake.

So I'm not quitting the night. I'm just demoting it.

From virtue to habit.

P.S. Yes, I wrote this one at night. I'll send it in the morning.