Fixing a Broken Schedule

What happens when the thing wearing you down is the same that lights you up

My screen is the only light in the apartment at 4am.

Some nights I’m working on a client draft. Others, I’m brainstorming half-baked ideas or playing around in Claude Code or voice-noting a friend halfway across the world. Either way, this habit has become a part of my schedule that I’d stopped questioning.

There’s not a single sound from cars, neighbors, or pets. It’s blissful. I tell myself I’ll wrap up in twenty minutes, and an hour later I’m still there, reworking a paragraph, testing one more thing, or chasing another idea until it leads to something real.

This has been the pattern since the start of 2026. Four nights out of seven, I’m up past four, sometimes five. Most of the people I work with are based in the US, so their afternoons are my evenings and their evenings are my midnight. Even when I start at a reasonable hour, the day stretches without any clear stopping point because there’s always one more thing I can finish before I call it.

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Last Monday, I woke up with a sore throat that felt exactly like having a golf ball stuck in my airways. Tuesday, I couldn’t get out of bed. Head pounding. Allergies crept in. Even speaking hurt, which put me in a predicament given I had two client calls and an active proposal in the works that same afternoon.

Wednesday, I swallowed my pride along with a tonne of Strepsils, and finally did the unthinkable.

I took a full day off.

I remember lying on the couch with my morning coffee, fighting against the stream of reminders and calendar notifications from my phone. No gym. No client calls. Somehow I stuck with it and worked no more than an hour to knock off the absolute essentials. I consider that a win because I know the old me would’ve ignored that instinct completely and just powered through.

The strange part is that I wasn’t burned out on work I hated. I love doing what I do. Those late nights never feel like I’m suffering as they’re happening. They feel like being in flow, which is exactly what makes them so hard to stop - the thing that’s tearing me down is the same thing that lights me up.

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I decided to immediately fix my sleep schedule and set up two unwritten rules: jump fifty times the moment I wake up, and stop working past seven in the evening.

Thursday turned out to be easy. I’d gone to bed around one and woke up feeling like a completely different person. The hours before my first client call gave me time to think and write — something I’d always pushed to those quiet late-night stretches but always ignored during the day.

Friday was harder. I stayed up until three the night before finishing a project and ended up working well past eight. So, as a bit of a compromise, the moment I shut my Mac that night, I made another commitment: I’m not going to do anything work-related for the entire weekend. Not even mapping out this newsletter.

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Of course, a week isn’t long enough to rewire anything.

For a long time I held these late nights as a badge of honor. I’m the creative who works whenever I feel most energized. I don’t have to clock in or clock out and am someone who’s blurred the lines between work and life because the work is the life.

That story feels good on paper, but it stopped feeling good this Tuesday as I lay in bed, unable to speak, and unable to do pretty much anything.

The experiment continues this week. I know that some mornings it’s going to work and others it won’t. I haven’t solved this by any means but I’m going to keep taking small, imperfect steps rather than wait for the perfect day while my body fights against me.

Talk soon,

Pranav

P.S. I wrote about my night owl tendencies a while back in Finding the Keys — worth a read if this one resonated.

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