You know that feeling you get, when you’re working on a project — making good progress, ideas are flowing — and suddenly you look up and it’s already 11 p.m? You figure it’s probably time to close up for the night, put the laptop away, and go to sleep.
Which you do.
And then you lie there, lights off, wide awake, with a thousand ideas racing through your brain: Oooh…I should email so-and-so, to see if I can find more data for my project. What if I changed the order of my presentation around, would that make more sense? Don’t forget to add that thought to my to-do list. Wonder what the caf is serving for lunch tomorrow? (Okay, maybe not all the thoughts are productive ones!).
You can’t sleep….you’re “in the zone.” So you open the laptop back up, just to do that one. last. thing. Before you forget. It’ll help you get it off your mind, so you can sleep.
And now it’s after midnight, and you’re still at it. In. the. zone.
Do you know that feeling? Or is it just me?
Some guy named Rae... 
I definitely have these, although for me is more often waking up really early (like 3am). I’ve found it best to not fight your body (or mind). I just do the work when my body tells me it’s ready to do it. And I will sometimes *stop* working when it’s clear I’m just pushing the pencil around the paper to no purpose.
I will always go late versus wake up early. Definitely more of a night person, although that’s changed a little bit as I’ve gotten older. It’s interesting to note that I was really, really tired earlier in the evening, but my mind was just so immersed in what I was doing that I couldn’t put it down. Love that about the work we do. It’s why the CIO is the best job on campus, right? 🙂
When I was much younger I used to do a lot of computer programming (or as the young folks call it now, “coding”) and this is exactly the reason so many programmers work all through the night.