Freelancers, designers, wahms, tell me… What are your best work hours?

For the past week, I have been really focused on working on my network of blogs and on generating quality content. This means that a single blog post can take anything from 4-6 hours to do from start to finish.

Sometimes I work on them for longer, days even, designing some related custom graphics etc and generally tweaking and retweaking the layout until I’m happy with it.

In the past I have always found that getting up early, like around 4am has worked really well for me.

I get up, put the old fluffy slippers on and shuffle through to my home office and put in a solid 2-3 hours before my kids or husband even wake up.

This week however, I’ve just been too tired to get up in the morning, looking like I seriously need the best eye cream that the world has to offer, but of course the work still needs to be done.

My youngest son is back at school after the holiday break, but my older son is still here, and taking up a lot of my day time hours. I love being able to spend time with them, but as every freelancer or wahm will tell you, that it is a constant distraction. No matter how many times I take some time out with him, I’ll get back to work having set him up with a fun task to do, and bam, he’s right back at me clanking, shooting, spinning in the chair next to mine and just generally making noise directly around me and making it nearly impossible for to concentrate on a single word.

So I’ve been staying up late nights instead.

I’m finding it even easier than getting up early lately. Maybe because of the increased caffeine in my diet? I don’t know, but I’m getting to bed around 23h45 and last night was just after midnight. I feel better if I push myself to do this, because then I can just tumble into bed afterwards, it’s not like then I have to get out of my pj’s and rush headlong into my day.

As for fun activities, today I set my son up with MS Paint, on my husbands old PC laptop.

I was *astounded* at what he came up with. I showed him a couple of the tools and how to ‘fill’ and then left him to it so that I could get back to work.

After about 20 minutes of blessed, peaceful silence, I heard the words, “Look here Mommy!” and I turned from my iMac to see what he’d made.

mysonspaintpic

How old do you think he is?

He-is-just-four-years-old.

Did you see the smoke coming out of the chimney and everything?

Four.

I think I’m going to be out of job in a few months at this rate.

Kids, they amaze you all the time.

So back to my original question…what hours of the day do *you* work at your optimum capacity?

 

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