Every few years someone publishes a “how I work” post and I read it thinking yeah, that’s nice, but do you actually do all of that or did you just describe the idealised version of yourself? The version that wakes up at 5am, journals, meditates, drinks a green smoothie, and has inbox zero by 9am.
I’m not that person. I never have been. Here’s what actually happens.
I wake up sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 because my kids have decided that’s when the day starts regardless of what I think about it. There’s no alarm clock. There hasn’t been one in years. Children are the most reliable and least snooze-able alarm system ever invented. I make coffee. Strong, black, no sugar. This is not a personality trait. It’s a dependency.
I’ve been working remotely since before it was cool. Before the pandemic made every recruiter on LinkedIn suddenly discover that “remote-first” was a thing. I was doing remote work back when people still looked at you funny for it. “But don’t you get lonely?” No. “Don’t you miss the office?” Absolutely not. “What about collaboration?” We have video calls. They’re terrible, but they’re terrible in an office too, you just have to wear pants for those ones.
My home office is a room in my house with a door that closes. That’s the secret. That’s the whole productivity hack. A door. Not a standing desk, not a second monitor (okay, I do have a second monitor), not a mechanical keyboard that sounds like a tiny construction site. A door that tells the rest of the household that dad is pretending to be a professional right now.
I run a pretty boring tech stack and I’m proud of it. I’ve watched enough teams chase the shiny new framework every six months to know where that road ends. It ends in a rewrite. It always ends in a rewrite.
For my day job I write code in languages and frameworks that have been around long enough to have proper Stack Overflow answers. Not “here’s a GitHub issue from three days ago where someone says they think it might work.” Proper, battle-tested, boring technology. The kind of technology that doesn’t need a blog post explaining why version 4 is completely different from version 3 which was completely different from version 2.
My editor is VS Code. I know, I know. It’s Electron. It’s not Neovim. I don’t have a perfectly curated dotfiles repo that I’ve spent more time on than my actual projects. VS Code works. It opens. I type. Things happen. That’s enough for me.
For this blog I use Hugo. It’s fast, it’s simple, it generates static files. There’s no database. There’s no CMS. There’s no admin panel. I write Markdown files, push to Git, and a GitHub Action deploys it. The entire hosting setup could survive a nuclear apocalypse because it’s just files on a server. Try doing that with WordPress. Actually, don’t. I migrated away from WordPress and I still have flashbacks about plugin update screens.
I’ve become increasingly allergic to complexity as I’ve gotten older. In my twenties I wanted to build everything from scratch. Custom auth systems. Custom ORMs. Hand-rolled CSS frameworks. Now? I want the most boring, well-documented, widely-used solution available. I want the solution that a thousand other developers have already found the edge cases for. I want the solution where the error message is googleable.
AI has changed how I work in ways I genuinely didn’t expect. I use Claude Code daily now. Not to write code for me, but to think with. It’s like having a colleague who’s read every documentation page you never got around to reading and doesn’t judge you for asking obvious questions. I still write the code. I still make the decisions. But the loop from “I wonder how this works” to “oh, that’s how it works” has gotten absurdly short.
The people who say AI will replace developers are wrong. The people who say AI is useless are also wrong. The truth is the boring middle ground where it’s just a really good tool that makes you faster at the bits of programming that were never the hard part anyway. The hard part was always figuring out what to build and why. No amount of autocomplete fixes that.
I don’t do Pomodoro. I don’t have a second brain in Notion with 47 linked databases. My task system is embarrassingly simple. I have a text file. It’s called TODO. It lives on my desktop. When I finish something I delete the line. When I think of something I add a line. Revolutionary stuff, I know. Someone call Tiago Forte.
What I do swear by is time-blocking. I call it monk mode. I block out chunks of time in my calendar where I do nothing except focus on the problem in front of me. No Slack. No email. No quickly checking that one thing. Just the work. It sounds a bit like Pomodoro, but Pomodoro has you stopping every 25 minutes to take a break, and frankly if I’m in flow after 25 minutes the last thing I want is a timer telling me to go look at a wall. Monk mode is about protecting space in the calendar so the rest of the world knows not to bother you. It’s essential for remote work because without it, your day becomes a series of interruptions connected by brief moments of almost getting something done.
Meetings are the enemy of actual work and I will die on this hill. I block out mornings for deep work. No calls before noon if I can help it. The first few hours of the day are when my brain is actually capable of holding complex problems in memory. After lunch it’s all meetings and emails and pretending I understand what someone said on a call while I was actually reading a pull request.
I take walks. Not productivity walks where I listen to business podcasts and take voice memos. Just walks. Around the neighbourhood. Looking at trees. Thinking about nothing in particular. Some of my best ideas have come from these walks, but I don’t do them for the ideas. I do them because sitting in a chair for eight hours is a genuinely insane way to spend a day and yet here we all are.
Remote work isn’t for everyone and I get that. Some people need the social structure of an office. Some people need the commute as a mental boundary between work and life. But for me, the ability to be present for my family while still doing meaningful work is something I’ll never trade away. I can drop my kids at school. I can be there when they get home. I can have lunch with my wife. These aren’t perks. They’re the whole point.
I know “how I work” posts are snapshots, and most people’s snapshots expire in six months when they’ve moved on to the next tool or methodology. But that’s kind of my point. I don’t move on every six months. The stack I’m using today is largely the same stack I was using two years ago. The lessons I learned debugging a problem in 2024 still apply because I’m still using the same tools. Every year of experience compounds on the last one. You don’t get that when you’re constantly starting over with whatever framework just hit the front page of Hacker News.
Mastery comes from repetition, not novelty. The developer who’s spent five years with the same language knows where the bodies are buried. They know the weird edge cases. They know which blog post from 2019 has the answer that the official docs never covered. You can’t shortcut that by jumping to Hype.js every time someone posts a benchmark showing it’s 3% faster at rendering a to-do list.
If you take one thing from this, make it this: optimise for calm. Not for output. Not for hustle. Not for the appearance of being busy. The best work I’ve ever done happened when I wasn’t stressed, wasn’t rushing, and wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone. It happened when I had a clear problem, a quiet room, and enough time to think.
That, and good coffee. Always good coffee.