A Day in the Life of an Engineer Who Builds Companies

People ask me what my day looks like. I think they expect a list of life hacks - wake at 4am, cold plunge, journal for an hour, then conquer the world.

That's not my life. My day is messier than that, and honestly more boring. But it works, and it has stayed mostly the same whether I was shipping code for someone else or running my own companies. So here's the real version. No spin.

The Morning Is for Building, Not for Talking

The first two or three hours after I wake up are the most valuable hours I have. I protect them like they're worth money, because they are.

I don't open Slack. I don't check email. I don't look at the news. I pick the one hard thing that actually matters that day - the tricky bug, the architecture decision, the piece of code that needs real thought - and I work on only that.

This is the rule I break the least, because it's the one that costs me the most when I break it. The morning brain is sharp and quiet. Once the messages start, that quiet is gone for the rest of the day and you can't get it back. So I do the thinking before the world wakes up.

Late Morning Is When the Noise Arrives

Around mid-morning I let the world back in. This is when the messages, calls, and questions hit.

When you run companies across three continents, someone is always starting their day while you're in the middle of yours. So this block is mostly other people: standups, customer calls, a co-founder who needs a decision, a teammate who's stuck. None of it is deep work. All of it matters.

I've stopped pretending this part is optional. For years I treated meetings as something stealing time from "real work." But unblocking a stuck engineer, or hearing a customer say what they actually need, is real work too. It just doesn't feel like it because there's no code at the end.

The trick I've learned is to be fully in it or fully out of it. Half-listening on a call while pretending to code helps no one. I either close the laptop and pay attention, or I don't take the call.

Lunch Is a Real Break, On Purpose

I used to eat at my desk and feel proud of it. Now I think that was just a slow way to burn out.

I take a real break in the middle of the day. A walk, a proper meal, time away from screens. Not because some productivity book told me to, but because I noticed my afternoons were garbage when I didn't. The work I did from 2pm onwards without a break was so bad I'd redo it the next morning anyway.

A break isn't a reward for working. It's part of the work.

The Afternoon Is for the Boring, Necessary Things

My afternoon brain is not my morning brain. So I stopped giving it hard problems.

This is when I do the work that needs doing but doesn't need genius. Code review. Replying to people properly. Writing things down so the team isn't depending on what's in my head. Tidying up. The unglamorous maintenance that keeps a company from quietly falling apart.

Founders love to talk about the big vision and the hard problems. But most of running a company is small, repeated, boring upkeep. The afternoon is where I make peace with that.

The Evening Is the Hardest Part to Get Right

Here's the part I'm worst at, so I'll be honest about it.

The work never ends. There is always one more thing. When you build companies, there's no point where someone tells you you're done for the day. The temptation is to just keep going, every night, forever. I did that for years. It doesn't make you more productive. It just makes you a worse version of yourself who happens to be online a lot.

So I try - try - to draw a line in the evening. Not always at the same time, and not always successfully. But I've learned that the founder who works until midnight every night isn't winning. He's borrowing energy from next week, and that debt always comes due.

Some evenings the line holds. Some evenings there's a real fire and it doesn't. The goal isn't to be perfect. The goal is to make the late night the exception, not the default.

What Actually Makes the Day Work

If you read all that hoping for a magic routine, I'm sorry to disappoint you. There isn't one. The specific hours don't matter. What matters is a few simple ideas I keep coming back to.

Do your hardest thinking when your brain is freshest, and guard that time like it's sacred. Match the task to your energy instead of fighting it. Take real breaks, because tired work is work you'll just redo. Treat people and meetings as real work, not as interruptions to it. And learn to stop at night, because the work is infinite and you are not.

That's it. No cold plunge. No 4am alarm. Just a normal person trying to build things, do good work, and still be someone worth coming home to.

The best schedule isn't the most intense one. It's the one you can actually keep doing for years without breaking. Mine is boring on purpose. That's exactly why it works.