Andrej Karpathy

I'm a night owl, for sure.

It's semi-stable, like 8 or 9 or something like that.

During my PhD, it was even later.

I used to go to sleep usually at 3 a.m.

I think the a.m.

hours are precious and very interesting time to work because everyone is asleep.

At 8 a.m.

or 7 a.m., the East Coast is awake.

So there's already activity.

There's already some text messages, whatever.

There's stuff happening.

You can go on like...

some news website and there's stuff happening, it's distracting.

At 3 a.m., everything is totally quiet.

And so you're not going to be bothered and you have solid chunks of time to do work.

So I like those periods, night owl by default.

And then I think productive time, basically, what I like to do is you need to build some momentum on a problem without too much distraction.

And you need to load your RAM, your working memory, with that problem.

And then you need to be obsessed with it when you're taking a shower, when you're falling asleep.

You need to be obsessed with the problem, and it's fully in your memory, and you're ready to wake up and work on it right there.