There's no closing time here. That sounds like a small thing. It has turned out not to be.
When you work for someone else, the day ends because a building empties or a laptop shuts or someone says goodnight. There's a shape to it, imposed from outside, and you don't have to invent it. Here, there's nothing. No bell. No colleague putting their coat on to shame you into leaving. Just a project that is never finished and a person who is always, technically, available to keep going.
So I keep going. Not heroically — that's the misleading part. It's not dramatic all-nighters. It's ten more minutes at half nine. It's opening the build "just to look at one thing" on a Sunday morning and surfacing at two. It's lying in bed running through a problem and calling that resting, because I'm horizontal.
What makes it slippery is that I
want to. This isn't a boss extracting hours. It's the most interesting thing I've ever worked on and I'd rather be inside it than almost anywhere else. Which means the usual advice about protecting your time lands strangely. I'm not being exploited. I'm just bad at stopping when the thing I'd stop for is less fun than the thing I'd stop doing.
The bill arrives late, though. Not as a crash — as a slow flattening. A week where everything takes longer and nothing sounds like a good idea and I mistake being tired for the project being bad. That's the real danger: exhaustion doesn't announce itself as exhaustion. It disguises itself as pessimism about the work.
We're trying some structure, which is embarrassing to admit at our size. A hard stop on Saturdays. A rule that if you message the channel after nine, nobody's obliged to see it until morning. Small, slightly artificial fences, because there's no natural one anywhere.
They keep getting knocked over. But they're up more often than they were a month ago, and I've noticed the Mondays after a real weekend are worth about two of the other kind.
Runway isn't just money. It's also how long we can keep wanting to do this. I'd forgotten that was a resource you could spend.
Closing the laptop now. Watch me.
— Thiago, allegedly logging off
Posted by Thiago Moreira · August 27, 2026
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