Hackers have two reasons for staying up late working, and both of them are because they couldn't get the work done during the day: 1) Distracting work environm

Hackers have two reasons for staying up late working, and both of them are because they couldn't get the work done during the day: 1) Distracting work environments. One person commented on your last post and advised you to read Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, so I won't tell you to do that. But be aware of it. A door that closes, quiet neighbors, few meetings. 2) Guilt/determination. If a programmer for whatever reason is having trouble making progress during the day, but is dead set on shipping, they may stay up late to try and make it up. This is a good thing for you as a stakeholder, because it means they care. It's a bad thing because something is holding them back. Usually this thing holding them back is some repeated obstacle that drains their willpower. That can be a variety of things: bugs when you have bad debugging tools, figuring out how to do something without quick-feedback access to documentation/expertise, running tests when there's a twenty-second compile cycle that has to complete first, working hard to add a new feature and then losing it because your computer freezes and you don't have version control, etc. Note that 1)is actually a subset of this, as it's "getting your brain ready to code only to have it interrupted often," but since you can probably control 1) directly I gave it its own listing. #2 can be hard to tackle. How are you supposed to find better debugging tools as a non-technical business guy? And how are you then supposed to go about telling your tech cofounder how to do his job? I don't know what the answer is. Likely it's that you should buzz off and go do customer validation or whatever. But maybe not. In general, I agree with Rework on the early-to-work-early-off-work schedule, but the way to achieve it is to figure out the reasons the night owl thing happens and address them, rather than to try and force everyone in the 9-5 bucket. Shape the peg to the hole, THEN put it in.