I tend to agree that ideally you want to have a the right processes in place so that you can ship anytime. I am annoyed every single Friday that I have a stack

I tend to agree that ideally you want to have a the right processes in place so that you can ship anytime. I am annoyed every single Friday that I have a stack of things ready but... nope, not on Friday. Many of us are a long ways away from that ideal. I recommend that you start with "anytime as in normal working hours", which means having load-balancing/failover in production so that you are mildly degraded but no real outage. A lot of shops never get to this point and you'll find that it's awesome compared to the old "just stay up late and do it off-hours" routine that creates even more problems. The thing I like most is the ease of doing incremental daily rollouts instead of big-banging the shit out of everything at once because staying up late every night for a week is unrealistic. Maybe someday you'll get to the ideal peak of everything-automatic-regression-testing that is unrealistic for most of us, but normal working hours is a pretty good second best.