1) 2am. Followed by occasions at Starbucks-type places with a sufficient, but not overwhelming background noise and headphones with music. 2) Awful. I like to

1) 2am. Followed by occasions at Starbucks-type places with a sufficient, but not overwhelming background noise and headphones with music. 2) Awful. I like to sleep when I need to sleep, which is not the same time every night, so why would I get up for work at the same time every day? 3) Written, non-realtime communication when possible. This gives me the opportunity to figure out the answer to more complex problems, and the time to actually fix simpler ones. 4) Hacker as a mindset. There are equally complex business and code challenges. 5) IRC when I remember to sign in. Google Talk whenever my browser is open. It's all latent communication through a real-time source. (ie: if I ask/answer a question, I don't expect an immediate response, but when it gets responded to we can have a short discussion about it) I usually ignore chat when I'm "in the zone" because that's very tunnel-vision-y for me. Sometimes feedback through chat is essential to moving something forward. 6) Away, but only when there's a space I can go if I need to talk to someone. I make a choice to be in "world-mode" or "zone-mode"