"At least I'm getting something done"

The night shift feels like work. It takes effort and concentration, and it leaves you tired. So it's natural to assume that something has been accomplished by the end of it.

You can test this the same way you'd test any other kind of work, by looking at what it produced.

Solving a practical problem usually involves a few steps. You gather the facts, work out the options, and choose one. Then you act. Take the roof. The facts you needed were whether the roofer would accept staged payment, how urgent the leak was, and what was in your savings account. At three in the morning you had access to none of these. The roofer was asleep. The bank statement was downstairs, and in any case you weren't going to get up and read it. So you worked from memory and guesses, and your guesses leant towards the pessimistic, for the reasons given in chapter 4.

The options you considered were limited to what a tired, low mind could generate lying down, and those were selling the car and cancelling the holiday. The obvious option, asking the roofer, didn't occur to you. That wasn't because it's clever. Ordinary ideas like that come out of a mind that's in ordinary working order.

And acting was impossible. You can't ring your sister at three in the morning, or email the roofer, or talk to your son. The night shift can't get past the first stage of solving anything, and so it goes round. You get as far as "but what if he won't take instalments" and there's nowhere to go from there except to the top again. Each circuit feels like progress because you're thinking hard, but you finish every circuit where you began it.

Then there's the matter of what you keep. Nothing is written down. By morning you remember the mood of the night very well and the content hardly at all. If you did reach a useful thought at half past three, it's probably gone. Whatever thinking the problem really needs will have to be done again, from the beginning, at the kitchen table. The night shift didn't get you ahead on any of it.

Compare the two sessions in chapter 1. The night session lasted nearly three hours and produced four verdicts, all wrong, and no actions. The morning session lasted twenty minutes and produced four actions, and all four were carried out that day. The morning session took about a ninth of the time and got everything done. You weren't any cleverer at the kitchen table. The difference was that you had a pen, a phone and daylight, and the rest of the world was awake.

There's a fair objection here. Some people say they've had good ideas in the night, and I believe them. A mind that's relaxed and wandering, in the bath or on a walk or half asleep, does sometimes hand you the answer to something. But that kind of thinking is quite different from the night shift. It's loose and unforced, it isn't anxious, and the idea arrives without your working at it. The night shift is effortful, anxious and repetitive. If a good idea does arrive unbidden in the night, write one line on the pad by your bed and let it go, as chapter 13 will describe.

So the honest account of the night shift's output is that it produces nothing you can use, and you pay for it in sleep. I doubt you'd put up with that from any other activity in your life.