By the time this blog is published, another Thursday night has been and gone. When you hear the phrase ‘Thursday night’, what do you think about? Normally it’s something like a cramped pub in London Bridge, where a post-work drink turns into six, surrounded by a bunch of young, tipsy consultants gearing up for the weekend.

I’m at my desk. It’s 17:00 and the sky is black. My body has been hunched over my laptop for so long that my body has caved into itself. ‘Friday tomorrow’, I hear my flatmates say delightedly. ‘Are you excited?’ I manage to muster up a sort of grimace. They back out of the room quietly.

I log off work at around 17:45, absolutely famished despite not having moved all day. I try to figure out what will be the quickest thing to cook. It’s usually always pasta. I usually always eat too much. It’s the stress. By 18:00 I have to have another sit down while I wait for the food coma to pass, which feels like a step in the wrong direction.

18:30. OK, I think I can get up. It’s normally at this point that I contemplate whether or not to have a cup of tea (caffeine hit to get me going) or a cup of coffee (caffeine hit to turn me insane). I think about that thing I read online that says you shouldn’t drink any caffeine after 15:00. I throw caution to the wind and make a coffee.

18:32. Time to start the evening shift. I get myself back up to speed on what we’ve done with the case study video so far. It transpires that what I had been certain was a commendable, well thought-out multi-channel ad campaign in the early hours of this morning now looks like a bad SNL skit in the cold light of day. Do we have time to start over? Does it make sense? What did we mean by this sentence? That part isn’t even legal in most European countries. 

20:00. Okay. There’s definitely no going back now. We’re going with what we have.

21:15. Shit, I just spent an hour talking to my partner about my most traumatic childhood memory. She’s heard this one twice before already.

21:30. We schedule our toilet breaks together to maximise our time. 

22:17. You know what – I actually love our idea.

22:31. It’s awful. I hate it.

23:00. I can feel myself beginning to flag as the tiredness sets in. The words don’t look like words and I can’t tell what’s funny and what’s not. Absolutely nothing makes sense. I want to sleep.

23:20. Premier Pro crashes and makes me think for roughly ten minutes that everything has been wiped – but then I find the autosave file. I am awake.

23:45. I go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror. ‘You said this wouldn’t happen again’, I tell myself calmly, but firmly. I splash my face with water.

00:15. As I edit a set of newspaper mockups with the words ‘FRUIT ORGY’ on them into our video, I experience a sudden wave of self-awareness that vanishes as quickly as it came. Concentrate, Sarah, I whisper. Your career depends on this.

I won’t specify what time it is that I normally end up going to sleep. It varies, but all anyone needs to know is that it’s always way too late. To our credit, I will say that with each new brief, we are getting slightly better at shaving off some time from our evening sessions – but we’ve still got a long way to go.

The moral of the story is this: be disciplined, commit to the idea sooner, and start planning for next Thursday night, first thing on Friday morning.

@sarahlisg0