Claude's usage limits come in five-hour windows. I kept bumping into them during the day, then sleeping straight through several windows every night. Capacity I'd paid for, completely unused.

At the same time, I end most days with tasks that Claude could do without me. Build this tool. Research that topic. Tidy up those notes. None of them need me at the keyboard. They just need a decent brief.

The Solution

I tag a task 'overnight' in my to-do list app, and my Mac does it while I sleep.

In the evening, a small script picks up anything I've tagged, turns the note into a job, and works out which project folder it belongs to. At 2am the Mac wakes itself up and Claude Code works through the queue – a fresh session for each task, in the right folder. By the time I sit down in the morning, the results are waiting for me.

How I Use It

The to-do note is the brief, so I write it as if I'm handing the task to a person: what I want, where the relevant files live, what good looks like. A lazy note gets a lazy result.

A recent example: I came across this list of signs of AI writing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing) and wanted to create a 'slop checker' skill to run over my writing before I publish anything. I wrote that up in a to-do, tagged it 'overnight', and went to bed. By morning Claude had built the skill and tested it against sample documents.

Why This Has Impact

The most obvious change: I run out of my Claude allowance far less during the day, because a chunk of my work now happens in windows I used to sleep through.

The change I didn't expect: it's making me more specific. There's nobody at the keyboard at 2am to nudge things along, so the brief has to be clear enough that Claude gets it right without me intervening or guiding. That discipline is making me better at writing specific prompts, and at giving Claude access to the context that lets it run more autonomously than if I was babysitting it.