Manual premarket scanning is broken and I need advice from the day-job crowd

if you trade around a day job like i do, your premarket focus is the whole budget. and manual scanning burns it in the worst possible order.

for years my routine was: sit down before the open, scroll forty plus charts one by one, hunting the setup i already knew i wanted. half of them had zero chance of qualifying. so by the time i reached the 6 that mattered, my head was fried from rejecting the billion that didn't, and i was making the real calls tired, in the ten minutes i had before work.

the dumb part is i knew exactly what i was looking for. i could write the criteria down. so why was i re-scanning the whole universe by eye every morning? if you can write it down precisely, the first pass isn't judgment, it's filtering, and that's the one thing you should never do with your eyes.

it's a lot better now. i stopped doing the first pass by hand and set the filtering to run overnight, so i wake up to the short list already cut and get to the open with a fresh head. i can hold the job and still trade like i mean it.

so, for the people who also trade around a full-time job: how do you handle prep when premarket is your only window? night before, wake up early, run a filter, or just accept you'll miss setups on the busy mornings?