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Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

> Like most engineers and other creatives

Free yourself of culturally-assigned norms ("engineers and creative people work best at midnight, with lots of coffee") and consider a wider breadth of experience.

The most productive and effective person I know, a computer engineer, typically starts working before I'm even awake. The premise of the article is that 4 a.m. is both outside most of society's normal waking period AND it's immediately after you've had a solid night's sleep, while 12-2 isn't really such an unusual time to be awake and, for most people, it comes at the end of the day.

As someone who woke up at 5 a.m. for many summers so I could start work on the farm before dawn, I know that you can definitely accomplish a lot of work before most people even roll into the office, but I also know that sleeping in is incredibly satisfying :)

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First it was open floor office layouts, now it's morning productivity.

Why can we not just agree that what works for one person does not for another.

I have a mild form of attention deficit. When I am fully awake and alert, my mind races at a mile a minute, and I can't focus on any task for longer than a few minutes. It's great for email, but having a long deep uninterrupted think? Forget about it. So, I distract myself - whether it's with music, or by pacing, or what have you, and it allows my brain to pay attention.

This also means that being SLIGHTLY tired at the end of the day is wonderful for focus. No, I'm not thinking as quickly as I do when I'm well rested. But I get a lot more done.

One other thing: I'm sure I'm not the only night owl that finds the morning pre-everyone-else-awakening far from peaceful. If anything it's a constant reminder that your time is finite and is about to disappear. Every morning is a deadline until the world awakens and your productivity ends.

Evening/nights are the opposite of this: If everyone around is in bed they'll stay away, and you are only limited by your own fatigue and focus. The world is your oyster until YOU choose you no longer want to work.

I am a night owl as well and I share your sentiment: Time seemingly stops when everybody goes to sleep. It is like a freeze button has been hit for the rest of the world, and the universe is mine.

I know, the feeling of solitude, concentration, flow, and energy -- to say nothing of rebelliousness for defying societal norms -- of staying up late, it's just great.

I've always had my greatest thoughts and best ideas at night. I've always crushed projects and invented great things at night.

Luckily, my employers have also been very accommodating of this as well because I _produce_. My boss didn't even raise an eyebrow when I showed up at 1 PM. I remember staying at work and being the only car left in the parking lot with my team's best engineers for nights on end.

It was great, and we were accomplishing things that nobody else in the company even came close to pulling off at the time.

My dream is to go to work ~2:00 every day. My sleep cycle is pure hell otherwise.

Why would you assume that it's a cultural norm?

I don't drink any caffeine but regularly stay up until 4 or 5am. It's simply when I feel most productive and is totally natural for me.

It seems pretty clear that the opposite (early rising) is the cultural norm which is getting pushed. There are many times in my life where I'm forced to revert to waking up at 8am, but as soon as I'm back in control of my time I'll revert to a 4am–10am sleep schedule. I hardly think that's due to fulfilling some abstract cultural norm.

People are different. Sleep schedules shouldn't be a morality play.

Wait, you're literally arguing that the "culturally-assigned norm" is working late and sleeping late, instead of vice-versa, Benjamin Franklin's "early to rise, makes a [person] wise" from America's agricultural roots that birthed the normed 9 AM start time for the salaryman for centuries?!

In high school, I had to wake up at 6 AM every day; you can imagine I was tired as hell -- and it's because of my biological chronotype (I am genetically from a family of night owls -- late risers). It had nothing to do with culture, other than the fact that I was forced against my will to go against what my body was telling me was healthy (sleep at 6 AM and awake at midnight).

Modern science has JUST caught up and realized that chronotypes are a thing, but culture has definitely not (despite the "late start" school movements for adolescents, whose biologically clocks are even FURTHER ahead than us).

I've read that some folks may be more sensitive than others to cues like blue light. This would mean staring at a computer ruins your sleep (or pushes it back). Eating and sleep cycles are also closely related, folks like us may not even feel hungry until late in the day. Lots of generalizations in this thread about what's good for everyone. As the only expert here on myself, I wish they would can it.

I thought about this a while back, and it occurred to me that if you had a tribe of primitive humans, it would actually be advantageous if not everyone had the same biological clock. It might be useful to have a few people usually awake at night, guarding the camp, instead of everyone passing out quickly after sunset.

I've never in my life drank even a sip of coffee, energy drink only a few times mostly during college. I have also never woken naturally before 9am. Literally as long as I remember even as a child before high school in the weekends I would sleep in when my younger siblings would rummage through the house the entire morning, much to my parents surprise.

I don't doubt that it would be possible to be conditioned to wake up at 5am every day, but don't just brush it off as a culturally-assigned norm, I didn't even meet another computer nerd until I was 13 years old.

A solid nights sleep for me is over 9 hours. I rarely get that as I have to set an alarm clock to work up to be able to coordinate with the team effectively and I usually don't manage to fall asleep before 2am.

I usually don't manage to fall asleep before 2am.

That would probably be why you don't wake up naturally at 4AM

Talking about waking up early puts the cart before the horse. It's really about going to sleep early, IMO.

Also, not eating before going to bed. An empty stomach before bed is (A) good for sleep, and (B) good for waking up early (without alarm).

It's called the SERVER approach. Super Early Rise, Very Early Rest. Buy your own copy over here in the self-help section!

Whatever. If I go to bed early, I roll in my bed for 2, then 4, then 6 hours and not find any sleep. And that's on a good day. On a bad one, it will be for 8 hours and then it's time to wake up.

When I was a kid, my folks put me in bed every evening at 8 PM, sharing the same false assumption as you. And I spent hours after hours watching the darkness. I would almost always fall asleep later than them, and often not until 2 or 3 AM, sometimes 4 AM.

When I was in middle-school and high-school, it was terrible because there was no mid-week day off as there was in primary school, and because it started earlier (and there was a bit of extra commuting). As a result, since I wouldn't fall asleep before 2 AM on any day, I was actually sleeping as much during the 2 days of the week-end as I was sleeping during the whole rest of the week (5 days).

In high school, I experienced a week there or there when I was totally er... off, in a mist, because of exhaustion. But even that didn't make me able to sleep early. The next year I was so exhausted that I fell asleep at noon one day and woke up 3 days later in the evening.

Then I was in University or Engineering school and those were the good years because attending the lessons was not mandatory and there was nobody to tell me to go to my bed or my room early in the evening.

30 or 40 years later, I am typing this message, it is 5:45 AM and I might fall asleep soon.

I'm exactly the same. In highschool I had to wake up at 6:30 am but could never fall asleep before 1-2 am... I was exhausted all through the week until I could sleep in during the weekend. It was especially tough during spring when the sun would set later. I did not drink coffee then and still do not drink coffee.

It's only once I went to university that I've been able to have my own rhythm and would sleep from 3-4am until 9-10am. I even chose my first job because it allowed me to come a bit late in the morning.

A lot of people seem to think that being an early riser is only a question of motivation but I think it's not a question of motivation but a question of genetic make up.

Thank you for writing this. I had exactly the same experience, since primary school I would stay awake until 2-3AM every night staring at nothing. My biological clock just couldn't accept the 8PM sleep schedule.

Then at some point I decided to start listening to it, and found my most productive hours between 12PM to 4AM, then waking up at around 10AM to start the next day. That's how I rolled my university years, masters, PhD and (entrepreneurial) work. Unfortunately, trying to explain that to conservative "early to bed early to rise" folk is a usually waste of time...

I was talking about my parent's:

I have also never woken naturally before 9am

Maybe my parent also has trouble falling asleep early like you. But my point is just that you aren't going to wake up early, unless you fall asleep early- when you fall asleep drives when you wake up.

If you like your sleep schedule, that's fine. It sounds like you are controlled by it though. I have found melatonin helpful for moving my sleep schedule when it gets out of hand.

Sleep hygiene.

Freedom from the norms is what got me to the point of being most productive after midnight.

Programmers/developers aren't productive at night because it's a cultural norm (for the most part). We're productive at night because it's a learned behavior. For me, I only had time to myself on the computer after everyone else in my family was asleep. Also I had insomnia.

Is "before" really meaningful enough to bother differentiating? You work from 5am to whatever. I work from 9am to whenever. It's not a big deal.

Guess I could say, "While that farmer calls it quits, I am working late into the night getting ahead! Mwahahaha."

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