The Secret to Becoming an Annoyingly Productive Early Morning Person

With me it comes and goes. I have nocturnal periods, mostly when I'm working on some project and 'normal' periods when doing a lot of customer work. But as soon as I'm on my own the night habit kicks in. I just love it when the whole world is quiet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/style/sleep-problem-late-...

According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”

The world definitely favors the naturally early riser - and if you're not you're seen as lazy or eccentric.

Yes, I (and I think many others) would be VERY interested in companies that allow this kind of schedule. Further more, I think you'd find that hiring people who want to work those hours, means you're hiring people who are most successful in those hours.

Nothing sucks more than being a night person, whos brain comes online later in the day, but having to be in your seat at your desk at 9 AM.

I see no reason whatsoever to pursue a 9 to 5 routine. I come in to work at 12 leave by 8-9 and I'm pretty happy for it

Night-owl, morning person, who cares? As long as you stick to something.

With that said- I rise at 5am everyday.

early to rise has some cultural cachet as moral but when have Cool and Moral ever coincided?

Banking and the DMV are pretty much it as far as things-denied-the-night-owl.

plus 8-5? that shit aint early. Talk to some bakers or retail works about waking up early.

A remote first workplace gets the same flexibility you desire (pick your own hours) without any of the drawbacks or relationship problems (it's actually better than the current situation of 9-5 + commute.)

There are consessions with all that but you can work around them as others do already.

Regarding societal pressure, there is. But you need to realise these people are productive, not always successful in hindsight.

There was some article a whole back about how the most influential people in history shave all had one sleep thing in common: sleep was consistent day to day. None of them had any similarity in the hours they kept.

The author hypothesized that this may be an evolutionary survival mechanism that allowed bands of humans to always have people who were awake or more likely to wake quickly if threatened after dark or in the early morning.

For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.

Yes, it's hard with kids but basically have adopted a bifurcated sleep pattern - 6 hours, wake at 6:15 am, and help with family stuff and do about an hour of non-brain intensive work, and then two more hours of sleep before rewaking and restarting work in the late morning, raring to go. In the evening I can get so much done.

I have my own company, so this flexibility is possible.

This is for people that think like the author and want to do like the author. Everyone else can ignore.

Or just work remotely period, so people don't notice what time you start your day.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/having-this-gene-...

When I freelanced, I used to start about 9 in the evening, work through with no distractions till 4 or 5 and sleep until lunchtime. It was great as I had time to do stuff or laze about in the afternoon, see people in the evening and still do a full ‘day’ of work.

Only backfired when a client insisted on a 9am meeting.

I’ll start getting notifications of task completion early afternoon, continuing into the night. I have to process each task, accepting or rejecting them by morning, to keep forward momentum through the next day. Lots of harmony between my internal clock and the work I do.

There’s just one problem: most companies require me to be in the office from 8am to 5pm every weekday. The constant clash of “my job” (the rigid traditional workday), and “my work” (highly-structured, but very fluid schedules), causes a whole lot of unnecessary stress and unproductive office time. I end up working unsustainably long work-weeks, all due to optics (read: office politics). It’s all very strange to me.

My current solution is to work as an independent contractor, and be my own boss. But this solution comes with a whole other set of (very difficult) problems.

It’s frustrating to never fit into the structure of a company, considering I like my work, I’m good at it, and it fits into my internal clock.

Now I get strange looks when I leave at 3pm.

My employer let's us punch the time clock (we can do it online, too, which means it works with home office). I think you could run a noon to 8pm schedule (being in the office after that needs to be registered with facility management).

PS: My personal (N=1) experience with being a night owl actually is, that I have no problem getting up early when I go to bed early enough. Setting my alarm clock to 9:30pm as a reminder to go to bed helps me a lot getting up early. I don't buy too much into this theory of a night-owl / early bird split in the population, because time is kind of a construct of a watchmaking civilisation. I'd assume sunrise and sunset are much bigger influences on individual's behaviour.

Lots of caffeine though..

I used to be a big caffeine drinker. In my experience the problem with caffeine is that your body's tolerance to it seems to increase and so you need to keep increasing the dosage in order to get the same effect. It ended up being a net negative for me.

I've noticed that the best way to wake up early is simply to go to sleep early. Takes a bit of work at the beginning if you've developed some bad habits but eventually you can get used to it. Seems to be more mental than physical.

Also, caffeine should really be used only for emergencies in my opinion. Like if you've had very little sleep but you still need to be productive. Other than that I would stay away from it. Your body really does not need daily doses of caffeine to function, just like it does not need nicotine nor alcohol nor any other drug (assuming no medical need). They are just net negatives.

Drink green tea if you really feel like having some mild stimulant every day.

The wide use of drugs as performance enhancers in our industry really makes me unhappy and uncomfortable. (I guess it probably exists in other industries too?)

I can't work out how to properly put into words how or why it makes me uncomfortable. But it seems like instead of drawing lines and saying people shouldn't need to take ADHD medication to focus, or modafinil to work unnatural hours, or ambien to sleep on planes, we're just going along with it. Like the work should come first, and of course we should take drugs to allow us to meet work expectations, or to get the upper hand in intra-employee competition, etc.

Wow, pumping yourself full of drugs just so you can be a better cog in a machine?

Thanks, but honestly that's a non-starter. I'm not sure how we got to this point, but please reconsider - some employers might actually look at this and think that's an acceptable thing to suggest to an employee.

For me, not using alarms to wake up in general, and sleeping earlier works wonders. I also adjusted to having less sleep as a result of the forced sleeplessness of military life.

People have wide variations (in some cases, defects) in virtually every physical and mental dimension we can measure. The idea that everyone's body clock is precisely tuned to 24 hours just doesn't seem right, it's far more likely to be within a range, perhaps between 18 and 30 hours. With that logic, I speculate that many "night owls" are people whose body clock doesn't reset properly until 26-28 hours from the previous day.

I would love to know if there are any research studies along these lines.

That said, I suspect he doesn't have a 1.5 hr commute like many do (and I used to have, at times). Working from home does indeed provide a tremendous advantage, particularly with those quiet early morning hours.

If I want to spend my short time on this planet in a more productive way so I can do more in my life, that's my choice and I'm not making a mistake or doing it wrong.

Do what you feel you need to do, but don't pretend like I'm living life wrong just because I'm different.

Worked very well, but I think if I tried it now, I would have a more difficult time sleeping with television playing in the background now that I no longer sleep this way.

In my case terry pratchett audio books since some of those I can almost quote entire chapters.

Unfortunately, despite seeing the benefits of the early-morning schedule, over time I reverted back to my night-owl tendencies.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/send-...

Routine, Discipline and a regular amount of sleep, regular in this case meaning routine amount, not necessarily a lot or a little. That is my takeaway from every single not-worthless article or piece of commentary that has helped me get my own shit together. The actual details generally don’t matter, the actual lifestyle doesn’t matter, and the actual job or field of study doesn’t matter. So long as you have those three elements, you, the general you and not necessarily you specifically, can figure out the rest. The amount of caffeine consumption or lack thereof, whether you shower in the morning or at night or both, how you commute, whether you work from home or not, what you eat in the morning, et cetera. I guess in the case of two or more working adults in the same house, cooperation/division of labor is another key element in that mixture, but I am not speaking from experience, just observation, on that one.

Not to discredit the difficulties of parenting, it is the hardest job in the world to do well, but somehow we’ve collectively increased our population to 7 billion of us and a not insignificant fraction of us generally turn out alright, and the how you go about it matters a little bit less than the why. The parents that are enthusiastic about and enjoy being parents will always be better than the ones that had it foisted upon them somehow, and in that sense, it is just like another job: you learn how to do it, you learn how to do it well, you make it an integral part of your day, and that means building it into your routine so that you always have time to be a parent, that way your kids don’t turn out like those of us where our parents weren’t present and we were background details, distractions, when they were.

Admittedly, that didn't work when they were toddlers. But once they hit school age, you can certainly figure out a way to make things work.