I also like giving my most productive/energetic time to my own projects/learning, as opposed to work, but that is just me.
After work time is for dinner, family, and fun projects that I don’t need additional motivation for
In my natural state, I wake up randomly between 09:00 to 12:00; the only way I can wake up earlier, or at specific time, is if someone else forces me out of bed, and makes sure I don't fall back asleep within the next 15 minutes. I've been like this for as long as I remember. So even without kids and their adjustable schedules (ready to get up as early as 04:00, but waiting for us to wake up until ~06:30), to get in that morning hour of learning, I'd have to ask my wife to wake me that hour earlier - which already defeats the point of having alone time.
And even if, my brain never really wakes up until ~12:00 - 13:00 anyway.
Having your biological clock stuck in an opposite timezone to everyone else sucks, but you only learn how bad once you start a family.
One thing I've naively assumed, is that having kids will awaken some instinctual facet of my psyche to respond to the stimuli inherit in having young children. Maybe that is still _likely_ true, but your experience was that nothing about your internal clock fundamentally changed?
Today is a perfect example. It's 10pm currently and I need to wake up in 9 hours and be walking out the door in 9.5 to make it to the office in time. On the 3 days I do not go to the office, I don't roll out of bed until maybe 15 minutes before our daily stand up at 9:30am. Even then, I might just get up with enough time to go to the bathroom and unlock my laptop. I should be getting into bed now, but I still need to take a shower and wind down. I'll be lucky if I'm asleep by midnight.
One thing that has changed since I was a kid, is that I can fall asleep in just a few minutes if I make a conscious effort. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate into better sleep quality as a whole, but it certainly takes one piece off of the table that many struggle with.
This ended up being ramble-y, but again, thank you!
Nope. The only thing that changed is that my 報復性熬夜 (revenge bedtime procrastination) went into overdrive and I'm nearly incapable of going to sleep before midnight now. Which is probably the reverse of what you're hoping for.
> One thing that has changed since I was a kid, is that I can fall asleep in just a few minutes if I make a conscious effort.
For me, it's a bit of a wash. I no longer get stuck in the loop of getting stressed over how little sleep time I have left, preventing me from falling asleep - a constant in high school. But how fast I fall asleep now depends on how tired and relaxed I am. Since latter hardly happens, it's mostly a function of sleep deprivation - i.e. I can fall asleep in minutes, provided I'm systematically undersleeping. Otherwise, it's a coin toss. Cooling down the bedroom helps - recent heat waves made falling asleep hard for me until I made the connection and started firing up A/C at night.
And what you're describing for time management is similar. You have influence over how much space you leave between you and the things in front of you on your calendar, but you'll never have much control over the end of the day, and how exhausted the final events of the day end up making you feel.
Sadly my most productive time, the time where I feel like doing the most work, is between 13:30 and 18:00, which has a pretty big overlap with "picking up kids, getting dinner ready and other household chores".
Me too, I almost blurted out something like this to wife today - that I can't help it, my best hours seem to be between ~13:00 and 19:00, which is exactly the time that's torpedoed by a series of distractors like "dinner", "picking kids up from facilities", and everything else that's going on. By the time we're clear of all that, I'm too mentally or emotionally drained to do or enjoy anything.
I’m doing grad school right now, while working full-time while maintaining family responsibilities.
My ways of working and achieving during undergrad (mid-afternoon to late evening sessions) are not mapping well to grad studies. Getting up early is hap-hazard and working late at night leaves me dead tired for the next morning.
However, I’m glad that my kids are getting the best of me during my peak productivity time.
By contrast, staying up to 12-1am is effortless and I get a solid 2-3 hours of independent time to catch up on work or learn
This works well for me for getting a headstart on the workday, but I can't seem to "learn" anything in either the first hour or so in the morning, or the last hour or so before I go to bed.
Plus, with the latter, if it's anything interesting, it keeps me up at night.
Mornings are the only time I can learn what I want to learn and not what the man wants me to learn.
After a few weeks of a study plan and the motivation fades I find it really hard to "learn" for more than a few hours a day, which I was able to do while working full time.
It probably depends on your financial state and other motivating factors as well. It was easier to be motivated when I was poor in college than as a 40 year old that could do whatever I wants whenever I want.
After work usually there is too much noise to get a large chunk of time. I do have 60-120 mins after my kid falls to sleep but I'm always in a gameplay only mentality during that time.
At night it is much more difficult to be consistent with a habit, with things coming up spontaneously (e.g. friends wanting to go out for dinner), time for family and also tiredness after working all day varies a lot. Whereas in the morning it was much easier to just block 1-2 hours with nobody interrupting and while I might not be the most productive/energetic at that hour, it is pretty much consistently the same every morning.
Morning is a good time to be productive and creative, but to learn?? No way, not for me.
Of course, YMMV.