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We're products of evolution and thus we have physiologic reasons to have our sleep/wake cycles tuned to the sun. There's a decent amount of scientific evidence in favor of "sun-conscious" sleep patterns.

e.g. this review article http://www.nature.com/nrendo/journal/v12/n1/full/nrendo.2015...

This is a sane idea, but sunrise is often far later than when people are expected to get up 'early'. And add the crazy that DST is to one's schedule, and waking up early becomes a very strange, shifting ideal. (Lately, I've heard 4am to 5am match this ideal; personally I like to have attainable goals, like slouching into work before the crack of noon.)

Yeah DST throws a huge wrench into this whole plan. Good luck waking up with "sunrise" for work.

Where I live, the sun sets in November and returns in February at this time of the year. Sync to that ;)

Likewise it does not set for weeks in summer.

A sun-conscious sleep pattern in Wisconsin implies a 9-hour waking day for a good chunk of the year. No thanks.

Sun cycle varies widely during a year i.e. Sun rises at ~8.30am and sets at ~4pm here now, so do you really imply I should sleep 17 hours a day? Similarly, I should get up before 5am at summer. I agree that, ideally, yes, we should align with the Sun cycle, but as many things in real world, it's just not possible or practical.

I'm in a similar boat, and I've never understood the patronizing attitude lobbed at night owls by morning people.

I assume you need to stay up pretty late to get all of the presents delivered, Mr. Claus.

I keep similar hours as the GP, which I can do because I'm remote in a group with other programmers around the world. Actually, the late hours have been useful at work, because we get 24-hour coverage without waking people up when lp0 is on fire. Not to mention that the wee hours are much quieter and generally distraction-free.

However, my mood has been better by phasing a little earlier this winter. I think getting under 7 hours a day of sunlight starts up a bit of SAD for me, which is entirely avoidable at California latitudes.

I've had to get up very early to deal with production issues at work (sometimes between 2-3 a.m.), and I actually find those hours very peaceful - just the hum of the heating/AC and my dogs' snoring.

Morning people get grief from night owls as well, try leaving the office at 4pm and see the comments you get even if you started at 7am.

I've kept both types of schedule and while it's true that the morning hours you get by waking up early aren't strictly "free", I have noticed that for me they are often more productive. I suspect this is because in the mornings there are never demands placed on my time by other people or "more interesting" things to do whereas in the evenings I am often inundated with invitations from friends or distracting opportunities.

I noticed that as well when I started getting up early after years of being a night owl.

There simply aren't as many distractions in the morning, because most other people are either still sleeping or at work.

I guess the same would work if most of your workday were really late at night (e.g. midnight to 8 am), but for most people, that kind of lifestyle tends not to be very compatible with the other demands of life and business. So working from early morning until early afternoon seems to hit a nice balance between lack of distractions and compatibility with other people's schedules.

If you really need to be a night owl, well, haven't we got the technology to adjust the lighting in our buildings so that you feel like it's afternoon even when it's only 8 am?

I think there are a lot of people for whom "becoming a morning person" actually means "overcoming this depression".

Maybe so. I guess it's one of the symptoms of depression.

There is also research that indicates that school results improve, and the students report that they feel better if the school starts later in the day, in sync with what appears to be their natural clock. So maybe there is a correlation, but the causation might be just the opposite unless we are talking about clinically depressed people (that I don't want to trivialize in any way.)

I doubt that there is anything natural at all about the standard office-hours, and I also doubt that we are a exclusively day-active species. There are many accounts of alternative sleeping patterns or segmented-sleep.

I wish we could implement the siesta. I find I'm most productive from about 6 am to 11 am, and then again from 5 pm to midnight. The middle part of the day is kind of a waste, but I have to be on the clock then.

I relate to OP's notion of "free hours". Simple programming tasks took me twice the usual time late at night, and after 1am I just couldn't come up with anything creative. That's great that you work well in the evening, but not everyone works this way. When I shifted to morning schedule, I didn't waste time on doing tasks slowly at night, so these are my free hours.

I think it varies quite a bit from person to person. For me, the peak productivity time is 11-3 (PM). I wake up at 9:30, have breakfast and coffee while doing some casual reading and then work until 5ish with a break for lunch. On this schedule I'm usually at least as productive as the people I work with even though I'm "on the clock" for fewer hours. I find I tend to have extremely high productivity but I can't maintain it for as long, so it balances out. Keeping going after I'm tired to meet an 8 hour requirement is just a waste of time and the work I do after I'm burned out is crap.

When I've tried working longer hours (by starting earlier) my total productivity goes down significantly. I know a lot of people who just say you get used to getting up earlier, but I never do. Even maintaining an early-ish schedule waking up at 6:30 for a full year, I was just plain miserable every day and it never got better. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who only get stuff done in the morning and rise early. Whatever works, but it sucks when jobs force everybody to start on an stupendously early schedule. But it cuts both ways - I don't want to force other people to work on my schedule if that makes them miserable.

I do understand your point but I still feel you're missing something. It's not pure coincidence or random that there is not a lot of advice out there about how to stay up late and sleep in. Nor is it completely irrational that there is a lot about waking early. There's something to being in sync with nature and the sun, maybe, or the psychology of the /idea/ of getting an early start, even if it is just an idea. I would stop short of prescribing the precise reasons why this is a goal, but there are reasons.

While it's certainly no coincidence, there's a lot of confounding reasons. The industrial revolution's timing of shift work placed a very long-lasting and extremely strong weight on punctuality. And that punctuality often run 24/7, meaning that the clock's crucial tipping points often landed at unpleasant hours like 7am (be at your station at 7am, which means getting there between 6:30am and 6:45am, which means leaving the house by 6am, which means waking by 5am...)

Add that a lot of people who work physically hard in that sort of tiring shift work (especially people my parent's age) learn to consider early rising a moral virtue and a badge of worth, and you've got a lot of pressure to hold it up as an admirable standard. It can get pretty silly, to the point that I've seen people promoted for punctuality despite a record of poor performance; factories are different, of course, but America was built on the power of heavy industry, so it's a philosophy that pervades. To wit: even in fields where work spans months instead of hours, getting up daily 'before your competitors' gives you an 'edge'. It's a really odd notion if you look at it closely.

On the other hand, I find the added mild stress of waking early, combined with a ritual (absolutely and especially like making coffee as noted in the article) helps me have an excellent start to the day. I don't usually do that, but I really like it when I do.

Waking early is nice, so long as I'm not horribly sleep deprived to start; or so stressed that I can't fall asleep early.

EDIT: I should note that I'm just skimming the surface here. That industrial timing may really be rooted in how trains had to be critically on-time, which forced plants to be ready or miss the ride, and vice-versa. The whole topic is stressful to read about, but really interesting.

"But the extra hours don't come from nowhere... you need to compensate by losing a comparable amount of time at night."

I agree, but personally I find I am in the mood for being productive but in the evenings I tend to surf crap websits and not do anything useful.

Curious if others feel the same on this?

For most people free productive early morning hours mean time when other people are disturbing them, which usually starts happening at 9 AM.