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Waking up at 5 am

freestylemind.com

46 pointsoscardelben26 comments

The post is basically suggesting you take your unproductive time (at the end of your day when you are tired) and shift it on to your employer while taking your most productive time (when you first wake up) and keeping it for yourself.

I'm not coming out for or against that I'm just making the point.

Keep it for yourself. Your own happiness, enlightenment etc is your own. Don't sell it to the lowest bidder. =) (re: waking up at 4:30 am is something I've recently done and it's nothing short of amazing)

Speak for yourself. I'm cognitively useless until at least two--four hours into my day. Best work happens right around 5pm.

There's no reason you can't go in to work at 5am, or just work from home at 5am.

I'm the author of the post. I posted it here because I think it can be relevant to programmers.

I understand many people like to work at night, but for those who are ok with getting up early, it's really something worth trying. In my (limited) experience it's not hard to study programming topics when you just woke up, instead it takes a good 30 minutes or more if you want to concentrate on a bright monitor (but you can use a dark color theme to solve that).

Regarding productivity, the reason I believe waking up early works is because you get a big amount of high quality, uninterrupted time, where you are fresh and not tired from the day.

I read your post, but not any previous ones where you may have addressed this: is the sun up at 5am where you live? I always find it much easier to wake up early if the sun is already up. If the sun is still down, do you do anything to trick your body into thinking the sun is up? Does it help?

The sun would certainly help, but unfortunately it doesn't raise until 6am (one month ago was 6.30am). Only in summer we have the sun at 5 am.

That's exactly what I did for about 9 months to start my first start-up - except I woke up at 4am, so I could fit in a one-hour nap before going to work (I was still inexperienced at napping back then).

It worked really well. I don't think I could have finished the product without working in the morning.

Celebrate your 40th birthday or so. Then you will find it to be no problem to rise at 5, even if you went to bed at 11:30 or midnight.

Indeed, this is the bane of my existence. I've found that vitamin D helps a little, as does melatonin (though you have to take it at the right time of the evening.) And mostly, having a very consistent schedule. The problem with the 5am thing, for me, would be that I'd blow the schedule every weekend when I stay up till 2am socializing or whatnot.

I'm 37, and I can't wait for this to happen. Most of my friends want to go to sleep at 9 or 10, and I'm regularly up until 1 AM. I'm hoping this shift is just as exciting as leaving adolescence, when I no longer needed 10 or 11 hours of sleep.

I've woken up early on a regular basis before. In the morning I could get more stuff done, possibly due to these factors:

- Fewer distractions. It's generally quieter in the morning.

- Less chance to procrastinate.

If I'm awake and it's an hour or two before I have to go to work, what else am I going to do besides something productive? The start of work is a built in deadline.

I've always been a morning person, so I regularly wake up between 330 and 430. To me, I'd much rather wake up early than stay up late. I can wake up early and be fine the entire day, and then sleep at 9-10. I get solid sleep and very rarely wake up.

Waking up early is great: I can get uninterrupted work done, head to the gym, make all my food for the day, and make sure I eat breakfast.

Also, if you have a flexible employer, you could work from say 430 to about 10 or 11 and then have the rest of the day to do what you wish.

Another advantage of waking up early, if your employer allows it, is working four 10 hour days. I started doing that a couple years ago and would have a hard time going back. Those couple hours in the morning are golden because no one else is around. Having a three day weekend every week isn't bad either.

Four 10 hour days would be great, but I don't think I can concentrate for that period of time. As it is, my concentration diminished after about 6 hours of work.

I've found the 10 hour day concept (or 4/40 as it's called in HR circles) to have unintended negative consequences for both sides of the equation. On the side of the employer it's just as you say: employees who are less productive because those last 2 hours are almost worthless. On the employee side you end up doing 2 hours or so of additional work on your "off day" because everyone else is still in the office and they tend to need things from you.

The idea that I've found is better is the "Friday Meeting Day". Schedule all your meetings on Fridays and if the meetings progress quicker than expected give your employees the rest of the day off. It speeds up meetings (which is where employees tend to screw around) and ends up giving the staff an early weekend almost every week.

I don't understand. In your off day, you are not in the office, are you?

If you allow people to contact you on your off day (and it could Sat/Sun too, not just Friday), people will contact you... but if set the precedence that you won't reply/answer then those same things will be asked on Thursday. I've worked a 4/40 for three years now and never had this issue.

In regards to being productive, that really depends the person and the work they do. I tend to do half development and a mixture of sysadmin and PM work the other half, so the day flies by. Plus, how I see it a lot of people work 9-10+ hour days on a regular schedule. I use to do that and I still do, but now I get an extra day off.

It really depends on where your at, and honestly how pivotal you are to what the team is doing. As the boss, it would be nearly impossible for me to achieve this.

I do run a results-oriented shop. We have some guys who essentially work a 4 day work week (I have no idea how many hours they put in). They do try to make themselves available on fridays to answer questions or give quick input into problems we're having. Something like 5-15 minutes on an average Friday.

I, on the other hand, work a solid 5 day week. I do have a hard(ish) cap on my time at 8 hours every day however. I find that if I'm managing myself and my team properly that a 40 hour work week is plenty. Even at a boot-strapped startup like ours.

At times like this I'm thankful that my current employer is on the flextime wagon. I still have my alloted time per week (mostly more than that, but well...), yet it doesn't really matter that much when I take it. So I don't have to fit my natural rhythm around my work schedule. Talking to your employer might be a decent alternative to this. It has the added benefit that in the evening the office is pretty empty -- and that's when I usually get more productive. For people who have their highest productivity in the morning, being the first in the office would be better, though.

I do this on occasion. I totally agree about getting things done before work rather than after. It sometimes wears me down though, and I'd rather sleep in and do things after work. I like to switch back and forth.

"embrace polyphasic sleep".

Not as easy as you would think. Also, most job schedules don't really allow for a polyphasic sleep schedule.

Plus, it is most probably harmful: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

Maybe the author was talking about biphasic sleep (a smaller core night sleep with a big siesta)?

In the article I'm talking about biphasic sleep. I think it's still a category of polyphasic sleep, but if I'm wrong I'll edit the article.

I don't know for sure if you are wrong. Just that according to this article[1], our circadian rhythm makes us sleepy twice a day: at night, and, to a lesser extent, around midday. So it make sense to sleep at both times. Real polyphasic sleep goes again that cycle, and that makes it fundamentally different from biphasic sleep.

Now, real polyphasic sleepers don't agree "real" polyphasic sleep is actually harmful. At this point, I am not so sure, and therefore tend to be conservative. I would love to see systematic, long experiments (not just experiences) about polyphasic sleep.

[1]: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm

Rebuttal to aforementioned article: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...

(copy-paste from my comment on the "How to nap..." article)

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