This was obviously written by a "morning person."
Like most engineers and other creatives, 4 AM is when I'm just starting to get my deep sleep (which peaks at 6-7 AM).
12-2 AM is the most productive time of the day for me.
Like most engineers and other creatives, 4 AM is when I'm just starting to get my deep sleep (which peaks at 6-7 AM).
12-2 AM is the most productive time of the day for me.
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 :)
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.
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).
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Guess I could say, "While that farmer calls it quits, I am working late into the night getting ahead! Mwahahaha."
YMMV of course, but getting up really early might not be as outlandish as it sounds.
Waking up at 4AM would mean that time-frame moves up another 3 hours and I would have to finish doing everything I need to during the day by 2-3PM and most jobs would generally look down upon that.
> YMMV of course, but getting up really early might not be as outlandish as it sounds.
Doing it once or twice isn't especially difficult or outlandish, but I haven't managed to keep it up longer than a week despite my best efforts. And it always resulted in absolutely miserable afternoons.
When I go to bed late and wake up late, however, there is no such "miserable" time period.
That said, if I go to bed later than 2-3AM, I'll feel tired the next day.
Sleeping 1AM to 9AM has worked fairly well for me thus far and I'm just glad I have a job that allows me to work flex hours.
I have to add that I find lying in bed unable to fall asleep one the most miserable human experiences. I suspect it's what ultimately led to me developing the late night sleeping habit, since if I was unable to fall asleep within 10 minutes, I would get back up and keep reading or doing something until I was more tired.
Waking before 8-9am seriously affects the very quality of sleep. 8-9am takes a little attention to my sleeping and continued use of an alarm clock, but I can get a decent enough sleep. At 6-7am wakings, it is doable with a great deal of work. I then continually run the risk of oversleeping sporadically (I often don't hear alarm clocks early in the morning). Sometimes I'm just wide awake after midnight even with continued waking. Outside of taking sleeping pills, I'm not sure how to combat that.
I worked exactly one job that started at 4:45am and had to quit due to lateness. I physically couldn't do it. Half the time the alarm wouldn't wake me. I can do this occasionally for a couple days at a time, but it is rough. I'm much better working overnight than early mornings. I used to get told I'd grow out of it, but I'm 38. I don't think I will.
But if getting up late is not an option, 3am beats 6 or 7 am for me. Which is a solution for times when I have to do something early.
But again, just my personal experience. Everybody is different, and nothing is worse than telling other people "oh, you are doing it wrong, just do X and be a normal person!"
i wake up at 4 am everyday because i need to get into the office by 5, and lots of things needs to be done by 7.
by noon my productivity falls off a cliff and I am a zombie by 6 pm but the social life begins at the time when friends and family get off work. you can choose to cut that out of your life... but that's a huge sacrifice.
when the weekend comes around, i'm in bed until noon, and then by sunday i'm back to ready to hit the sack at 2am again, except that work starts in 3 hours.
every week this cycle of absolute torture goes around, and has been my life for the last 5 years.
but what this article is not about is the time you wake up, but the quality, quiet time you put aside for important things, before work starts. for me, that would be 2 to 4 am before i go to work, but obviously that's not happening. so just because you wake up at 4 doesn't obviously mean anything on its own, the important thing is waking up at 4 when your workday begins at 7.
I work best between midnight - 4am. Unfortunately I'm stuck in the corporate world where I'm expected to work 8-5. Late sleepers aren't any less productive than early raisers, but the bias prevents business from shifting the work clock around to cater to our different sleep patterns:
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/28/11306124/chronotype-night-owl-d...
Most people have highly adaptable bodies and can train themselves to be a "morning person." If a person were to stay up until 2AM, there's no way they'd want to wake up at 4AM. They would therefore see themselves as a productive night owl.
I disagree. If it were that simple (with some work, obviously), more would easily be able to train themselves to be "night people" to work overnight shifts. And my experience working nights disagreed. Some folks just cannot handle the sleep and waking times of the shift, others get to a point that they have trouble being productive. A few find it unsafe to drive home afterwards.
I think we are flexible and adaptable to a point, but there is a limit before you find health and sleep suffers a bit too much. For most, nights would push the envelope, but the early mornings do it for a few of us.
If it were possible to train yourself to be a morning person, then I would have done it by now after several years working 1st shift (8 AM start). Previously I was working 2nd shift (2 PM start). I never really have gotten used to getting up to be at work by 8 AM. I do it, but I always feel sleepy until about noon. Last week, I had to cover for an absent coworker and worked 2nd shift for the first time in years. All last week, I felt more alert, I was more productive, and I slept better.
If there's a trend at all, I'd suggest that older folks fare better in the early morning and younger ones are better at night, although I've seen counter-examples and even poly-phasic folks who do just fine.