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Comment by shawabawa3 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, is waking up at nearly 9am late?

I wake up between 8 and 10 daily (I have very flexible working hours atm)

I optimised my home for a short commute and have never had a job where arriving before 10am was required

Yes, by the standards of most employers and schools it is very late. I am fortunate in that I can often sleep until past 8, and I'm much saner and healthier for it. But all through high school I had to get up at 6:30. Since I was _also_ an extreme night owl and used to do all my schoolwork after everyone else in my house was asleep, I'd usually get to bed by 1:30 or 2:00, which meant I was severely sleep-deprived all through high school.

I've had to take various contract gigs where I had to start my commute at 7, or be at meetings that started at 7, and it's terrible. Employment arrangements like this wind up getting a version of me that is at my lowest, least-focused, least-productive ebb, no matter how much coffee I pour down my gullet.

These days I still get my best, most focused programming work done between about 4:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. It's a constant strain because it means my time at home with my family is foreshortened every single weeknight.

There are jobs in I.T., like emergency Server Admins for hospitals who get paid extra to work the "night shift". That might be worth looking into.

Or if you live on the East Coast working Remote with a company in Pacific Time Zone.

The thing that finally worked for me was finding out the amount of sleep I ABSOLUTELY needed to function. Which was about 4-5 hours. My body wants 8, but I can make it through the day with 4 hours.

Try to only sleep this minimum about for several weeks, and eventually you will be tired enough to go to bed exactly when you want. For me that was a midnight to 4:00am schedule, and I was gradually able to add a couple hours sleep to that over the course of a year. Now I'm sleeping 11:30pm to 5:30am.

I’d be worried about the long term health implications of missing that much sleep.

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/health-news/deep-sleep-clean...

4 hours? You are insane (in a good way), mate. Any less than 7 hours and I literally can't even wake up. If I force myself, my body will literally not respond to my commands and getting up and straight becomes as hard as deadlifting 100kg...

I used to be the same way, but I went on a Zero Carb diet a few years ago because of some food allergy problems and I immediately needed about an hour less sleep.

Also I have an ADHD medication that I take first thing in the morning, and it wakes you up about 100x better than coffee, sort of short circuiting your biology and making you a morning person.

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