Ask HN: What time of the day are you the most productive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What time of the day are you the most productive?

3 pointsmese8487 comments

"Do the most important thing first thing in the morning and you'll never have an unproductive day," the advice goes.

But everyone has different prime hours (a great HN comment on why we all have an energy problem, not a time problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16074674).

What time of the day are you the most productive? Would love to hear your thoughts on how much you guys "actively" manage your prime times (and control your daily productivity). Working on a http://mailbrew.com feature that highlights managing "the ideal time of the day" people would "consciously" allow distractions but not sure whether enough people are aware of peak time management concept, never mind using it to receive daily digests. So hesitant whether to position such a concept a unique selling feature.

Best time: late afternoon, early evening.

Second best time: late night.

I've tried for years to adjust to a morning schedule, waking up earlier, etc... It was never as productive and I'm always left feeling tired. Adjusting to sleeping earlier and getting up earlier worked for awhile but wasn't as productive as simply working at the above optimal times for me.

This is the first time I hear of this, still I’ll try to answer. I can’t really give a specific time frame but it’s mostly during “quiet” hours (so, either early morning or late at night)

If I wake up early, at around 5am or 6am, then my morning is ultra productive.

If I wake up at 8am, my morning is subpar and I will perform best from mid-afternoon to late evening.

So it's the "quiet" that makes your morning ultra productive in the former scenario?

By waking earlier, I tend to feel more relaxed because if I get productive then I can do much more in my entire day, and if I just mess around and read the news, I feel less stressed as I still have the rest of the day to do the work. It's basically a win-win.

The quiet helps and so does the "working while people sleep" too, for some weird reason.

Early morning, after a good night sleep, especially when I have an empty calendar.

In the afternoon I experience the usual energy slump.

My guess is morning like your quote, but let's use the WakaTime anonymous user data set to find out.

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