The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People | Hacker News Reader

The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

productivityreport.org

99 pointskvee114 comments

I'm so tired of these "jobs are rigged for social people!!!" or morning people or organized people kinds of posts. There's no rigging, if you want to work alone from 10 PM to 6 AM that's in your prerogative but just because most jobs require collaboration or most people prefer to sleep at night (gasp!) and work while the sun is out does not mean it's "unfair" to you; it just means that you're an outlier. Also the tone of this write-up is unnecessarily patronizing by accusing "morning people" of foregoing their health by sleeping less; hasn't it occured to the author that they might be sleeping early?

I'm writing this as a person who regularly sleeps at 3 AM and works alone in a very disorganized manner, but I have no illusions about the healthiness or ubiquity of my lifestyle.

Construction work is rigged for morning people. Not every job is at a desk.

The crux of the topic is that there's always stigma if you're different, and having a different schedule makes you different.

Having a different schedule means you not here when it's most effective for the group. That's not a stigma, that's a fact.

I've never been a morning person, but I have worked circles around some of those who valued that far more than it's worth.

Anyone who thinks getting up early makes them superior to those who don't is only boosting their ego. Getting stuff done right it what's truly important.

For many of us, getting stuff done requires real-time collaboration with our colleagues. Even in the software field, only a minority of jobs are primarily based on solo tasks that can be done at odd hours.

it's always morning somewhere.

For many of us, not all 8 hours of work require real-time collaboration with our colleagues - thank heavens. There's more than enough overlapping to accommodate everybody.

Yeah, because more senior workers eventually have kids, and kids need a proper morning wake up, and child care doesn't run until 10 PM.

Don't like it? There are lots of industries with nighttime work or extensive travel obligations.

Hm, I think this is backwards; there's plenty of evidence that we wake up kids way too early. Really, school schedules are as they are to fit around work schedules, not the other way around.

https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h...

Adolescents are only "children" in the modern social sense. Young children don't have that shift, and sunlight is important for them: https://parentingscience.com/kids-need-daylight/

Are the "more senior workers" with the clout to set the work schedule the ones that have pre-adolescent children, though? That would be one hell of a coincidence, and doesn't match up with parents-of-young-children I know.

Except that school hours end at 3:30 around me and I don’t understand what I would be supposed to do if I continued having my current schedule

> Yeah, because more senior workers eventually have kids, and kids need a proper morning wake up, and child care doesn't run until 10 PM.

Which do you think came first, jobs that start in the morning or child care that start in the morning?

Do you think it's ok for kids to be in child care until 10pm?

Depends when they start. Depends why they're there. Depends on the child care.

Being in child care at 10pm isn't inherently any better or worse than being in child care at 10am. It's all relative.

No it isn’t. The sun isn’t a social construct. As much as people here want to disconnect from nature and reality. Some things are still rooted in real world unchangeable nature.

If that was the shift I was working, what choice would I have?

I think children, and higher order mammals in general needing significant sunlight for optimal health and early growth/development came way before night owls.

Jobs that start in the morning. Farm work for example, those jobs have been around a very long time. Nice to have someone watch the kids, but they came with you to work if necessary. Modern factory and desk jobs are fairly recent inventions.

Doesn't matter. We are here now. If you can get society as a whole to change working and school hour, I will too. In the mean everything is organized around these hours. If you have kids or work with people who have kids, you have no choice.

and that is the overall point of the article.

I've seen a lot of research (such as [1]) showing that kids waking up early is actually detrimental to them. I feel the causality goes in pretty much the reverse direction that you're implying: the children are forced to get up early to go to school because their parents need to be free of them early and their parents need to be free of them early because they are forced to be at work early.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2820578/

Define: kid.

Parent wrote “having kids” and take this from a father of a 5 and 2 year old it’s: “daddy cheezy eggz!!!” at 530am no matter what.

I read this three times and I still don’t know what your comment was supposed to say or mean.

I think they mean: the studies showing bad outcomes from waking up 'kids' early are specifically about teenagers. Little kids get up very early, and the schedules of parents have to account for this.

Children wake up early and you need to wake up with them, feed them nurture them. They'll take you out of your sleep. Actually waking up is on you.

Take it from the father of a 4 year old and a 2 year old, my kids aren't awake until after 8am.

Because, it turns out, children are like other people and vary!

I had a quick skim and I couldn't see anything about what is defined as early and at what age is something early?

That is talking about adolescents (10-19) not kids.

I agree that teenagers should be able to start school later but kids are definitely early birds.

Also because every book insists tucking your kids in at 8pm.

Early to sleep, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. In my case I have no choice, my SO works in medicine so I’m up when she’s up at 5 whether I like it or not.

I’ve gotten a lot more productive since we started sharing a space.

Is it the early rise, or the constant presence of the opposite sex?

Having someone else around you is enough to make you more active and on-task.

https://chadd.org/adhd-news/adhd-news-adults/could-a-body-do...

Well, as long as they're not distracting you at least.

> Early to sleep, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise

Early to sleep, early to rise, makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.

See how easy that is?

Ah yes that reliable way of proving a claim: quoting a rhyme

> Is it the early rise, or the constant presence of the opposite sex?

Funny because for me it was totally the opposite. When I lived together with my ex wife it was super difficult for me to wake up early, because she didn't, so I was just so tempted to go back and cuddle with her until 8 AM when she actually woke up.

During the pandemic because we were both working from home, we'd always take a nap together after lunch as well.

Now that I am divorced I have no problem getting up at 5:30 AM everyday and avoiding daily naps. And I am also way more productive compared to when I was married.

Is it possible that morning people are more productive than people who prefer later times of day. This article is filled with things that are "biased" towards morning people, but didn't actually provide any evidence that this bias is unfounded.

The article mentions that people with late chronotypes get less sleep due to early work hours, and that lack of sleep causes productivity issues.

It's not just less sleep.

In my personal case (I know, anecdote blah blah) I can be very productive, happy and more functional if I can consistently sleep for 6-6.5h per night as long as my wake up time is no earlier than 9:30-10:00. I don't even need caffeine at all, and I can still be perfectly fine with the occasional 5-5.5h sleep night.

OTOH, I might have slept 9h every night for days but if I have to be up earlier I will be miserable, my brain will be foggy, I'll have less energy and I tend to injure myself a lot more working out.

As a counterpoint, I have worked with many "night people" who will work very late into the night on problems, sticking with them until they are solved. I'm a morning person, more by necessity of having other stuff to do in the evening, and I find I end up being more likely to drop a problem without finishing it because I have to leave work. It's all anecdotal, but especially in software, I see how people who have arranged things to work late, without a "hard stop" could also be very productive (even if it's not healthy)

That seems to run counter to the idea that stopping and walking away rather than just grinding until it's solved is beneficial to problem solving.

There's a difference between grinding and being in a flow state at 'quitting time'.

not the ones I've worked with.

There is a way around for this for most people in our industry. Work in Europe with an American team. Or work in Asia with a European team. Or work for a Silicon Valley company on the east coast.

There is no conspiracy or rigging- it’s because of sunlight

> Additionally for working parents, the hours one can work largely must coincide with school hours as well as times of day when the more affordable option of group childcare, as opposed to private childcare, is available.

Dual working parents, like compulsory schooling, are a recent invention

The morning work/school schedule is because of sunlight

Who would send their kids to school at night or in the dark

Think of the history of humanity and thinking of working the fields or construction at night because you are a “night person”

Humanity has spent more time in small nomadic tribes, often needing to maintain fire constantly lit and keep watch. There is some evidence that a random spread of rhythms is the norm.

> The morning work/school schedule is because of sunlight

Does it move up when it's still dark at 10AM?

> people who brag about sleeping only a few hours a night

Just because you're a morning person does not mean that you sleep only a few hours a night.

So many arguments back and forth in the comments on this one. I am a night owl and always have been. When we had kids it was hard, but my wife and I seemed to revert back to staying up late very quickly. Our kids are homeschooled and usually get up between 8am and 10am. Working from home too means we don't have much pressure which is nice.

It’s a bit more than a couple hours before midnight in my current timezone. I’m probably more tired than I ought to be given it’s mid-evening where I’ve lived the better part of 20 years, but I’m adapting to my current circumstances. I’ll probably wake around 7, and probably begin work between 9–10. Some of my team will begin work around the same time but several hours earlier by their clock. Some will probably be nearing the end of their workday. We’re all doing pretty well with the overlapping hours we have and make efforts to overlap them as well as we can as needed. No one’s being judged positively or negatively on the hours they keep, we’re adults doing our jobs and taking it seriously.

If your workplace is rigged to favor such arbitrary competition, there’s probably much more wrong with your workplace. I’m sure that’s real and I don’t mean this to be dismissive. But this definitely strikes me as more a symptom than a particular problem in itself.

"Morning people" stuff tends to select for conscientiousness.

Not a perfect correlation, but a positive one nonetheless.

I say this as a serious night owl, and someone who is intellectually conscientious (I love learning and mastering) but traditionally not (it takes me a lot of effort to be organised and disciplined to a reasonable standard).

Tends to select for agreeableness. I deeply care about my work but I don't agree that it has to be done 9 to 5.

Agreeableness sounds like something to optimize for when selectig prospective employees as well.

It depends. If you work on sales, being agreeable is not necessarily good for you.

To me, the idea that there's any correlation there at all is frankly bizarre and smacks of presenteeism. Feels like a PHB-holdover we should all be rightfully trashing as an anachronism.

Also, how is this even supposed to benefit anyone in an age of geodistributed teams? Again, caring about what time someone gets up seems like a smell of an outdated organizational structure.

It's actually the opposite from my experience. It's very easy to get asked to work late (getting asked "hey, can you look at the build blocker?" towards the end of the day) compared to being asked to work early (barring having to acomodate any meetings with time zone differences).

It's just an anecdote, but I've never once been asked to work early in my software development career.

Are you saying you've never been in a workplace where people are expected to be in the office / online / at standup by 9:00 or 10:00?

Being asked to work late _on top of_ having started the day in the morning is hardly the opposite of what the OP is arguing about.

Judging from the comments, it looks like all the people who desperately want to go back to totally normal with everyone else behaving perfectly normal like they do, are getting very noisy. And any bad economic outcomes will be blamed on all our remote work and quiet quitting and the beatings are going to continue until the morale improves around here...

The sun is also fairly biased in this respect, "coincidentally" lighting up the times when morning people like to work, while keeping night owls in the dark, where it is harder to do many jobs. How long will we allow this oppression, I wonder?

A few dozen to a few trillion years, depending.

Morning people like to get up long before the sun rises.

Yeah. That’s why the sun is rigged in their favor. It chooses to rise a few hours after the morning people decide to wake up.

By the same logic, it’s rigged in favor of the night people as they go to bed a few hours after it chooses to set.

Morning people frequently rise well before the sun.

It's possible you've missed the point.

(depending on your latitude and the current time of year)

I have the opposite problem. My energy peaks in the mid-morning, which my workplace has set aside for meetings (partly because we have team members in an earlier time zone, and partly because the manager who set it up that way had a late evening energy peak). So by the time I have an uninterrupted stretch of time, I’m often too drained to really get much done.

I wake up 5 am, work until 11 am and that was the day besides maybe some meetings. It works well; 4 hours of quiet coding, 2 hours working together on code and then maybe 30-60 minutes in management meetings. I have tried different setups but my peak is 7-10; it doesn’t really matter when I slept or how etc. I used to be a night owl and I tried normal hours (9-5); nothing is as productive as what I currently do.

You don’t shower or eat breakfast? Just roll out of bed into a zoom meeting?

Will the pseudopolitical propaganda about the workplace ever end on HN? This topic is not just dead but eviscerated roadkill.

Well, this is actually an issue. This was killing me slowly. I had to quit and become self-employed, and there's no way of going back as long as things are arranged and organized like this. It is limiting my options drastically.

I am not a morning person and this article hits home for me every day.

I am not a morning person and sometimes I think about it, is it possible that my natural cycle is x hours of sleep and y hours awake and that x + y is not 24? I think this is my case because every now and then I can wake up early only to loose track, then go back to stay up longer in the night and wake up late again.

Related: School also starts too early: https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h...

Whatever a morning person is. When I get up at 4 or 5am I am having a hard time talking to a colleague before 9am. Calling it quits at 2pm will raise eyebrows and meetings will be scheduled until 5pm or later.

> It’s not that they couldn’t get into bed earlier. It’s that doing so wouldn’t make them sleepy.

Do late night people need less sleep than morning people ?

Wake up early and you’ll be sleepy at the same time as the morning types

Tried it, doesn’t work, I don’t fall asleep any earlier. Same reason if you slept in an extra 5 hours that wouldn’t make it any easier to stay up until 3.

How much of this is from historic inertia of morning people continuously promoting other morning people because their schedules aligned.

I'm a morning person. 2 jobs ago I would show up to work around 7am. I avoid all traffic, get a quiet office to get work done. Bang off a couple quick early morning tickets. Everyone else? They show up sometimes between 8 and 9; almost always grouchy and complaining about everything. Make their coffee as slow as possible, saunter back to their desk, drink it as slow as possible.

But then when I leave earlier than they do... they complain. So my boss allowed them to leave early with me. So everyone basically got 1 hour free pay every day except me? Because I'm a morning person? how very motivating.

1 job ago. I was an outbound tech, I was given security code and key to the office. In case I need to get supplies from the office on a weekend or afterhours. Lots of people worked there, usually 2 people were in the office before me. One day, I show up and nobody was there. So I opened up the office, but I neglected to do the morning chores I didn't know about. Primarily starting the coffee maker. I'm a starbucks latte type, soI didn't partake in their 1970s drip coffee. Not to mention they charged $3/cup to their employees...

There was an official investigation by one of the owners to determine who opened the office and didn't put on coffee. It wasn't an investigation into why the normal people werent there.. when they figure out it was me... they say they cant trust me to be able to open and be alone in the office.

Like what... then they order 3 new people to be in the office. They all hated me like nobody's business. 1 of those people had kids and used to drop them off to school before coming to the office but couldn't anymore.

i always tried to get into work just before my boss did. seemed to be a success. and realistically, i can only do about 6 hours a day, no matter what time i get up.

The game was rigged from the start.

The ghost of 2017 wants its opinionated latitude and collaborative timezone unaware puff piece back again.

i think this is a good thing and not "rigged". here's why:

1. you can train yourself to be a morning person. this is coming from someone who is not at all a morning person by nature. so it's not unfair, what it does do is weed out people who don't bother to do so. it selects for disciplined people with a strong work ethic.

2. it is easier to be a night person than a morning person. inertia says it is easier to stay up later than get up earlier. so again, it selects for people who are disciplined.

Anedote, but as I got older (>30) being a morning person became easier and easier.

For me, it is the other way round.

Thus: YMMV

Sorry, this is not how it works. (What actually happens: You're laying in bed awake and eventually raise to shuffle to work without any sleep.)

thanks for telling me what's actually happening to myself. you're wrong, it works fine. and it's worked for a bunch of friends as well.

why do you think "this is not how it works"? i may have only an anecdote and some reasoning to support my point of view, but you have squat to support yours.

It may have been so for you. Your case may have not been that severe. This doesn't mean that it so for everybody else, as well.

And why do I think that this is not how it works? Well, it hasn't been so, when I was 5, not when I was 7, not when I was 14, not at 20, nor at 30. It isn't so in my 50s. It's currently 2:50 a.m. local and there's no chance, I can get any sleep for another few hours. (So I'm going to do some work, until any of the early birds manage to show up.)

> thanks for telling me what's actually happening to myself.

You're the one in this thread with the blanket statements that everyone can train themselves to be a morning person along with the blanket statements about how flexible or inflexible everyone's chronotypes are.

Go look in a mirror right now and figure out how much of a hypocrite you are.

Maybe you can't see it because you need better rest.

No, you can't. Well, maybe you personally can. But all the actual science says that willpower, sleep hygiene, and sunlight exposure only move the margins a bit for those with inflexible night-time chronotypes.

Doing everything "right" is not going to make a 5am natural sleeper into a morning person, it's going to make them into a 3am natural sleeper.

I wonder whether those studies tried alarms.

As a former “night owl” who has largely adjusted to a morningish schedule for approximately a decade… alarms are the devil to me. I only set them as an emergency last resort. Even if I do, I generally try to get to bed early enough I won’t need to rely on them. Alarms and abrupt wake from sleep are immediate and persistent negative rest for me. Even waking too early, checking the time to discover I could rest longer but not by much, is more resting. At least then I get an extra 20 minutes to just quietly ease my brain into the waking world instead of bludgeoning it with blasting sounds I either need to react to immediately or pretend I’m sleeping through.

most wouldn't fall under "inflexible night-time chronotypes" i don't think

Do you have links to the "actual science" btw, I'm curious to read about this

sorry, nothing about our bodies tells me they're this inflexible. i wonder if the "nighttime chronotypes" controlled for things that actually would influence it, like light exposure. regardless, one of the things that worked best for me was rigging a bright light to dawn gradually at a early hour, and cutting off my bright light exposure at a early hour. even if i have a "night chronotype" it's still possible to "trick" it into thinking i'm sleeping at a different time.

tbh i'm a bit suspicious that there are 5am natural sleepers. being basically nocturnal doesn't sound natural or healthy. and given the proven effects of lack of sunlight on mental health that should be fixed regardless of work timing.

i personally hate the phrase "the science" with a passion, but can you link me what you're referencing? cause nothing suggests that they're this "inflexible".

ngl everyone i've talked to who has a "nighttime chronotype" is actually just doomscrolling until 3AM then complaining "oh i can't sleep early". they typically keep bright light on late and use blackout curtains in the morning. no wonder their bodies don't work in a natural, normal circadian rhythm when they do this kinda stuff.

Agreed on caution regarding the phrase "the science." Both social psychology and medicine have been hijacked in recent years by PR firms spinning good sounding submarine articles out of typically underpowered studies. This is a problem. It contributes to the often-discussed replication crisis

> tbh i'm a bit suspicious that there are 5am natural sleepers. being basically nocturnal doesn't sound natural or healthy. and given the proven effects of lack of sunlight on mental health that should be fixed regardless of work timing.

Humans used to get up twice a night to do things like stoke a fire. A completely different rhythm of sleep to today's. Night vs day wasn't as much of a thing in the past. Assuming that everyone today should sleep just the once doesn't work as soon as you look at South America or Africa, either.

And plenty of people deal with variable work schedules often driven by coworkers in different time zones, shifts, on-call, getting up at 4am to catch a flight, some events that go late etc. I guess there are people with highly regimented hours but I can’t say I personally know a lot—but then most of the people I know have to be pretty flexible.

Being suspicious is your prerogative, it doesn't detract from factual data that this exists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

For all my life I've been afflicted in such a way, judged as being lazy and stuff. I blamed myself a lot. I tried a lot of stuff to "hack" myself into a proper schedule, no-screen, circadian lighting, substance abuse, healthy lifestyle, all sorts of breakfast, intermittent fasting, doing a shit ton of sports to drive myself to exhaustion, nothing worked.

I just can't sleep before ~2AM.

If I ever do it's only when I am severely sleep deprived, and then only get very agitated sleep, wake up at most a couple of hours later and will be mostly sleepless for the remainder of the night.

With age I started to challenge the idea that everyone must operate in the same exact way and maybe there's nothing wrong with me.

Around that time I started to measure the shit out of my sleep using various devices, trying to find root causes, then the baseline of my core circadian rhythm. Over 5 years of accumulated data just point in a single very obvious direction: my body wants to sleep about 7h45 min avg, between 01:45 and 3:00, and get up around 10:00-10:30, and coercing myself out of that for any extended period of time results in sleep deprivation as I then only get at most half of restorative sleep. Of course I can wake up early for a flight or something, but that's just not supposed to happen everyday.

So what's the hack next? Bathing in 6000K artificial bright light at 4AM and closing blinds + pulling curtains at 4PM so that my schedule ends up aligning with what "normal" people do? Sorry but no I'm not going to do that.

Assuming your username means you're in college: I would wait for a few more years before appointing yourself the expert on other peoples sleep physiology. It's easy to think this way in college because people around you will be sleeping poorly or erratically, won't respect sleep or bother with sleep hygiene.

Once everyone is out of college the biological differences become a bit more noticeable. Most people will "fix" their sleeping relatively easily. Others will struggle at first but eventually make it work by adopting strict sleep hygiene and routine. Then a few will find that no amount of sleep hygiene gets them into a good cycle for the standard working day. For some of them the issue will be severe enough to qualify as a clinical disorder like DSPD. DSPD is known to be extremely difficult to treat.

i think that's the key point - i don't disagree that there are "the few" where genuinely nothing works. but then there are always the few with some special case where the standard solution doesn't work, but that doesn't mean anyone can say "the workplace is rigged" against them. i think you're right that there's obv a range of how easy it is, but most people can get into something workable with good hygiene.

Yes, most people can get into something workable and most people do. 9-5 probably wouldn't be the norm if this weren't the case. But if someone is years out of college and still can't sleep or function on the 9-5 schedule then chances are they are one of the few rather than the many.

>but that doesn't mean anyone can say "the workplace is rigged" against them.

You absolutely can. "X is rigged against them" is the social model of disability in a nutshell. Workplaces with rigid early schedules are rigged against people with sleep disorders and late chronotypes the same way buildings with no ramps or elevators are rigged against people in wheelchairs and on crutches.

For many years, I was used to getting up late. Then I found a reason for getting up early: during vacations, I wanted to do 5-6 hour bike rides before the temperature reaches 100F in the afternoon. So I started getting up at 6am during vacations. And since I had gotten used to it, I kept up the same schedule year round.

It's not that rewarding in the winter when it's dark in the morning. But it's still useful for getting work done early before I start getting interrupted by coworkers.

God everyone says this. But it's not like i didn't wake up at 7am for 12 years in highschool, and it didn't make me a morning person. Just perpetually sleep deprived.

Up through high school, despite being sleep deprived it didn't take me 12 years to finish.

You can adapt to early hours, but you can’t become a morning person. As people age, they do tend to shift their internal clocks earlier, but within the same age cohort relative early/late preferences generally stay the same between people.

Internal clocks and circadian rhythms are complex, but are demonstrated to have a biological and even genetic component. Declaring that being a morning person is about “discipline” is like saying being a great basketball player is about “discipline.” Sure, it helps, but at some point genetics and biology take over.

I wasn’t a believer on this subject before, but I found the book “Internal Time” incredibly well researched, written, and convincing.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975392

You can fake to be a morning person by setting your alarm early and go to bed 8 hours before that; maybe you are doing a good enough job and have a productive life. However, maybe you would’ve been far more productive if you would’ve just slept when tired and worked when you naturally wake up. In my experience, that works a lot better than wringing yourself in some kind of schedule.

I don’t know very many (any, come to think of it) people who would naturally choose 9-5 and indeed, less and less do adhere to them. I prefer 5 am to 11 am for office hours and others prefer 11 am to 3 pm and then 5 pm to 9 pm etc.

People who prefer actual office hours I don’t know personally, but I guess they exist.

I’m sure. It’s pretty obvious. If you have a choice in the matter, early start gives you superpowers and is evidence of discipline.

I typically start work at 7:30. I have about 2-2.5 hours of actual, mostly undisturbed productivity. Early in my career my managers thought I was a genius because I knew everything. I did - because I read stuff.

Nowadays I’m a boss guy, and I’m fully up to speed and ready to go at my 9:15 standup, and half my colleagues are running behind to make the meeting.

Note that I’m not a “morning person”. I hate waking up at 5:30. But my kids need to get to school, my wife tends to start early and I don’t see a point in lounging around. People would be better off focusing on taking care of themselves instead of trying to make laziness some sort of protected medical condition.

> and is evidence of discipline.

No it’s not. It’s evidence of a morning person.

"I do what works for me and people who can't are undisciplined" is exactly the kind of take that has people saying the system is rigged.

"People would be better off focusing on taking care of themselves," well, I would say that getting enough sleep and not caring about when exactly others start their day could be a part of that.

Getting sufficient, quality sleep is taking care of yourself.

"Starting early shows discipline" is exactly as valid as "staying late shows dedication", i.e. not at all.

I don't follow, whatever you do from 7:30-9:30 I used to do just as well from 22:00-24:00. Family obligations unfortunately made splitting the work day in half like this very hard so I now start earlier, feel tired all day and am much less productive.

I'm just not a morning person, before 9:00 I just feel miserable. It doesn't matter if it is work, exercise, reading or studying - nothing feels right.

This is arbitrary. One can also prepare for the next day by working late the night before, start working later in the morning, and be just as fully up to speed and ready to go at 9:15. Standup could also just as easily be at 11:15. Why is your way superior?

I don't think being a morning person has much to do with loving/hating to wake up early. It's more about how easy it's for you to get enough sleep if you have to wake up early every morning.

I'm definitely not a morning person, but I love waking up early (ideally a bit before sunrise). Unfortunately my circadian rhythm is always creeping forward. Whenever there is something special (like a trip across multiple time zones) that allows me to reset the rhythm, I get a couple of weeks of early mornings. But eventually I'm back at balancing between sleeping late and not getting enough sleep, because I fall asleep a little bit later every night.

That "taking care of themselves" sounds much like "listening to your body" as a cure to obesity. Taking care of themselves is precisely what makes some people sleep late.

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