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Comment by wallunit | Hacker News Reader

Why is waking up two hours earlier in order to do stuff like coding on personal projects so much better than staying up for two more hours at night?

It won't make the day longer. Each hour you wake up earlier you will also probably go to sleep earlier. Of course you could also sleep less, but also in that case IMHO it doesn't make a large difference whether you add those extra hours to your night or to your morning.

Some might argue, that morning hours are more productive. But for me that is only true if I have slept well and long enough and it also implies that whatever you do in the evening will suffer by starting your day earlier.

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Morning hours are often more productive because there's fewer distractions - the rest of the household is asleep, the phone doesn't ring, and there isn't much on TV. Not to mention that if you've gotten up two hours early to do something, you're probably going to be doing it. (I used to have to get to work at 7:30 in the morning but still found that going to the gym before was the only consistent way to ensure it happened.)

All of that aside, the bigger problem is that other things pop up during the course of the day to steal your energy and time. If you have something scheduled at the beginning of the day, they can't eat away at it. If you schedule it anywhere later in the day, it becomes the "stub" for whatever else happened that day.

One of the pieces of advice they give folks who want to save more money is to "pay themselves first" - save some money from your paycheck _before_ allocating to other things you want to spend on, especially anything discretionary. This is the opposite of what we normally do, which is "save" whatever is left over after our spending. I think folks who set up a morning routine for work or gym are basically paying themselves first in terms of time commitment.

I can answer this from personal experience.

After working 9 hours at a full time job, a 45 minute commute home, helping make dinner for the family, cleaning up, playing with the kids, getting them cleaned up for bed, reading with them, putting them to bed, cleaning up the house a little bit, its 9pm.

All I wanted to do is spend a little quiet time with my wife, any motivation to work on personal projects, which may have been fairly strong during the drive home, is now gone, and all I really want to do is spend quiet time with my wife before we had to go to sleep.

So, it had nothing to do with making the day longer, and it had everything to do with the reality that by the time I actually got to the point where I could work on something, it was the least important thing in my life.

I would guess the if you code in the night your 2h turn into 6h. While if you do 2h in the morning you have to stop and go to work.

I think this is the fundamental reason also. It's much easier to slip and add more hours to the end of the day than it is to wake up even earlier than 5am.

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