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Comment by sourya4 | Hacker News Reader

I have transitioned from a late nighter to waking up in the 3-4am zone over the last few years.

That sweet interruption free early morning slot of ~5 hours when everyone's sleeping is probably the most productive I feel before the hustle bustle of life starts.

I have yet to master how to work better in short bursts of 1-2 hours when I have errands to run or calls to take later in the day. Would love to know if anyone has found techniques that work for them to make the most of such smaller time slots where it's harder to reach flow.

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I went 30+ years telling myself I am a night owl, with delayed sleep phase, unable to wake up before 11, finding my groove only in the late night.

Then one day based off someone's comment I bought blackout blinds for my bedroom, the kind you can't even see your hands in front of your face. Overnight I became a morning person. I haven't been able to sleep past 7:30am in almost a decade. My mornings are sacred now.

Unfortunately, small time slots just don't work for me. It's all about making the time weird ideas pop into my head coincide with the time I can sit down and engage with them fully. This is why I believe it's crucial not to waste that precious time with distractions.

You say your mornings are sacred now; before you made the change did you treat your nights as sacred? Do you think you were always a "morning person", but didn't/couldn't realize it?

Not specific to your comment here, but speaking more generally: I always found it sort of interesting how "morning people" are typically thought of as more productive, less lazy, etc. than "night people". If you say you wake up every morning at 5am people are impressed and assume you are highly motivated, but if you tell people you go to bed at 3am every day people assume you're lazy and maybe depressed. Yet everyone has roughly the same amount of waking hours -- the only thing that should matter is what you're doing with them, not when you have them.

> You say your mornings are sacred now; before you made the change did you treat your nights as sacred? Do you think you were always a "morning person", but didn't/couldn't realize it?

Yes. I've always loved morning time, despite waking up around 11 until my early 30s. I've been told I was lazy, lost a potential job offer because I was always late for work, until one day magically I became one of the "normal" ones :-)

I don't believe night owls to be lazy, variety is the spice of life, but I believe a percentage of them simply have a messed up sleep schedule and no idea how to fix it.

How do you wake up when it's dark at that 7:30? Do you have something that pulls them with sunrise?

For me waking up when it's very dark feels much worse than getting to sleep with a bit of light.

Good question, waking up in the dark is awful, so I bought myself a silent light alarm. Now I can wake up more or less at the same time no matter how late I go to bed, alarm or not.

i'm confused to how this is different to waking up to the sunrise that is also (almost) at the same time every day?

I don't know where you live but even at my latitude it most definitely is not "at almost the same time every day."

If I woke up with the sunrise in winter I'd be waking up 2 hours later than in the summer (3, really, because of daylight saving time).

The time doesn't change by a lot every day, sure, but that's not relevant to things like transportation or work schedules.

yeah i just meant like it's mostly the same time between days, but shifts heavily seasonally. I suppose one season might be worse for you than another based on your internal circadian clock

I have moved to quiet notifications policy on everything and turned Slack to yet another email. It is much easier to work and concentrate on task. However some colleagues are unhappy to get response in 10 minutes ~ 1 hour.

I've done this as well but the flip side for me is that I find myself probably checking various apps (etc) for new content probably more often than I would if I just had notifications on.

So ultimately, I feel like I've replaced an intolerable amount of notifications with an intolerable amount of application switching.

I acknowledge it's a me problem, of course, but it's still a problem. We are way too peppered with bits of "info" from way too many sources.

Give yourself a window to check notifications and doomscroll. It's easier to tell yourself "I can wait another hour until my lunch break when distracting apps are allowed" rather than fighting the urge with no relief in sight.

Personally I have settled on keeping social media and notifications blocked until 2pm. Much easier than wishing and failing to be a productive machine for the entire day.

That's usually what I try to do for personal stuff (with admittedly moderate success).

It's for work stuff that I have a harder time (because of not entirely rational fear of letting people down by being slow to respond).

Exactly what I tried yesterday. Got a boost immediately as I also come around to accept that my colleagues have their work too, they can’t always respond promptly, especially as I’m working across timezones.

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