Some people seem to be night owls and others getting up before the sunrise. I don’t judge. I’ve been both. But this article rang true. We’ve seen the CEOs who claim to get up at 4am for a ninety minute workout before hitting the office before five hours sleep. I’m sure lots of heavy hitters are at the gym early, but a lot of this seems to me myth making. This topic was briefly covered in 2004, but that was a long time ago. Your current thoughts are welcomed.
Inspiration?
And old history:
It’s not a myth. I know two people who are genuine morning people. One, a female, has two small children and gets up at 2 am so that she gets a few hours alone to take care of herself and work things that she can never get to. How someone can live on only 4 hours sleep is beyond me. Her father, who was in the military and then became a commercial pilot and had to be at the airport at odd hours, including very early in the morning, became accustomed to only sleeping 4-5 hours a night. He retired from flying and still gets only 4-5 hours of sleep a night, and he seems fine. Not tired or run down. Again, I can’t fathom doing that myself for more than a day or two in a row, let alone my entire life. I think some people are just wired that way, and their body adapts to it over time, just as some people say they “need” 10 hours of sleep a night or they will die. I do fine with 7-9 hours, which I think is pretty average, but as a teenager I slept for 10 hours a night regularly, presumably because I was growing and needed it.
The Navy made me a morning person. Before my time in the Navy, I routineley slept late and dreaded the prospect of waking up early. But being able to wake up and spring into action at a moment’s notice is a mental/physical skill, at least it was for me, and once learned it’s stuck with me since I left the Navy 16 years ago. Being a dad has meant sleep past 6 AM is very rare, but unlike my wife, that hasn’t been a particularly difficult part of parenthood for me.
I don’t understand. I can wake up whenever I want. It only depends on what time I go to bed.
I’ve worked days, afternoons, midnights. Whatever.
If we’re talking about waking up, then immediately jumping into your day, no that ain’t me. Currently I leave the house at a quarter after 5 am, after getting out of bed at 3:30 am. Let me have coffee and toilet time, thank you kindly.
I’m not disputing many thrive in the morning. Sometimes I do too. The part of the article that inspired me was about a CEO who claimed his schedule was as below. And maybe it is.
Excerpt, The Atlantic
3:45 a.m. — Wake up to go to the gym for a 90-minute workout
5:15 a.m. — A cup of coffee and reading half a dozen newspapers
6 a.m. — Shower and head to the office
6 p.m. — Back for dinner with his wife
9 p.m. — Bed and reading
10 p.m. — Asleep
I believe that this is complete hooey. Not only is there no time between the end of his workout and his first cup of coffee, but no one reads six newspapers in 45 minutes. He then gets less than six hours of sleep, gets up, and does it all again. This is the idealized morning-person schedule, and it is madness. (Also, no matter what we do with the clocks, he will wake up in the dark. That’s his problem.)
Nowhere is this morning culture worshipped more obnoxiously than in Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital. I no longer live there, and I hear that things may be changing. But I was considered something of a reprobate when I worked in Washington (including on the Hill), because I would saunter into the office at, say, 8:15 a.m. instead of beating the traffic by arriving before dawn…
I wake up in the dark for a lot of the year. Today it was 7:30 a.m. So, it happens even if you’re not a morning person.
I’m utterly mystified. Being a “morning person” has exactly zero to do with how much sleep one needs.
One can be a “morning person” who sleeps 9 hours every day. Or 5. One can be a “night owl” who sleeps 5 hours every day. Or 9. They are completely orthogonal concepts.
So is the whining about short sleepers or about early risers?
Short sleepers are more of a mystery to me. I don’t mind getting up early, but I like to get a full night’s sleep.
It may be real, but can’t be typical. No dinner with clients? Nighttime calls? No international customers or vendors? No travel?
I’m not amazed that he gets in at 6am, but that he can leave at 5 or 5:30pm to be home for dinner.
Sounds like he has a good gig.
According to that BS schedule, he’s just “getting in” to the shower at 6 am.
I’m a morning person. Only because I rarely fall asleep before 3am.
I try. I’m admonished to do it. Don’t work.
And, I can read 3 newspapers in 30 minutes or so. They ain’t exactly Sunday papers. In fact it’s amazing if one particular one has 3 full sheets.
I have to get up early (for me) 2 days a week. Now.
I’ve never required much sleep. I’m lazy as hell but actually full sleep is hard to come by.
Back when I worked retail most of my co-workers thought I was a morning person because I was awake and functional at the beginning of the day. The truth was that I woke up hours earlier grogging through a morning routine then had a long commute. I hate mornings.
My wife is a morning person. On like a light switch, usually very early.
I’m not judging. Do whatever works for you. But call me skeptical if that regularly means less than six hours snoozing. Can’t be typical, no matter how loudly claimed by past presidents or famous inventors.
Gallup says that consistently since 1990, about 14% of Americans consistently report they get five hours of sleep or less. 26% report six hours. Four out of ten people.
A friend of mine gave me a button that says “Not a morning person doesn’t even begin to cover it”. I think it’s accurate. I am VERY slow to start up in the morning.
I have always been a night owl. When I was a baby my father always complained that he could never watch his nightly movies (back when the TV only had 3 network channels, PBS, and one independent station, the networks would usually play a movie at 9 pm) because even as a baby I had a hard time falling asleep.
I also suffer from insomnia. I’ll go 3 or 4 days with only getting somewhere between 3 and 5 hours of sleep. Then, more due to exhaustion than anything else, I’ll get one night of 8 or 9 hours. Then it’s back to a few days of minimal sleep.
It’s not a schedule that I recommend. I wish I could sleep like a normal person.
I have noticed that a lot of Type A personalities think that you need to get up at 5 am and be in the office as early as possible, and that they think anyone who isn’t a Type A morning person is lazy. I go into the office late, but I also work long hours and stay late. I do my best work later in the day. Fortunately, I found a company to work for that has flexible hours and judges its employees on what they actually accomplish rather than what time they start their day.
I’ve seen studies suggesting that being a morning person – what I’ll call an “early bird” – vs a night owl is largely innate and correlated with specific personality and vocational traits. Humans being complicated creatures, however, it can be difficult to separate cause and effect – like people being early birds and exhibiting some of the associated traits because their jobs require it, as some posters here or in the old thread have indicated.
But since this is IMHO, I’ll offer MHO based on a lifetime of anecdotal observation. Which is that the archetypal early bird tends to be associated with business or military efficiency and regimentation, while the night owl tends to be associated with creativity – often in the creative arts, but also with technical creativity.
I’m definitely in the night owl category, and always have been. Whether I’m doing non-serious writing for fun, or serious technical writing like a report or research grant application, or engaged in solving a software design challenge, my best work is typically done in the inspirational stillness that settles on the world well after midnight.
As an aside, some of the best work I’ve done in the area of software architecture had its genesis while pacing around my living room in the middle of the night trying to conceptualize the problem as a generalized abstraction. You simply cannot – or at least, I cannot – possibly do that in a bustling office environment, and you most certainly cannot do it by committee in a Dilbertian boardroom equipped with a whiteboard and stale donuts. The latter can be important to flesh out a solution and identify potential weaknesses, but the creative spark behind genuine innovation usually comes from an individual, and, I submit, that individual will typically be a night owl. Of course the world couldn’t function without the organizational competence of the early bird, but the early bird and the night owl tend to have vastly different innate skills.
I wake reasonably early - alarm goes off at 6. But I go to bed pretty early and get a good 8 hrs. I don’t feel any different whether I wake at 5, 6, or 7. The main reason I wake sorta early is because I feel the morning is the most pleasant part of the day. Nice and quiet with so many fewer people up and about. Yeah, I guess the same could be said for the middle of the night…
That was written by me in 2004. I continued to pretend to be a morning person until my retirement in July 2022. I’ve now reverted to my original persona, that of a night person. Though I still go to sleep generally by 11 pm now, I may arise anywhere from 7 to 9:30 AM and I like it that way. I also nap nearly every day too, anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Naps are wondrous things.
Ain’t they? Love me some nap time!
Ha! And you call yourself a night person? 
Lemme tell you about an authentic night owl, to wit, me. I’m speaking here about post-retirement. If I’m up and doing things in the timeframe you’ve indicated – between say 7 and 9:30 AM – it’s most likely because my night-owl inclinations have shifted later and later until finally they’ve shifted more than 12 hours. Yep, if I’m up at such an hour it’s often not because it’s morning, it’s because it’s very late at night according to my owl-clock, and nearly bedtime! To paraphrase Dave Barry from a somewhat different context, my role model here is Dracula. 