“The Tyranny of Morning People”

In My Humble Opinion
41

I’ve known a few very high powered individuals over the years and also a few not super impressive individuals who like to cargo cult high powered individuals and I can try and shed some light on the logic of it all.

First of all, if you reach a certain level of ambition, you’re almost forced to be molded by that ambition and relatively trivial factors such as your natural preference for morning or night fall by the wayside. The one thing I don’t believe this is true for is sleep, I am also very skeptical that you can reduce the amount you sleep by sheer force of will.

First of all, why are they all morning people? Because the very nature of the day is that this is the only time they can reliably be alone. The more high powered you are, the less in personal control of your time you are during your workday. You’re constantly shepherd around from meeting to meeting by a ton of well trained staff, you’re trained to rapidly download an extremely large amount of context into your head via extremely well trained briefers from which you rapidly make a series of decisions and then you are forced to flush all of that information out again so you are ready for the next series of meetings and next series of decisions. Your schedule is not determined by you, there is an extremely competent team of people whose entire job it is to constantly farm out every single meeting for which it is not essential for you to attend and keep you on task to attend only the bare minimum dictated by the laws of physics. Your control of your calendar is only to the extent that you provide high level feedback to your schedulers that eventually flows back into a different set of meetings you would like to attend.

The chronological physics of time means that events can only derail later events. If you have something regularly scheduled at 5pm, an emergency at 2pm can totally derail your plans. If you have something planned at 5am, nothing can derail your plans except things that happen overnight.

Secondly, why do they all have insane exercise regimes? For the simple reason that a) it’s the only way they can mould their brain for the insane rigors of the day and b) exercise is really a way to clear space for deep thought. You keep your body busy and moving so your brain can take the time it needs to think unencumbered, long term and strategically because no other time in the day is available for that.

Thirdly, why do they all have these weird quirks? I’ve found almost everyone who reaches that level appreciates the power of deep work, of simply doing the same thing over and over again for years to decades at a time. You think a CEO can’t read 6 newspapers in 45 minutes? Not if they’ve been reading the same newspapers the exact same way for 10 years. You start to pick up on the microdetails like, for each author, what bits of the story can you consistently skip or how slight differences in words reporting on the same story tell a much more subtle message. The actual activity itself isn’t as important as the constant repetition. Barack Obama would read letters from 10 random citizens every night, the same kind of deal.

Fourthly, do they really do that every day? No, of course not, that’s a miscommunication that is hard to correct in short pieces like that. CEOs are constantly interrupted by travel, events, emergencies etc. But think about the daily patterns you might have, do you do them literally every day? Probably not but if you start skipping them too many times in a row, then pretty soon the rest of life takes over and they collapse as daily patterns. The important things each CEO chooses to highlight is their commitment to the aspirations of a daily habit and an aspiration that they have maintained over multiple years/decades.

You can debate CEO pay all you want but the misconception that most or even any CEOs have a “cushy” job is laughable, the simple physics of it make it impossible. All the CEOs fall into a very narrow band of variance simply because we’ve hit the physical limits of the human brain and human body despite every single possible support structure money can buy put in place around them.

CEOs are not bad because we pick the wrong leaders (primarily) but because the job is ridiculously hard for which few people are physically capable and of them, their natural performance varies. We don’t have some large pool of ready and willing people who we can just throw in whenever we need, despite many people’s “I could do that” belief. It doesn’t help that the media depictions of a CEO’s job, to the extent which it ever resembles reality, only covers maybe 1% of the extreme outlier situations and never really shows the deeply crushing grind that is simply the average workday.

I’m as much of a critiquer of capitalism as anyone but whether we have capitalism or not, value is created by co-ordinated marshalling of extremely large quantities of resources and people who are capable of directing that flow competently can alter history. Whether it’s generals, presidents, CEOs, creatives, if you want to improve your performance by 1 - 2% at that level, that is what the role eventually demands of you.

42

Another wrinkle is the wake by alarm or naturally divide. My wife strongly prefers to wake when it gets light, and dislikes an alarm. Has her wake ridiculously early in the summer, and wanting to stay abed in winter. Me, my preference is just to have the alarm go off. I’m not sure I have ever used a snooze. I know I’m going to feel sleepy by 9-10 no matter when I wake, so if I sleep in (rare), I just feel I “lost” some of the day. I wouldn’t say I “pop out of bed” - but I do just get up and do what needs to be done: make bed, dress, make coffee, heat up oatmeal…

I’m not really a morning or night person. I’m pretty consistently lazy all of my waking hours. But, as I said above, I have a general preference for being up and about early. When everyone used to go into the office, I strongly preferred having a couple of hours before everyone else got in. And on the rare instances I came in late, the last 2 hours in the evening sure seemed to last longer than the first couple in the morning.

There are very few things I would intentionally stay up past 10 pm for. Quite a change from my college days, when I very often stayed up to see the sun rise.

43

I wasn’t making any sort of general claim. I was pushing back against the narrative that night owls are inherently more creative and that morning people have no creative period at all: we are just little conforming worker bees.

44

Your whole post rang pretty true. The big change for me (as my responsibilities and meetings kept piling on) was that one year I decided to effectively ignore the change from DST and get up an hour earlier, catch the first train in & get into the office at 6:15, and use that early time to get things done. That was HUGE. Instead of going into meetings half-prepared, I could review the day’s material, prep questions where I was interested, and occasionally scuttle a meeting when I wasn’t, and as you said, almost nobody was around to interrupt me.

45

As you already mentioned that schedule is nonsense. For one thing the arithmetics require that this CEO sleeps in his gym clothes, has the gym next to his bed, and employs people who do the urinating and evacuating for him.

I strongly suspect that CEO is from a sales not from an engineering background, i.e. lies all the time.

I once had a morning routine that involved waking up at 5:30, going to the toilet, dressing, leaving the house at 5:45, at the bus stop at 5:57, at the public indoor pool’s entrance door at 6:20, in the water at 6:30. That’s the sort of realistic timeline for a person starting the day with exercise.

46

I have no doubt the CEO’s gym is in his house. My gym now is an elevator ride away. I can go from in bed to starting my warm-up routine inside the gym in 5 minutes. That’s arise, pee, brush teeth, yank on shorts, tee, sox, and shoes, grab keys, leave my apt and walk down the hall, ride the elevator down, walk down the other hall, be in the gym waving my arms. When I had a house my (much smaller) gym was in my basement and took even less time to get to: no keys, no elevator, no longish hallways.

Yes, there’s some transition time the CEO article is ignoring. I bet the reality is what’s actually missing is that the workout itself isn’t 90 minutes. it’s 85 or 80 minutes. The “90 minute” time block allocated to gym includes the set-up time. And I also bet that when he gets back upstairs to the kitchen, the coffeemaker on a timer has prepared his coffee pot already. Which was set up last night by spouse or paid home staff.

47

I’m a programmer. I often find solutions when I step away from the problem. For myself at least, you can keep banging on the same door over and over, when what you need to do is back up and find a different entrance.

It’s a stubborn “It should work” attitude that I know I have. But I do find myself finding solutions when I’m not thinking about it. And that could be later at night (or wake me up when I’m sleeping). So I understand the concept of getting your best work done late. At a time when your mind is sort of wandering.

I drives me a bit crazy to walk away from a ‘It should work’ problem. That often indicates a deeper issue that you are not seeing that will be sure to bite you in the ass in the future.

48

I have no argument with any of the points you make in this thoughtful post. My argument is not with anything you said, but with the great many things you didn’t say. Notwithstanding your last sentence, you seem to embrace a value system that implicitly says that the only thing that matters in the world is business and the people who make it work.

My impression is probably incorrect or at least overly extreme, but I can’t help but think of the famous quotation from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” My point is that there is far more value in the world than what can be attributed to CEOs and their underlings. What about research scientists, professors, hardware and software designers and developers, artists, writers, filmmakers, poets, philosophers, and the millions of others who make our world what it is? Do you think these folks get up at 4 AM, exercise vigorously for an hour, and show up in the office at 6 AM for a frenetic day of nothing but wall-to-wall meetings?

Possibly some have some semblance of this work life, and may have it mandated by the nature of their jobs, but I know many such people, and very few of them do. Not all are night owls, of course, but what most have in common is a work schedule that is driven to a large extent by their own creative rhythms and motivations rather than by clocks and calendars. It’s a whole different world. My perspective, however, may be heavily skewed by my experiences with academia rather than commerce. But it’s a valid perspective nonetheless, and I’ve spent many years in both.

49

Newspapers are not what they used to be. If he’s a very fast reader, and/or if he’s only reading certain sections, 6 newspapers in 45 minutes is doable.

50

I think the preachy CEO types referred to in the first few posts are talking about going to bed at 10 and being up at 3:30 (e.g.) which is rather less sleep than most people want and need.

51

I feel like there’s also quite a few people in academia that have a sort of manic focus on their work, and who perhaps put in way, way more than 40 hours a week at it, and in doing so, find a lot of satisfaction. I am just a classroom teacher, and while I don’t work like that mythical CEO, I work way more than 40 hours a week partly because I’m happier when I do*. I don’t like to split my focus: I do work that I think is worthwhile, and I am interested in it enough that I want to put in the time to gild all my lilies. I always say my job is also my hobby. I’m willing to believe that there C-level people who feel like that, too.

Now, there are deep problems with how society rewards various people for what they do, and we can meaningfully talk about whether or not we have a system that takes this aspect of human nature and basically exploits it. But I don’t think it’s inherently a bad thing to be in love with your job, and to rather put your time into that than into other things (though, just like anything else, mania can get out of hand, and if you are neglecting the things you really value (family, your health) for the short-term rush of succeeding at work, that’s a problem).

52

Okay, but if that’s what the OP wanted to talk about, the thread should have been “The Dangerous Cult of no-sleepers”.

53

I don’t think it was mentioned here, but I’ve often come across the notion that humans should have some people who prefer early hours and others who prefer later hours, as that confers an evolutionary advantage for early humans (I.e. more people to tend the fires or watch for predators). I don’t know if that tracks, but it purports to explain the difference between people.

Personally, I was always a person who slept a lot growing up, and therefore slept in when I could (my mom used to joke that I awoke at “the crack of noon”). But I always liked it when I was up early.

As I’ve aged (now 45), I still need my sleep, but my internal clock has shifted so I’m in bed by 10 and naturally awake by 6:30ish.

That’s obviously not some insane 4-5 hours! I’m also not energetic in the morning- I’ve been trying to motivate myself to do morning cardio for months, and it doesn’t stick. I get my workouts in at night, after work, instead. Even on days when I don’t work, I like to get in a few meals (and a midafternoon nap) before I’m revved up for exercise.

At this point, I’d say I’m an early riser, but not a morning person.

54

Very astute points, and you’re describing most of the jobs I’ve been lucky enough to have, and especially the first full-time job I ever had that launched my career. I’d love to reminisce but it would be getting off-topic for this thread. Suffice to say that the autonomy to control your work environment and own your results is incredibly important to motivation, job satisfaction, productivity, and work quality. And that includes – where reasonably feasible – to accommodate the lifestyles of both early birds and night owls.

55

I expect some of them are chronically sleep-deprived, and may not realize it. There probably are some people who genuinely need that few, however; just as there are some who genuinely need nine or ten hours.

Time of life may matter. I needed nine most of my adult life, but now seem to need between seven and eight. (The gain in time to do something else with has been more than countered, unfortunately, by my body requiring more time to do just about everything.)

Ever since I was in my teens, I’ve been engaged in a continual battle with my natural sleep cycle, which seems to be “stay up until about 2AM and sleep until about 10:00”. I can shove it around some, but what I can’t change is that an extra hour of sleep in the morning does me twice as much good as an extra hour of sleep in the evening. It just seems to be the way that I’m built.

My mother had the same problem. My father was an early riser. Even back in the 1950’s, with him working full time and then some away from home and her a SAHM, she did not make him breakfast. That helped some. She had to get up to see me fed and off to school, though, not much later.

They are for a lot of people. They don’t work well for me. Either I can’t get any significant rest because I know I have to get back up, or I go into deep sleep and then have massive trouble waking up again before it’s way too late in the day, and once I drag myself up am too groggy for some time to do anything much. Occasionally ten minutes lying down with my eyes shut but not really sleeping will help noticeably, but often it doesn’t.

I’m not entirely sure that I wouldn’t do that if I ever got the chance. Maybe eventually it would come all the way around and I’d briefly be in sync with most of the society again?

But bright sun in the east bedroom window does tend to help. For several months in the winter here, however, even if it doesn’t stay cloudy, sunrise is on the late side – no matter what we do with the clocks.

– Earlier in my life, I’ve worked jobs when I needed to be there at 7:30 five or six days a week. I would sleep something like 12 hours on the off day(s). I can’t go as long as short on sleep as I used to; and I also can’t sleep 12 hours at a stretch any longer, at least unless I’m seriously sick. 10 seems to be about the current maximum and, even if I’ve been running short for days, I sometimes can’t do that.

– No, I can’t be out of the house in 15 minutes. Even aside from getting awake enough to drive if I had to get up early: these days, sometimes I can’t be out of the john in 15 minutes. And I need to do stretches so my back doesn’t seize up, and I need to let the dog and the cats out, let them back in, feed them all, get at least some of them back in again if I’m going someplace, get coffee into me, if at all possible get some food into me along with medications one of which needs to be taken with food plus which I’ll function better, check the list so I’m not forgetting anything crucial I need to take with me, possibly open the greenhouse (if I have to leave early I won’t be dealing with the wood stove, there’s an oilburner), and go through the john again. And I’m not even dealing with any children.

Left to myself breakfast is about two or three hours after I roll out of bed, and some things get done even before coffee and more between the first cup of coffee and breakfast. I can get out of the house in two hours if I have to. I can do it faster in an emergency, but I’m not going to be functioning all that well.

I suspect that people who can get out of the house in 15 minutes have nothing in their households that they need to deal with besides themselves, and are relatively young. And are among those who buy their breakfast en route, or who don’t eat any.

Yeah, I think this varies by person.

Once I’m awake, which takes a variable amount of time after getting out of bed, I generally have a surge of relative competence in mid-morning; and then often another one in the evening, though, especially if I pushed myself through the afternoon, the evening one may show up quite late after I’ve been relatively incompetent for a while in the early evening.

I’ve seen this problem much more the other way around: morning people who insist that night owls are just lazy, and could perfectly well get themselves up and functional early every morning in their lives if they’d just use some willpower on it.

At least most of the night owls I’ve known realize that some morning people are wired that way. We just wish all of them would realize that we aren’t.

Alternatively, the particular type of job you’re talking about (which does not, in my meaning of the term, match up with “level of ambition”) selects for people who are relatively capable of doing that. Ambitious people who find it extremely difficult aim their ambitions in other directions.

Chronic sleep deprivation?

I don’t know if it tracks either, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Everybody sound asleep at the same time would have been dangerous.

There’s also some evidence for a lot of people naturally having split sleep patterns, with a waking period during the middle of the night followed by a second sleep. Modern civilization seems to have made this impossible for most of us.

56

I was just coming in to post this article:

And this one:

57

In my experience with white collar office jobs, you get more credit for arriving one hour early than staying 2 hours late.

58

In my experience most of these “clear my inbox before 7am” zealots are in their 50s and 60s now.

Big overlap with the “raising kids is your wife’s job!” crowd.

59

I would push back on this a little. The reasons have to do with achieving a flow state.

I find that achieving a flow state is necessary for solving some hard problems. Sometimes, I won’t make any progress on a problem until I get there somehow. It’s that the problem requires some threshold of thought that I can’t get otherwise. And aside from that, I can be perhaps 10x as productive in a good flow state. I think a lot of creative types depend on achieving it.

The first thing is that there must be no distractions. Here, the times from 12-3a are ideal. Virtually everyone is asleep and it’s very quiet. My limited contact with the 4-7a hours is that it’s nowhere close to as quiet. Even the birds are making a racket then. There’s lots of industry ramping up in those hours to beat the traffic or otherwise.

I think the dark helps, too. The ideal situation is that you and the problem are in a bubble of light surrounded by infinite darkness. No constant movement in your peripheral vision.

Second rule is no multitasking. It’s absolutely required that you focus on the one task at hand and only that task.

You need to be mentally prepared to start with. When I start work for the day, there’s a pile of emails I have to respond to, and some other low-effort stuff. When I start actual work, it takes a while to basically remember where I left off. After all, it’s probably been 10-16 hours since I worked on any of it. More if it’s a weekend. It’s like someone cleaning the tools off my workbench. It takes a while to bring them all out again.

So I think it’s impossible to get into a flow state at the start of a day. You need a couple hours of prep, and by the time you’ve finished, you’re well past the time where you can count on no distractions. And it’s worse in that sense anyway compared to after midnight.

While I’m not mentally exhausted at the end of the day, I’m not a peak wakefulness, either. I think this helps, though. Part of achieving a flow state is letting your subconscious take a more dominant role. It doesn’t work if your executive centers are firing at full capacity.

60

My problem was not fitting well in a 24 hour schedule. If anything I’m a night owl. I like nightlife occasionally and I prefer the quiet of night to be productive, or just to enjoy watching TV without interruption.