“The Tyranny of Morning People”

In My Humble Opinion
61

I am typically awake from about 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. I love the deep quiet before dawn. I organize my mind and my day, write in my journal, work on projects I lack the concentration to do at other times. I live in a very rural area and there is no noise at all until just before dawn when the birds begin. Since I lack a job, this is my default preference these days. I’m pretty useless after the sun goes down. Good thing I don’t go to many parties or concerts.

At one extended-family gathering we went around the table saying whether we were morning or night people. Everyone was quite clear about which they were. My family isn’t exactly a font of go-getter business types or disciplined military types; there’s no particular cachet about being one or the other. It was fairly evenly divided.

62

I’ve found I have two complimentary flow states.

In the afternoon to early evening, I consider a problem I’m working on. Take notes, draw charts, flow documents or whatever to map out the problem. At some point I give up for the day and relax, but I find later that I was still secretly considering the problem in the background, until bed at 11 or so. Call that the afternoon flow state.

The next morning for a typical flow dyad is when I get up (earlyish - 6-7), think about my day, then start coding the previous day’s thoughts. There’s a bit of “well, I might as well get started on that thing”, no expectation of finishing… then in the euphoric glow of caffeine I may spend 6-8 hours in a happy, focused state, churning out code that implements stuff I wasn’t aware I was still thinking about just before last night’s bed. Probably the rest of that day is thinking about what I did and next steps.

Begin cycle the next day - new problem or improved problem statement, throw mental darts at it for a while, most productively late in the day, then bed then morning coffee and coding crunch crunch crunch.

I find the morning coding state creative and fulfilling. The planning afternoon/evening a bit anxious but creative as I mentally line up ducks for the next coding flow state. Being in the “morning” version of that zone is awesome. But when I’m on a roll in the afternoon it’s also exciting lining things up in my head.

63

During my time as a dev I sorta echo @squeegee’s experience. I totally agree that for that job, flow is essential to high productivity and flow hates interruptions.

I liken it to juggling. Once the balls are dropped, it’s a process to pick them back up. Then you toss 1, then another, and awhile later you finally have all 10 orbiting nicely and then forward progress on the problem can continue. Until the next interruption. But getting all 10 in the air in the right orbits is a prereq to the very next line of code. 9 won’t do.

64

Interesting. Can’t say I’ve ever achieved that, exactly. I can be productive during the day, but it’s nothing close to a flow state.

Sometimes I’ll wake up with the solution to a problem, or it’ll come to me in the shower. I may be able to put it into practice fairly quickly. But it doesn’t really extend to a hyperproductive day. I don’t think I’ve ever achieved a flow state for more than 4 hours, anyway.

It is like juggling, not just in the sense of keeping several things metaphorically in the air at once, but also that it becomes impossible if you think about it too hard.

65

That’s very true. I once worked for a non-profit organization in a job that often required nighttime work, meetings with volunteers and such, outside of business hours. But I got called on the carpet the few times I came in the next day at 9 instead of 8:30.

66

I think that there’s an age component to this.

As a teen, I could NOT sleep between 9pm and 3am, left to my own devices, so during the summer, I slept from 4am to noon, unless I had to get up for something, in which case I took Benadryl, and went to bed around 2am, got up at 7 or 8, or whenever I needed to, and took a nap when I got back.

But I was developing insomnia. Soon, I lost the ability to nap, and the Benadryl stopped working.

During the school year, up to my junior year, I slept from about midnight to 6am, and fell asleep pretty well at midnight. I’d take a nap as soon as I got home from school.

But my senior year, I stopped napping, and just got be on 6 hours a night, and caught up by sleeping in on Sundays (and sometimes Saturdays, when, at any rate, I could sleep until 8:30, and still be at 10am services).

In my 20s, I stopping sleeping well when off a schedule, but you know how well sleep schedules work in college. I slept about six hours a night, sometimes 7, lots of times five, and swilled caffeine. “Caught up” by sleeping away the weekends, until a doctor told me how bad that was for me.

FF to now, after 20 years of sleep studies and trying different medication, things I suspected of quackery, like magnetic resonance, and somewhat less quacky, but weird, like vasal nerve stimulation.

I’m on several different meds, plus a PRN now, and if I have the discipline to take the meds exactly on time, and get to bed exactly on time, I wake up 10-30 minutes before my alarm goes off (unless I am sick-- then I need a second alarm), and I feel like hopping out of bed. The urge is irresistible.

This is why I am up now.

The time change has me out of whack. I fell asleep accidentally at 5:20, and slept until 10:30, or so. 5 hours. I need three more hours. I need to be up at five, although four would be OK. So I’m taking my PRN as soon as I finish this post, and lying back down.

I am completely a morning person.

Without drugs (or being sick), I CANNOT sleep between 4am-8am. Just CAN NOT. I feel a compulsion to get out of bed that is like an itch I MUST scratch.

I wake up WIDE awake, and MUST get out of bed.

I don’t brag about it. I know getting up at between 2:30 and 4 is weird, and I’m not bragging. I could get up at 6, and still call myself a morning person.

67

I’d be happiest staying up til 7 or 8 am and sleeping til 4 pm. I’m free to do it since
I work from home…but it makes getting up occasionally for appointments with the “normal” world (contractors, doctors, etc.) unimaginably painful. I dread it for days in advance, I’m so anxious about it that I rarely get more than one or two hours sleep the night before, and I feel lousy all day. :frowning:

68

I am not a morning person. I have had jobs where I’ve had to punch in by 0500 or 0730, and I’ve been able to manage that, but I’m definitely not at my best for the next two or three hours after arriving at work. I stay up late, which to me, is normal and natural. I can sympathize with @wolfpup , who mentioned that he likes late nights. So do I. Sometimes, I do my best work during them; other times, it’s just a time to watch a movie uninterrupted by phone calls, e-mails, and other disruptions.

I recently had to take a red-eye flight from Calgary to Toronto. I was one of the few people in the cabin who did not sleep at all. I was watching movies on the seatback video, which is what I’d do at home in the wee hours anyway. That did not endear me to my seatmate, who ended up putting her coat over her head to avoid the light from my video screen.

I’ve said before that there ought to be sleeping and non-sleeping sections on aircraft, the way there used to be smoking and non-smoking sections. That way, those of us who are night owls don’t disturb the sleeping morning people with conversation, movies, even individual reading lights. We can go about our normal time schedules, they can go about theirs, and we’ll all get along. Without coats over our heads.

69

Wasn’t Hitler supposed to sleep 4 hours per night?
(Don’t know what he was doing: sure wasn’t reading military reports: lack of sleep apparently doesn’t make you smarter or a better human being)

Every medical source I read say you need around 7-8 hours of sleep, maybe a bit less when you get older. When I eat healthy (not too much) and exercise enough (real exercise with wind and rain) I default at 7.5 hours.

I can definitely get by with a lot less, but that shit ain’t healthy.

70

A certain number of people genuinely do not need as much sleep as the rest of us. They really do only sleep 4-5 hours a night and it’s fine for them.

However, most of the people staggering along on that little sleep are NOT those people and either fooling themselves or going through life with all the problem of chronic sleep deprivation.

71

My wife and I are retired. She gets up about 8:30 AM and I get up about 6:30 AM. My “high energy” period is right after I get up. During this time, I empty the robot vac, unload the dishwasher and drying rack, do our laundry (about a load every two days), feed and walk the dogs, take out the mail and get the paper, take out the trash and recycling, read the paper, make coffee and start a fresh pot, and then take care of the few business activities I have for my volunteer work (mailing, printing, updating documents, e-mails, etc.)

Last week she had to go to a craft fair and so she was up at about 6:00 AM. Just before she left, she asked me, “Do you do this every morning?” I wondered if she thought that little elves came and took care of everything.

One morning I managed to replace our kitchen faucet before she got up. I’m not sure she noticed that for a couple days.

From about noon onward, I’m almost a veggie.

72

If memory serves (dicey!) Thomas Edison was famous for boasting he got by on only a few sleep each night. When a journalist showed up at Edison’s office to interview him, he was told he would have to wait because Edison was taking one of his regular daytime naps. So while some people do seem to need much less sleep, there is also a BS factor in some of the claims.

73

100% this. I’ve been chided by morning people for a lot of my working life - lots of “oh, you finally got in” (we have a flex schedule and I intend on using it to its limit, thank you very much).

If left to my own devices, I’d go to sleep at 2-3am and wake up around 10am (or later). For work, before we had kids, I’d get up around 8am to get to the office by 9-9:30am. Now with kids (but also dramatically increased work from home ability), I get up at 7-7:30am to get them ready and drive them to daycare… and I clock in between 8:30-9am. I tend to go to sleep around midnight these days.

My wife is a morning person and an elementary school teacher - I don’t know which came first, but she normally is up around 5-6am and is nodding off on our couch at 9pm.

I’m fairly useless in the morning, even with multiple cups of coffee. My best work happens between 10pm and 1am, but I’m off the clock, so it’s for non paying jobs :smiley:

74

Yeah, absolutely. “You should be up already” carries a moral-character evaluation that is lacking in the less-heard “You should stay up later”.

I’m less spectacularly nocturnal than allthegood who typically climbs into bed at 3 am to read for another hour before turning the lights off and dropping off to sleep. But I caught attitude from my folks growing up. They were “in bed by 10” people and sleeping in on weekends meant maybe sleeping until 7:30 instead of waking up a 6.

Any time there’s a discussion of scheduling some activity or event, the people saying “ugh, 9 o’lock is too early” get stared at judgmentally: “The rest of us could manage to make it, why can’t you?”; but when one of us says “I have choir until 10, let’s start at 11 PM and go 'til 1” the morning folks manage to imply that because they got out of bed to do important things early in the day they can’t possibly be expected to meet so late, that it’s only the slackers and indolent people of the world who would do such an irresponsible thing and stay out that late.

75

I’ve got it now, but will admit that I used to feel late sleepers where lazy.

For instance - My BIL is an early riser like me, when we are guests, he’ll be up making coffee and making breakfast and such. Maybe put a brisket on the grill that takes 12 hours to cook.

My SIL, his wife, doesn’t get up until about 10am. BUT she was up until 2am preparing foods to be cooked the next day.

I’ve worked all the different shifts. When I was on second shift, I would get home at 11pm. And had roommates that where in bed… I had to be quiet, and could not just go to bed after working. So, I started cooking. It was a good way to unwind from the day without making too much noise.

76

Some people also can switch themselves around much more easily than others. Threads like this, or grumbling about the time switch, often get a couple of posters saying “What’s all the fuss? I never have any problem switching schedules!” So I think that just as some of us are hardwired morning or night, or even swing shift, some of us aren’t specifically wired to any schedule, and some are somewhere inbetween and have a preference but not too much trouble shifting to a different pattern.

Just like there are some who are very strongly sun-oriented, and others who can’t understand why anyone would need to be outdoors or near a window, or have trouble getting up in the dark, as long as they’ve got electric light available.

People vary a whole lot, in quite a few different ways. It would be a whole lot easier on everybody if everyone would recognize this.

77

I’m like you and my wife is like yours. Except you must live in a much larger residence than we do. Or she’s deaf.

I’m up 3-5 hours before she is. But nothing louder than typing on the Dope is acceptable while she’s in bed and sleeping ever more lightly as the day wastes away. I’m slinking around in socks and verrrry carefully setting my coffee cup on the counter so it doesn’t clink. Even making coffee is dangerously loud; all those gurgling noises.

I could do zero of your tasks before she emerges. Which makes for very unproductive mornings. Unless you count Dope posting as productive. :crazy_face:

78

If you are on a flex schedule, you should respond to people who leave at 5pm or earlier “half day today?”

79

Wow, I thought I was the only one. :grinning:

I get home from work not much before midnight, and between a little unwind time, 8-8.5 hours of sleep, and my required leisurely coffee-infused wake-up routine, showering etc I’m not ready to face the world until about 11AM. Setting up appointments with parties as you so describe becomes an exercise of bargaining, with them trying to steer me towards 8 or 9 AM, and me trying to steer them toward midday.

Obviously I can and do wake earlier when there’s just no other alternative, but like you, I’m literally stressed out with the looming disruption of my schedule; days in advance. Hell, I’d be inclined to burn a vacation day just to avoid having an early appointment and then having to go to work later in the afternoon. I had to serve on a jury for 2 weeks earlier this year, and it was brutal trying to force myself to go to sleep early enough to wake up early enough to be downtown at 8AM. The jury service itself was interesting, the people were great, but I was super resentful of the disruption of my routine. I was glad to get back to work.

Normally, I’m at full stride from 10-11AM and GO-GO-GO all the way till almost midnight.

80

My sympathies. Our bedroom is down the hall, at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen and carport, and she’s a heavy sleeper. I still move pretty quietly, but I’m not scared to stack dishes, take out the trash, or similar tasks.