Fuck this. I'm a night time person and I feel like I'm constantly punished by a society that places a moral value on waking up early.
In all seriousness, I'm thinking about starting a "night company" for night time people. Come in at 2, work until 10. Is there anybody out there who'd be interested in something like that?
In the book "Why We Sleep" the author writes about how some people are naturally night owls and it damages their health to be forced into a morning routine (e.g., waking up early for school).
According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.”
That book actually put me on the track to taking this idea seriously. I'm absolutely a natural night owl and I felt like my whole life I've been considered lazy by other people because I'm not bright eyed and bushy tailed in the morning, even though I think I have far more productive output that most of my peers - I just do it all in the hours while they're sleeping. Finding out that there's an actual cause besides thinking that I'm just a lazy person was a real revelation for me.
Is it too much to ask for to wake up naturally, exercise a bit, have a solid meal, then get down to business when I'm ready for it rather than having a stressed out mad scramble every single morning?
I'd rather be cautious with such assessments like "absolutely a natural night owl" – at least until we're able to tell that from the genome directly, haha.
I'm a night owl myself, but around 10 years ago I've accidentally switched to the 10pm-5am sleep pattern and those were happiest and most productive months of my life. I was waking up without alarm and was jumping out of bed, quite literally. I dream to return to that pattern again and have been trying to do so since then (no luck so far).
I'm neither. I just need 6-9 hours of sleep regularly (going to bed at the same time). It takes 3 to 4 days to adjust to an other schedule (with difficulties during that period). So going out on weekends means I can't wake up early during week days.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
You can't be serious? People are different. Dear God, to say that lead to the Holocaust is just absolute insanity. There are so many more things that lead to the Holocaust than just "people are different".
Please don't respond to egregious comments by replying, thus taking threads further into the weeds, if not the flames. This is in the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The Holocaust and the events that lead up to it were directly related to new studies about DNA and genetics. That exact line of thinking is what caused the Nazi population to pick out specific groups as a whole.
And currently, as we speak more and more violence is spreading based on people looking at others as genetically different.
Of course sleep schedules are pretty tame stuff. I'm just asking us all to please be to mindful of those who may misinterpret our discussions.
People are absolutely genetically different, and I see recurring types of people everywhere I go (not necessarily tied to race). Pretending like we're all the same doesn't really help anyone and probably just turns away people who don't enjoy being lied to and shushed for something as innocent as believing there are "types" of people. That is miles away from believing some of those types are worthless and deserve to die in terrible Holocaust-style mass killings.
Yes, but they're all single or otherwise have no family obligations. Once you have a family and have to deal with school and other activities it's pretty hard to deviate much from the normal 9-5 workday.
Single dad, night-person here—I far prefer working at night once the kids are in bed over trying to squeeze meaningful productivity in between school hours, dinner, activities, father-son time, etc. I've trained myself to do something from 9-4, as those are my remaining school-age son's school hours, but it's nowhere near as satisfying as working at night when the world is asleep.
In my country kids use their foot to get to the school, even small kids (usually starting at 9 years when afterschool care is not available anymore). Maybe you should start structuring your society in a way that allows people without cars to get around if you don't like that, or move to Europe.
Wow, I don't know if the negativity is warranted here, but for me (and my kids walk to school), getting the kids ready involves making sure the young kids get properly dressed, breakfasted, lunch packed, etc... Transportation is not always the issue.
I didn't want to be negative, sorry. Kids generally are able to do all of what you saod when they're 9 years old. I've seen that American families often belittle their kids and are afraid to make them responsible.
Your mileage may vary. I grew up In New York City and was fine getting myself ready and taking an hour on public transport to school every day, but New York is an outlier amongst US cities. Even my friends who grew up in the suburbs just outside New York needed their parents to be chauffeurs and butlers for them.
Not just the US, UK is the same, when I was 9 (1989) I had to cross two busy roads to get to school and it was considered entirely normal to walk to school alone.
Now in 2019 at the same age (9) letting my step-son do the same would be considered by a lot of parents to be borderline child abuse.
I’m treating him the same way my parents treat me, if he wants to make his mum a cup of tea (novelty hasn’t worn off) I’ll let him (with supervision at a distance), I’m not coddling him at his age I had full access to my father and grandfather sheds/garages and tools - by comparison a kettle isn’t a big deal.
In New Zealand this is illegal while they’re under 14.
Whereas, when I grew up, pretty much from 7+ you were expected to be able to go visit your friends, get to school, etc. without all the ceremony and scheduling required today.
Yep, it's hard to avoid the "back in my day" feel but there is a qualitative difference in how we are raising current generations here, Daniel is vastly less self-sufficient than I was at the same age.
For me, the "night owl" manifests as clarity of mind. My mind feels clearer as the day progresses and clearest during the evenings. If I try waking up at 6:00 AM or something early like that, I'm foggy all day until ~10 PM when I should be getting to sleep, then I'm exhausted with a clarity I hadn't had all day so I don't even want to sleep, I want to do something.
It's like, when the sun is down, my brain is ready to be super productive.
Here's the problem with your questions. I could answer in whatever way suits my argument and you'd have no real response. You want me to give input to your hypotheses, but I'm not going to play that game.
So instead of answering these, because your list of tasks that imply my life is deficient by your standard could go on forever, it makes more sense for you to argue whatever position you are taking directly.
as a family obligated person, i think there is a demand. And i think it could help parents, one parent could work early or half a day, then come home take over child care, and then the other parent can do a full 2 - 10, 8 hour day without the need for day care or some.
i know people that dont do the math, and actually work to pay for the daycare...
That schedule might work for "parenting" but would be horrible for the relationship of the couple. People often try to view parenting solutions in isolation and forget that this is the lives of 3+ people we're discussing. It's the same as work to pay for daycare. If a stay at home parent works 2-3 days per week, and their income only covers the expenses of going to work, they still get benefits. They stay in the job market without a multi-year break, in my country they accrue superannuation payments, and it gets them out of the house with a break from the kids (parenting constantly is hard mentally).
I don't think you can say with any level of certainty that such a schedule would be horrible for a couple's relationship in general, or as a rule. Relationships are all very different, as are the people involved in them. I'd bet plenty of couples would find flexible work hours to have a number of helpful, positive side effects on their parenting and their relationships.
Are you a parent? I am, and every parent I've ever spoken to has said how difficult maintaining a relationship with your partner is when you have young children. If you make it so that your schedule means you never see each other than this will be even worse. The trope of a parent to young children is a tired, worn out, exhausted person and the above schedule is going to give these parents even less time together and virtually zero support while parenting.
> I know people that dont do the math, and actually work to pay for the daycare
One parent staying home to avoid paying for daycare will generally permenantly depress that person’a income, long after the kids no longer need daycare. Even if you’re just breaking even on working with paying for daycare, you’ll make more money in the long run after you stop paying for daycare.
All of those articles are a) single or b) rich or c) young people with no families (and combinations of those) signaling how motivated and what hard workers they're in...
There's also a reason why we see them from privileged (usually white) people in cushy careers (or in pursuit of such), and we don't e.g. read a black single mother, walking up at a 5am everyday and working her ass off two jobs till late, just to make ends meet blogging such BS...
Well, I'm not exactly white (surely not in the WASP sense, in fact KKK used to really dislike us), nor mob, and hardly come from any privileged background (dad was a low-pay commercial sailor, grandpa worked at the buffet at hotels), but yes.
Or perhaps it's HN working as always and people disagreeing?
A heavily downvoted post is not exactly a "mob" (any more than a heavily upvoted one would be).
People threatening or calling you names, or demanding your job, etc, would be a mob.
I also get lots of downvotes when my opinion is not popular (which is easy, I'm not very fond of what I consider the fads of the era, or mainstream opinions on most things). But I wouldn't call it a "mob" in ordinary HN cases.
That might sound nice until you realize that most people socialize after they get out of work. If you have a weekly schedule like this you might miss out on a lot of social opportunities, much like people who work in the restaurant industry or have odd shifts in jobs like nursing.
By far, the most popular time slot for the activities I want to participate in is 7-9pm, and usually Tuesday and Thursday. Monday is much less common, Wednesday is very rare, and nobody ever wants to schedule an activity on Friday. Occasionally something will start at 6pm, if they need an extra hour.
So every week, I'm forced to choose among activities, as my Tuesday/Thursday 7-9pm are always at least double-booked, and usually triple- or quadruple-booked. I have more than enough free hours in the week to do everything I want to do. It's just that hardly anybody ever wants to schedule anything at any other time.
You're going to have a chicken-and-egg problem getting any number of people to shift away from this schedule.
In my own life this hasn't been much of an issue. I wake around 5pm, so if there are evening plans, that tends to be my morning plans. Of course, this means I end up having a fancy dinner with friends for breakfast at times, but that's not all that big of a deal. And if I plan to work that day, I won't drink at "dinner".
All in all, my social life is pretty normal with my night schedule. I wake up around the time my wife gets home from work. We eat together and talk and hang out. When she goes to bed, I go to work. By morning, as the rest of the world around me is waking up, I handle any errands or chores and I'm back to sleep by somewhere between 9 and 11am.
The only time my schedule ends up being an issue is when we travel. But then since I'm not working, I actually really enjoy being up during the day. It's just difficult to switch schedules from "night mode" to "day mode" and back after our travels are over. It's pretty much the same thing as jet lag when flying half way around the world. It's a pain in the ass for a couple days, but not particularly detrimental.
I've brought this up before, but worth repeating: According to the book Why We Sleep, something like 30% of the population are hard-wired to be "night owls" and 30 or 40% early risers.
The author hypothesized that this may be an evolutionary survival mechanism that allowed bands of humans to always have people who were awake or more likely to wake quickly if threatened after dark or in the early morning.
For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.
Yes, it's hard with kids but basically have adopted a bifurcated sleep pattern - 6 hours, wake at 6:15 am, and help with family stuff and do about an hour of non-brain intensive work, and then two more hours of sleep before rewaking and restarting work in the late morning, raring to go. In the evening I can get so much done.
I have my own company, so this flexibility is possible.
The "slow morning" thing is real. No matter what, my brain does not turn on till close to lunch time. Being a morning person would make life easier in a lot of ways, but it just isn't how I'm wired.
I would sign up in a heartbeat, even if it's a plain old web programming consultancy. I've done all this shit for thirty years, and still I eat speed every morning and feel like a sleeping person with a rocket strapped to my back until noon. I go backpacking with no electricity for a month, stay up till three in the dark, wake up at noon in the daylight, and feel wonderful. I am sick of sanctimonious authoritarians telling me I just need to change my perspective in order to be normal.
If I were single and straight out of college I would have jumped for something like that...for a little while until sleeping when the sun is out became untenable.
I’m with you. I am very much a night owl. I do my best work between noon and 9pm. Fortunately, my work can be done any time of day. In fact, projects I manage are “jobs in addition to” for most team members. Which means they work on my stuff later in the day, after their day jobs.
I’ll start getting notifications of task completion early afternoon, continuing into the night. I have to process each task, accepting or rejecting them by morning, to keep forward momentum through the next day. Lots of harmony between my internal clock and the work I do.
There’s just one problem: most companies require me to be in the office from 8am to 5pm every weekday. The constant clash of “my job” (the rigid traditional workday), and “my work” (highly-structured, but very fluid schedules), causes a whole lot of unnecessary stress and unproductive office time. I end up working unsustainably long work-weeks, all due to optics (read: office politics). It’s all very strange to me.
My current solution is to work as an independent contractor, and be my own boss. But this solution comes with a whole other set of (very difficult) problems.
It’s frustrating to never fit into the structure of a company, considering I like my work, I’m good at it, and it fits into my internal clock.
Yes, I (and I think many others) would be VERY interested in companies that allow this kind of schedule. Further more, I think you'd find that hiring people who want to work those hours, means you're hiring people who are most successful in those hours.
Nothing sucks more than being a night person, whos brain comes online later in the day, but having to be in your seat at your desk at 9 AM.
I don't see where TFA ever said that you /should/ become an "annoyingly productive early morning person". It only talks about how to go about doing that, /if that is what you want to do/. If that's not your thing, then that's fine, and I'm not sure why you'd even bother reading it (or perhaps you didn't).
Haha, of course. "We're awake at night" would not be the point of the company, just an aspect of the culture. It'd probably have to be adjacent to other "night" industries though, or something with a good tolerance for asynchronousness, or have clients in appropriate timezones.
Not a natural early bird, but I picked up the habit of getting up early because its a great way to get uninterupted time at work (without meetings, fairly silent work environment with almost all desks empty).
Now I get strange looks when I leave at 3pm.
My employer let's us punch the time clock (we can do it online, too, which means it works with home office). I think you could run a noon to 8pm schedule (being in the office after that needs to be registered with facility management).
PS: My personal (N=1) experience with being a night owl actually is, that I have no problem getting up early when I go to bed early enough. Setting my alarm clock to 9:30pm as a reminder to go to bed helps me a lot getting up early. I don't buy too much into this theory of a night-owl / early bird split in the population, because time is kind of a construct of a watchmaking civilisation. I'd assume sunrise and sunset are much bigger influences on individual's behaviour.
I run my own LLC, and my own working hours are 2PM (-ish) to 2AM (I get up at 10:30-11AM). Don't get frightened, I don't continuously work for these 12 hours, there's between 6 and 9 hours of working time in there, which I know because I track how much time I spend and on what. This works great for me. If I get up early and start working, my whole day will be ruined and nothing of value will be done. Tested many times. If I get up early and don't start working until my normal working hours, I _might_ be able to get something done that day. I'm very protective of my schedule, and have a very understanding wife (who appreciates not having to work).
Currently? Bootstrapping a product in computer vision space, by spending half the time helping 2 other companies with their deep learning efforts, and the other half on my own R&D. I've been in the fortunate situation that there's far more consulting work than I'm willing to take (and man do I charge a lot), so that part is booked months in advance. Product efforts are progressing nicely, too. I might be looking into hiring someone to help on both of those things in the foreseeable future.
I don't know if it's just the network effects or my preconceived notions, but the whole "business" thing turned out to be not as hard as I thought. I work out of my man cave and have a rack full of quad-GPU machines in the garage (because fuck cloud GPU pricing). I spend about a day and a half per week in my customers' offices (and I charge my hourly rate for commute too). Everything else, I don't even have to leave the house. If I don't feel like working on any given day, I just don't. Today is one of those days.
I now think this is how high-skill CS is supposed to work. Offices are bullshit. You can get easily twice as much done with a little self-discipline if you work remotely, and work will be of higher quality, because you _can actually focus_.
I would. I struggled for a long time as well, then my wife told me to stop and follow my natural schedule. I am way more productive now. They only reason it worked though is that we own our company together.
This is one of the primary reasons I've been a remote worker for the vast majority of my working life. I prefer working nights, to the point when I almost can't be truly productive during the day.
Yes, I agree. I love my routine and it makes me happy.
Early riser here, and like some of the night owls here, I also miss out on things. Concerts that go late are hell for me. I’ve adjusted to only seeing the ones I really care about and being fine with not catching the others.
Given the 24/7 nature of the net these days, I’m surprised companies aren’t running an early bird office on the east coast and a night owl office on the west.
A lot of folks in India who work on US/Europe based assignments tend to work to a similar schedule. Most of them did not seem particularly happy after a while on the schedule. Partly, its missing out on a lot of socializing that tends to happen in the evenings, and partly it is missing out on the morning schmoozing at the coffee machine where are a lot of information exchanges hands and decisions are worked out.
When I freelanced, I used to start about 9 in the evening, work through with no distractions till 4 or 5 and sleep until lunchtime. It was great as I had time to do stuff or laze about in the afternoon, see people in the evening and still do a full ‘day’ of work.
Only backfired when a client insisted on a 9am meeting.
With me it comes and goes. I have nocturnal periods, mostly when I'm working on some project and 'normal' periods when doing a lot of customer work. But as soon as I'm on my own the night habit kicks in. I just love it when the whole world is quiet.
Work on a remote team that's spread across the world that knows how to work in an async fashion that isn't always chasing "they wanted it yesterday!" deadlines. There's much less expectation to be available at specific times.
You're also in a society that focuses on getting things done. How about not getting things done and staying up late. Let's see if that article gets to the top of HN.
You're punished how? by bars being open when you get off work? or shows happening after work? or "working late" or "burning the midnight oil" being considered a sign of dedication and hard work? by all the stereotypes of old people waking up to watch the sun rise?
early to rise has some cultural cachet as moral but when have Cool and Moral ever coincided?
Banking and the DMV are pretty much it as far as things-denied-the-night-owl.
plus 8-5? that shit aint early. Talk to some bakers or retail works about waking up early.
Even better if it's possible. But in business, you really do end up needing to interface with people in normal 9-5 companies fairly often, so at least with 2-10 there's some overlap in the afternoon. Do external stuff in the afternoon and then just grind through the night.
The parent didn't say anything pejorative about those who do things differently. They said "fuck this", and lamented feeling punished by social pressure to be a morning person.
I am saying "fuck this" to the culture that pressures everybody to be productive in the early morning and casts judgement on those who have trouble being productive in those hours. No offense was meant to the author, I'm always interested in people sharing their routine advice.
You said the pejorative statement was about those who do things differently. Saying "fuck this" makes it clear there's a strong objection to the idea(s) presented in the article, something "i disagree" just wouldn't convey in the slightest. Saying "fuck this morning person" would have been the statement your critique would fit.
I think people took your 2 to 10 thing far to literal.
A remote first workplace gets the same flexibility you desire (pick your own hours) without any of the drawbacks or relationship problems (it's actually better than the current situation of 9-5 + commute.)
There are consessions with all that but you can work around them as others do already.
Regarding societal pressure, there is. But you need to realise these people are productive, not always successful in hindsight.
There was some article a whole back about how the most influential people in history shave all had one sleep thing in common: sleep was consistent day to day. None of them had any similarity in the hours they kept.
My guess is half the people out there are night owls and the modern serfdom left them no choice but to comply. Just look at the people yawning in a long Starbucks line.
I'm naturally a night owl. My best sleep seems to happen between 7-9AM. However, I recently started getting up at 5AM. It was hard at first. It took a solid month before I started sleeping well again. However, I feel the tradeoffs have absolutely been worth it. Before, I worked on my side projects after work. The amount of brain power I had left at the end of the day was incredibly variable and completely dependent on how the day had gone. Now, I do the things that are most important to me first thing in the morning. I feel far more productive. It's been awesome. Also, I don't use caffeine at all.
Ok, serious question. What happens if there're days when you go out with people and get in bed at 2AM? Do you still get up at 5AM? Doesn't that mess up your body for days after?
This has only happened a couple times. I hardly function on less than 5 hours of sleep, and not very well on less than 6-7. So in this case I would get up at 5 to maintain the habit, do some reading for an hour, then go back to sleep for a couple hours. As I said, there are tradeoffs. I'm pretty much fried by 9-10PM, which is having an impact on my social life.
I'm a life long morning person and avoided social outings like that for exactly this reason. I'm less reluctant to these days since I think they're actually fun but yeah I can't sleep in later than like 8 AM generally. But I'll nap the next day. And let's be honest, if you're drinking until 2am, you're probably not sleeping well that night regardless of when you go to sleep.
Anyway, the clear cut advantage in my mind is that I'd rather be awake when the sun is out.
Same here. Definitely much more productive after 1am historically but for the past few years I've been getting up at 5am since I can do that every day and still fit in with regular people's expectations. Working through the night is something I could only do once in a while realistically these days. So the trade off is worthwhile for me.
As I said, it's taking a long time to adjust. I've previously consistently gotten up at 630AM every day, and it never felt as natural as waking up at 830-900. I still think those are the hours my body most wants to sleep, but it's not so hardwired that I can't choose a different schedule.
Interesting. This implies work gets the remaining variable mental energy. I’m all for having side projects, but given enough time, but not enough mental energy, which should get the leftover and presumably less productive bits?
The way I've switched from a 'wake-at-2-pm' kind of person to a 'wake-at-6-am' kind of person is setting an alarm, popping 200mg caffeine + 200mg modafinil, then going back to bed. In 10 minutes I'll be right back up and ready to go to the gym and go about my day. I've started dialing back the modafinil since it seems unnecessary to get up anymore and I have some ethical concerns (see comment below.)
I'll also +1 the friction removal concept -- laying out my gym clothes the night before really helps me get out the door as soon as I'm up in the morning. Otherwise, I'll tend to want to go back to bed.
The wide use of drugs as performance enhancers in our industry really makes me unhappy and uncomfortable. (I guess it probably exists in other industries too?)
I can't work out how to properly put into words how or why it makes me uncomfortable. But it seems like instead of drawing lines and saying people shouldn't need to take ADHD medication to focus, or modafinil to work unnatural hours, or ambien to sleep on planes, we're just going along with it. Like the work should come first, and of course we should take drugs to allow us to meet work expectations, or to get the upper hand in intra-employee competition, etc.
That’s an odd bit of moralizing. We’ve been taking drugs to alter our mental state for thousands of years (alcohol, caffeine). I don’t know about Modanifil, but Adderall is one of the most well studied drugs out there, so much so that we give it to children for permanent daily use. A therapeutic dose is much easier on your cardiovascular system than the double shot espressos that everyone chugs down.
I have ADHD but I've never took any medication for that. Would you mind to share some of these effects? Because over the years I feel like my attention span has shrank considerably.
Modafinil has basically as safe as caffeine, isn't it? The big difference with caffeine is that many governments permit caffeine in food/drink but control modafinil, but trusting governments to have good opinions on drug safety seems a little unsubstantiated. I think modafinil is less addictive than caffeine and has fewer withdrawal problems. And it's not a drug like cocaine or alcohol that has serious long-term side effects. So I think the only serious reason to avoid it, if it doesn't cause you side effects, is a morality that says certain drugs are bad. (Which isn't even consistent - there are plenty of moralities in the world that say that caffeine and alcohol are bad too, and that at least makes sense.)
It's not unusual to feel gut-uncomfortable with technology enhancing the lives of humans beyond where nature left us, but at the end of the day, I have trouble seeing how you can say using modafinil to get your job done is bad but using eyeglasses to get your job done is good.
Do M.D.s generally recognize modafinil as less safe than caffeine and alcohol? It seems unlikely to me that the political will exists in the US to schedule either, regardless of what doctors actually think.
My claim is that no research exists that argues that modafinil is more dangerous than caffeine. (I'm not 100% sure about this claim, and it's easily debunkable. And for what it's worth I take caffeine and have never taken modafinil.)
I'm deeply uncomfortable with it too, and that's why I'm probably going to taper down to a complete stop. It's just hard to want to do that when I'm much more focused and productive when I'm on strong stimulants. All of my most effective coworkers are medicated.
This isn't sustainable. Ask older folks around you who used to use a lot of stimulants when they were younger, and you'll find the answer. Stimulant use is a lot harder on the body and the mind the older you get. Caffeine, as a light stimulant, is better, but can also be problematic.
I've encountered these work environments before and I wouldn't want to again. In my case it was a bunch of young people pushing themselves to the brink hoping to win the startup lottery as early as possible. They didn't of course. I hope your work environment isn't like this.
I quit caffeine (stomach issues) over a period of a few weeks, I replaced my morning up and moving cup with a shower as cold as I can stand, I challenge anyone to still feel sleepy after that (assuming they slept well).
Like my classmates who took adderal to get good grades, definitely. It shouldn’t be tolerated and should be tested. But then all of academia needs to change.
I used to be a big caffeine drinker. In my experience the problem with caffeine is that your body's tolerance to it seems to increase and so you need to keep increasing the dosage in order to get the same effect. It ended up being a net negative for me.
I've noticed that the best way to wake up early is simply to go to sleep early. Takes a bit of work at the beginning if you've developed some bad habits but eventually you can get used to it. Seems to be more mental than physical.
Also, caffeine should really be used only for emergencies in my opinion. Like if you've had very little sleep but you still need to be productive. Other than that I would stay away from it. Your body really does not need daily doses of caffeine to function, just like it does not need nicotine nor alcohol nor any other drug (assuming no medical need). They are just net negatives.
Drink green tea if you really feel like having some mild stimulant every day.
I'm surprised that you're commenting about the caffeine and not the modafinil!
Caffeine has lots of wonderful effects on the mind and the body. It was essential in helping me switch to an earlier routine: can't go to bed at 10pm if you're not tired because you woke up at noon; best way to be tired at 10pm is to get up at 6am; caffeine helped me get up at 6am.
Cycling your caffeine intake is a great way to still reap the benefits of caffeine without building up a tolerance.
>>I'm surprised that you're commenting about the caffeine and not the modafinil!
I know nothing about modafinil.
>>Caffeine has lots of wonderful effects on the mind and the body
It allows you to be productive even after not enough sleep. Unfortunately you can only keep this up for so long. In my case I now only use caffeine when I really need it. I'll gulp down three or four cups of coffee if I need to do all nighters. And because I have virtually no tolerance to it anymore the caffeine will work like a charm and I will not feel tired at all.
> Cycling your caffeine intake is a great way to still reap the benefits of caffeine without building up a tolerance.
I've tried this. Doesn't work for me. Seems like my body built a tolerance to caffeine, and no amount of break from it (even a month) will reset that tolerance.
For people like me who often find "go to sleep early" impossible, try to get in an hour or so of solid exercise at least every couple of days--running, biking, lifting, or whatever--something that will fully exhaust you physically. And if possible, do it outside in the sun. This is the best way I've found to regulate sleeping patterns, and it also counteracts caffeine if I've had too much. I haven't found anything else that works as well.
I too find caffeine delicious, but then I realized that I have to have coffee every morning, the same amount, and can't have more coffee during the rest of the day, and am not even awake enough to enjoy the coffee I do have in the morning.
So I've been cutting down and drinking lower-strength of coffee, and more recently tea and lower-strength tea (which is also delicious). There are other delicious things I can eat and drink the rest of the day that don't have drugs in them.
I find it strange how many people have this puritanical mindset that just because something is pleasurable or can induce some degree of physical dependency this automatically equates to something with negative health consequences or something that they should feel guilty about imbibing.
Coffee is one of the, or the best, source of antioxidants in the standard American diet. Barring pre-existing Cardiac health issues there is no harm to daily use as long as you don't exceed maximum recommended caffeine doses, which was around six shots of espresso or equivalent.
Furthermore "In some publications, caffeine and trigonelline are considered to be antioxidants also." There is much more medical evidence that coffee is uniquely beneficial than otherwise.
"Green tea. usually contains around 25 milligrams of caffeine per 8-ounce serving. It's about half of the amount of caffeine found in a typical cup of black tea and one-quarter of the amount found in a typical cup of coffee."
Depending on the brand, it's equivalent to a half of cup of coffee. Although green tea contains l-theanine which helps offset the jitters from caffeine. Personally I try to limit caffeine to the most bare minimum as I personally find that it causes a reduction in my emotional spectrum.
> setting an alarm, popping 200mg caffeine + 200mg modafinil
Wow, pumping yourself full of drugs just so you can be a better cog in a machine?
Thanks, but honestly that's a non-starter. I'm not sure how we got to this point, but please reconsider - some employers might actually look at this and think that's an acceptable thing to suggest to an employee.
This missed the fact that there’s a massive body of evidence showing people have different genetic predispositions to being morning people versus night owls
Extremely small sample size (of two), but I used to be a night owl, and in my old(er) age I've definitely become a morning person. Same with my wife. It's not unusual for us to be in bed by 8pm. My point is that being a morning/night person might be changeable.
It is a fact that as we age we prefer to go to bed earlier. There is a good evolutionary explanation for this. It makes sense that teenagers with better eye sight would stay up late to watch over the tribe / livestock at night, this predisposition for younger people to be night owls benefited the survival of the species.
I don't think that's what this article is about. Everyone has predispositions. There are some techniques that work for many people. This person is just sharing theirs in case it helps someone else.
This is pure speculation with zero scientific evidence, but I believe that some (many?) people's internal clock is not tuned exactly to a 24-hour day.
People have wide variations (in some cases, defects) in virtually every physical and mental dimension we can measure. The idea that everyone's body clock is precisely tuned to 24 hours just doesn't seem right, it's far more likely to be within a range, perhaps between 18 and 30 hours. With that logic, I speculate that many "night owls" are people whose body clock doesn't reset properly until 26-28 hours from the previous day.
I would love to know if there are any research studies along these lines.
Yeah, Eric Bittman at Umass Amherst is one person that reasearches circadian biology you can pick up some lingo to search for from papers.
Generally speaking, no critter's circadian cycle is 24 hours. They are all "entrained" (e.g reset) by stimuli, among which (blue) light is the most well studied. And non-24 hour circadian cycle in people can be diagnosed, and it is possible to be considerd a disability in the legal sense. But it is tricky to get testing, and insurance coverage for testing.
Even so, this can be changed via environment. I had a big predisposition to being a night owl in the past, often sleeping between 1 - 3 am, but after I enlisted in the military, being an early bird has stuck with me ever since. I often wake up 5-6 am and go to sleep ~10-11 pm, sometimes closer to 9, sometimes later.
For me, not using alarms to wake up in general, and sleeping earlier works wonders. I also adjusted to having less sleep as a result of the forced sleeplessness of military life.
The advice in the article is very universal and not specific to early morning people. A night owl too can prepare his breakfast or lunch, make a plan or meditate before sleep and benefit from that. It takes just a few changes and the title becomes The Secret To Becoming an Annoyingly Productive Night Owl. So what, you wake up early?
I think the key point here that was left unmentioned is that the writer seems to be working from home. If I had to get ready to leave the home and commute every day, I think a lot of my morning time would be spent just getting ready and commuting. This is one of the chief reasons I prefer to work from home: the productivity gains one gets from having free time in the morning to work.
EDIT: I just noticed that the author does commute. Still, I'm not sure I'd be productive if I had to commute an hour each way every day.
He explicitly says in the article that he arrives at his office by 6am.
That said, I suspect he doesn't have a 1.5 hr commute like many do (and I used to have, at times). Working from home does indeed provide a tremendous advantage, particularly with those quiet early morning hours.
This is specifically the reason why I changed from a person that got in barely at 10am to somebody that comes in at 6am.
Way less traffic and that cuts my commute down by half. (1hour to 30 min)
And I found I actually like 2-3 hours of no distractions at the beginning of the day.
When I came in at 10am, it was 0-100 almost immediately because somebody always wanted something.
Took me a good month though to actually learn to go to sleep before 11pm. Originally whenever I slept before 11pm, even if I was dead tired, I would wake up at 2-3 am and not be able to sleep again.
Not possible with my employer. 10am is the latest I am allowed to arrive. And to be honest, I already hated being in office at 8pm some times, so being out from work at 3/4pm is also a plus in my book.
Probably depends on where you live/work. My experience is that the roads go from empty to busy around 6:30 and start to get seriously clogged around 7:15. They're worst 8:15 - 9:30, but 11-2:30 is pretty similar to 7:45, partly because of double-parked trucks everywhere.
Sounds like the key to a productive, quiet morning is to work from home, or get up at 4:30am in order to avoid traffic and get to work by 6am. I think I prefer the former.
Instead of focussing of being externally useful / abused - please consider: internal, subjective rules to obey.
You are more than an experiment on short-living, abandoned batteries for the society you feel to be living a standard for.
Just because you are doing work does not mean that you are a cog. Many people do work that is meaningful for them. There is no shame in being productive.
And your feelings toward a purpose in life aren't objectively right either.
If I want to spend my short time on this planet in a more productive way so I can do more in my life, that's my choice and I'm not making a mistake or doing it wrong.
Do what you feel you need to do, but don't pretend like I'm living life wrong just because I'm different.
I currently work with a largely European dev team and started getting up and 5am to have more work day overlap. The hardest thing for me was getting to sleep at 9pm because I’ve always struggled to get to sleep. Usually I have too much on my mind.
Turns out that necessity actually forced me to figure it out. I discovered that I can get to sleep if I turn on a movie that I’ve seen many times before because it basically keeps my mind from wandering.
Not kidding at all, for the last 4 months I’ve turned on Avengers Infinity War every night + the sleep timer on the TV. I’m usually out cold before “Launch 17-A” and I never make it past the Guardians scene that comes right after. Also have to sleep on my side.
I’m sure it sounds crazy but it’s the only thing I’ve found that consistently works.
Exactly the same - no matter how much I have on my mind, I can usually get to sleep very quickly listening to audiobooks. It has to be a book that is a somewhat interesting but not too absorbing. And as you say, it has to be an audio book you have already heard before. I myself favor books on cognitive science, I really like Daniel Dennet's books for this.
Used to do this until I stopped needing to. A consistent bed time plus Rick and Morty/Venture Bros./Archer, just going from season 1 episode 1 on down the list, and then restarting once I got to the last episode at some point.
Worked very well, but I think if I tried it now, I would have a more difficult time sleeping with television playing in the background now that I no longer sleep this way.
I don't think it's too much to claim that if you can develop a routine that makes you perform great mentally that early in the morning, you probably aren't a "night person".
I'll disagree here as I'm naturally a night person but my current schedule is all early mornings due to my combination of work, study and parenting. It's not fun but I maintain it with discipline and it works out really well for productivity. If I don't need to be productive and relax a bit I'll slip into night owl mode.
This hasn't been my experience. My natural sleep cycle is something like 2am-10am, but for a span of 6 months I was able to develop a habit of 9:30pm-5:30am. In the morning I'd immediately go to the gym and then upon return (~7am) start doing work. It was one of the most productive periods of my life.
Unfortunately, despite seeing the benefits of the early-morning schedule, over time I reverted back to my night-owl tendencies.
One alternative solution is to schedule all of your emails so they are sent at 7 or 8am. That way you'll be annoyingly productive early in the morning, while sleeping.
Does the author have kids? I’m up at 5:30am getting my kids ready for school. If I’m lucky, that process is fully complete by 8:25am when the final kids are on the school bus.
If I had the luxury of a zen wake up experience, I don’t know what I would do with myself.
Having kids is a choice like any other — there are upsides as well as downsides, both of which you don't fully know in advance. I do think it's quite safe to say that quality sleep is not something to expect when you decide to have kids.
2 quick things to add. First, eat dinner much earlier if you're remotely sensitive to blood sugar movements (read: a normal human) because the difference between eating at 6 and at 8 is huge when trying to get to sleep. Second, have something you really want to wake up to do. For me, it's almost always breakfast. I can't wait to get out of bed to have the delicious thing I have every day which my body really wants.
He glosses over his consumption of coffee way too easily. "No drugs involved! ... except for a strong shot of caffeine, a powerful stimulant, just after waking up, and again 6 hours later."
No thanks. I'll listen to my body and its rhythms, producing work when opportunities arise. Restricting one's schedule artificially like this seems like a recipe for burnout and misery.
> No drugs or goofy supplements other than my medium cup of Starbuck coffee every morning around 5:30am, plus a booster cup around midday.
You have no idea how much coffee affects your sleep and energy levels until you quit drinking it. Before I quit drinking coffee, when I got home from work I was done for the day. I had a 'boring' evening routine because I had no mental energy to do anything other than veg on youtube videos and pass out early. Since I've quit, I have the same morning routine, but when I get home the productivity continues into the evenings. I feel like I have my teenage energy again. I always wondered what changed or if it's just me getting old, but no, it's because I started drinking coffee at one of my jobs in my early thirties.
The other secret must be not having kids. Or maybe I need to extend my evening routine to dropping them off at school/childcare the night before, which would both reduce the time needed for my morning routine and guarantee quality sleep!
No mention of children in this article, or anywhere in this thread. I guess parents are just doomed to be annoyingly unproductive, no matter how early we get up.
I'm a single parent of two young kids. I go to bed with them (i.e. 7:30-8pm) and I wake at 4am. They tend to wake about 6am, this gives me a solid 1.5 hours of productive time and about half an hour of muck around time.
I think it was only two or three days ago I was on HN reading a comment from a single working (Army) parent who takes a few credits every semester. It didn’t sound pleasant, and he specifically stated this was a temporary state of affairs because he is setting himself up for after he leaves the Army so he can best be there for his kid when it matters, but it was at the very least, a productive routine and lifestyle that matched his circumstances and life choices.
Routine, Discipline and a regular amount of sleep, regular in this case meaning routine amount, not necessarily a lot or a little. That is my takeaway from every single not-worthless article or piece of commentary that has helped me get my own shit together. The actual details generally don’t matter, the actual lifestyle doesn’t matter, and the actual job or field of study doesn’t matter. So long as you have those three elements, you, the general you and not necessarily you specifically, can figure out the rest. The amount of caffeine consumption or lack thereof, whether you shower in the morning or at night or both, how you commute, whether you work from home or not, what you eat in the morning, et cetera. I guess in the case of two or more working adults in the same house, cooperation/division of labor is another key element in that mixture, but I am not speaking from experience, just observation, on that one.
Not to discredit the difficulties of parenting, it is the hardest job in the world to do well, but somehow we’ve collectively increased our population to 7 billion of us and a not insignificant fraction of us generally turn out alright, and the how you go about it matters a little bit less than the why. The parents that are enthusiastic about and enjoy being parents will always be better than the ones that had it foisted upon them somehow, and in that sense, it is just like another job: you learn how to do it, you learn how to do it well, you make it an integral part of your day, and that means building it into your routine so that you always have time to be a parent, that way your kids don’t turn out like those of us where our parents weren’t present and we were background details, distractions, when they were.
I'm the single parent who made that comment. It's so important to be an involved parent. Not just for the children but this is also your life. If I can't take the time to enjoy being a parent then why am I even a parent?
Also, discipline is king. Anyone can pull a couple of all-nighters to get some work done but it takes discipline to make a multi-year plan of hard work come to fruition. I have previously considered stopping my studies but I can't accept how my life would look in 5 years if I did this. I'm giving myself a few difficult years to give my future self a much better life.
Can confirm you were, I could not remember your username until I just now saw it.
Your prior commentary that I referenced struck a chord with me because I’m facing facing down the path of a life that in some ways, might look something like yours, actually with fewer pressures, but still enough to seem daunting to me right now. I’ve gotten better about my own time management than where I was a few years ago and still have a long way to go. If you, if anyone, can do all of that and still be there as a parent, then I ought to be able to hold myself to a standard that is at least almost as high.
I’m not sure what I’m saying here, except, thank you for your commentary, your thoughts. In a way that is difficult for me to properly explain here, it helped me to read your point of view before and now. Good luck, for whatever that is worth to you, and I hope the best for you and your kid.
I have 3 children, and wake up at 4 AM every day. I have my kids put me to bed at 8 PM, then they stay up for another hour. I then get 3 hours of quiet, isolated time every morning before they get up. We have breakfast together, do the morning chores, get dressed and send everyone off to school, then I go back to work and start catching up with my team.
Admittedly, that didn't work when they were toddlers. But once they hit school age, you can certainly figure out a way to make things work.
Great ideas. Article bookmarked. I already do some of Nick's suggestions, like lay out clothes at night and organize food. Setting priorities of night life vs. productive mornings is easy for me except for about once a week when we go out at night for entertainment.
The electrification of the night (light bulb, then tvs, then mobile phones) has forced people deeper into the night.
Ironically, slightly unrelated, but Hindu texts speak that Rakshas (demons) that come out in the night and that the best take to wake and start the day is Brahmamuhurtha.
As a night owl, it's because often time by the time I get to work and am still ramping up my day, they're going at full speed and expect me to do the same.
Because the majority of people, who probably include people richer than you whom you beg for money, personally enjoy waking up early and they feel like their personal preferences are moral absolutes.
>> It's not a secret that women's employment is largely counterproductive by itself
This kind of sexism can be quite harmful. You might want to rethink this one.
>> They could do all the things described in the article for their working husbands.
True, but there's no obvious reason why it shouldn't be men who do these things for their working wives. Why should one half of a marriage devote their time and effort to the other half's success rather than having their own success as well?
Their success is measured in different terms: in having children (more children than parents for sustained population). In this most important regard, they have failed.
I hate to break it to you, hoss, but income and productivity are not the same thing. Productivity has continued to grow at a reasonable pace since the "Civil Rights Era". Meanwhile, incomes stagnated. I.e., what you said is exactly inverted.
In all seriousness, I'm thinking about starting a "night company" for night time people. Come in at 2, work until 10. Is there anybody out there who'd be interested in something like that?