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4 a.m. Is the Most Productive Hour

wsj.com

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Re: 4 a.m. Is the Most Productive Hour

#6

Post by SyneRyder »

For anyone deciding if it's worth clicking through: it's mostly a list of anecdotes about early-riser CEOs & people who workout as soon as they wake up. I didn't see anything about those who work through the night.

[I personally find 4am is often productive for me, but that's because I work at night, and I'll only continue coding at 4am if I'm already in the zone. If I'm not making progress, I'll want to crash to sleep long before then.]

Re: 4 a.m. Is the Most Productive Hour

#8

Post by johansch »

Who the heck gets productive within 1-2 hours of waking up?

Sure, those hours are great for ingesting what has happened since the last cycle but not really for creating new value.

Edit: I just realized I wrote this the wrong way. What I meant was that I can't imagine people being productive during the first 1-2 hours after waking up.

Re: 4 a.m. Is the Most Productive Hour

#9

Post by jff »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #5

This was obviously written by a "morning person." Like most engineers and other creatives, 4 AM is when I'm just starting to get my deep sleep (which peaks at 6-7 AM). 12-2 AM is the most productive time of the day for me.

> Like most engineers and other creatives

Free yourself of culturally-assigned norms ("engineers and creative people work best at midnight, with lots of coffee") and consider a wider breadth of experience.

The most productive and effective person I know, a computer engineer, typically starts working before I'm even awake. The premise of the article is that 4 a.m. is both outside most of society's normal waking period AND it's immediately after you've had a solid night's sleep, while 12-2 isn't really such an unusual time to be awake and, for most people, it comes at the end of the day.

As someone who woke up at 5 a.m. for many summers so I could start work on the farm before dawn, I know that you can definitely accomplish a lot of work before most people even roll into the office, but I also know that sleeping in is incredibly satisfying :)

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