Live data from Hacker News

The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

productivityreport.org

41–50 of 122 posts

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#41

The sun is also fairly biased in this respect, "coincidentally" lighting up the times when morning people like to work, while keeping night owls in the dark, where it is harder to do many jobs. How long will we allow this oppression, I wonder?

Morning people frequently rise well before the sun.

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#42

I’m sure. It’s pretty obvious. If you have a choice in the matter, early start gives you superpowers and is evidence of discipline. I typically start work at 7:30. I have about 2-2.5 hours of actual, mostly undisturbed productivity. Early in my career my managers thought I was a genius because I knew everything. I did - because I read stuff. Nowadays I’m a boss guy, and I’m fully up to speed and ready to go at my 9:1…

Getting sufficient, quality sleep is taking care of yourself.

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#43
I've never been a morning person, but I have worked circles around some of those who valued that far more than it's worth.

Anyone who thinks getting up early makes them superior to those who don't is only boosting their ego. Getting stuff done right it what's truly important.

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#44
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can't. Well, maybe you personally can. But all the actual science says that willpower, sleep hygiene, and sunlight exposure only move the margins a bit for those with inflexible night-time chronotypes. Doing everything "right" is not going to make a 5am natural sleeper into a morning person, it's going to make them into a 3am natural sleeper.

sorry, nothing about our bodies tells me they're this inflexible. i wonder if the "nighttime chronotypes" controlled for things that actually would influence it, like light exposure. regardless, one of the things that worked best for me was rigging a bright light to dawn gradually at a early hour, and cutting off my bright light exposure at a early hour. even if i have a "night chronotype" it's still possible to "tri…

And plenty of people deal with variable work schedules often driven by coworkers in different time zones, shifts, on-call, getting up at 4am to catch a flight, some events that go late etc. I guess there are people with highly regimented hours but I can’t say I personally know a lot—but then most of the people I know have to be pretty flexible.

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#45

I’m sure. It’s pretty obvious. If you have a choice in the matter, early start gives you superpowers and is evidence of discipline. I typically start work at 7:30. I have about 2-2.5 hours of actual, mostly undisturbed productivity. Early in my career my managers thought I was a genius because I knew everything. I did - because I read stuff. Nowadays I’m a boss guy, and I’m fully up to speed and ready to go at my 9:1…

"Starting early shows discipline" is exactly as valid as "staying late shows dedication", i.e. not at all.

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#46

Yeah, because more senior workers eventually have kids, and kids need a proper morning wake up, and child care doesn't run until 10 PM. Don't like it? There are lots of industries with nighttime work or extensive travel obligations.

I've seen a lot of research (such as [1]) showing that kids waking up early is actually detrimental to them. I feel the causality goes in pretty much the reverse direction that you're implying: the children are forced to get up early to go to school because their parents need to be free of them early and their parents need to be free of them early because they are forced to be at work early. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm…

Define: kid.

Parent wrote “having kids” and take this from a father of a 5 and 2 year old it’s: “daddy cheezy eggz!!!” at 530am no matter what.

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#47

I’m sure. It’s pretty obvious. If you have a choice in the matter, early start gives you superpowers and is evidence of discipline. I typically start work at 7:30. I have about 2-2.5 hours of actual, mostly undisturbed productivity. Early in my career my managers thought I was a genius because I knew everything. I did - because I read stuff. Nowadays I’m a boss guy, and I’m fully up to speed and ready to go at my 9:1…

I don't follow, whatever you do from 7:30-9:30 I used to do just as well from 22:00-24:00. Family obligations unfortunately made splitting the work day in half like this very hard so I now start earlier, feel tired all day and am much less productive.

I'm just not a morning person, before 9:00 I just feel miserable. It doesn't matter if it is work, exercise, reading or studying - nothing feels right.

Re: The Workplace Is Rigged to Favor Morning People

#50

"Morning people" stuff tends to select for conscientiousness. Not a perfect correlation, but a positive one nonetheless. I say this as a serious night owl, and someone who is intellectually conscientious (I love learning and mastering) but traditionally not (it takes me a lot of effort to be organised and disciplined to a reasonable standard).

To me, the idea that there's any correlation there at all is frankly bizarre and smacks of presenteeism. Feels like a PHB-holdover we should all be rightfully trashing as an anachronism.

Also, how is this even supposed to benefit anyone in an age of geodistributed teams? Again, caring about what time someone gets up seems like a smell of an outdated organizational structure.

Post reply on HN