Sounds like #NoKids rather than #SpainBrain. I'm sure it sounds like I'm being pithy, but you fall into line when your kids get home at 4 and you want to spend time with them before they go to bed at 8. Maybe his point stands in some sense, but once you add kids into the mix it quickly becomes "9-5" again or "burning the candle at both ends."
I saw some other comments that this doesn't work with kids.
Not sure I follow exactly. The point is that 5 hour work days can be a better setup than 8 hour days (given that no manager is in your way etc.). What's stopping you from putting those hours in when the kids are in school?
I would agree of course that choosing to be employed in a 9-5 job is probably a much better deal when you have kids because of parental leave.
...if they want to come in a 8:00pm and work until 2:00am, why not? Part of the "why not" is a deeply ingrained belief in at least American culture that morning people are just "better" than night people. It's so ingrained that we mostly forget to talk about it and it's just assumed. "Early bird catches the worm" and all that. I once saw a workplace where there were night-person-friendly policies and schedules. Then…
> Then one insanely morning person joins and wants to leave at 3:30 every day. Suddenly all of his scheduling preferences were presumed valid Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? It's as hard for the morning person to deal with night-person preferences as it's hard for a night person to deal with morning-person preferences. (Disclaimer: I'm a morning person and I'm not American.)
Why wouldn't their preferences be presumed valid? If I read the story right, there was one morning person and several night people. Why should the one person's preferences be presumed more valid than the several persons' preferences?
I think it's because people think "morning person" is the default, and correct, way of being. And that not being a morning person makes you odd or lazy. So when someone comes in challenging late-friendly scheduling, they're assumed to be the correct one, and that the workplace has somehow been in error by allowing later schedules.
But morning really is the default; it's our biological default. Most people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night naturally. Many people have small children, good luck remaining a night person with a 1 year old in the house. There are real reasons here, it's not just some arbitrary decision.
Biologically, don't most people wake up at dawn? That doesn't get you to the office at 7:30 AM in the winter.
That is, our schedule is not a biologically-based schedule. "Morning" (as defined by our society) is not the biological default.
I work the over way (west side of the Atlantic, most clients in Europe). So I get up, work until lunchtime, and then my 5 hours working day is other if I want. Of course it’s not everyday I don’t work in the afternoon, but it’s nice that you can spend the afternoon with the kids if you want. Ok, sometimes duty calls in the middle of my night (last Tuesday I was woke up at 3am for an emergency on a client server) but…
I once got woken up by a phone call from Europe at 4 AM. The first thing I had to do was remember an 8-digit hex number. It took a bit...
I live in a region where winter days are very short. I go to work and it's dark, I leave work and it's dark. I don't understand why we have decided to go sit in buildings during daylight hours. Even with a 40-hour week, I would love if the work day was shifted to allow one to get sunlight for a few hours each day.
I work a completely remote position out of Phoenix, but live in the Eastern time zone. So I'm 2-3 hours off my team depending on whether daylight savings is in or not. I've considered options like taking extended vacations to Europe. I could wake up at 9am UK, do some sight seeing. Start my 8 hour PHX work day at 3pm UK time. Work until 11pm UK time, got to sleep. Rinse, repeat. The only thing stopping me is kids in school.
If that bothers you, you simply aren't wearing proper clothing.
The difference between a refreshing chill and a harrowing cold can just be an extra sweater under your coat and a good attitude. As long as it isn't very windy, it's easy to make 14 comfortable.
I'm a Spaniard and I could never do that. In order to be able to work like that you need a very specific set of circumstances, probably first of all being self-employed. Since I work by contract for a company, and they force me to put 8 hours a day, I can't do that. However, it is true that I am the most productive in the afternoon. That is why I try to enter and leave work as early as possible, so that I can spend t…
Depends if your hourly paid or salaried - in theory salaried jobs its up to you to decide how and when you work within reason.
How is that even an argument? Does someone really argue that getting them up early is good for them? Especially for high school kids (maybe 14-18 ish?). No one could possibly think that sending them to a school that starts at 7am is any way good for them. In our distract the high school starts at 7am and the small kids start at 9am. This makes no sense to me at all. (I'm not a kid complaining, I'm a parent)
>In our distract the high school starts at 7am and the small kids start at 9am. This makes no sense to me at all. (I'm not a kid complaining, I'm a parent) I was always under the impression this staggered start rate among school tiers was because they all share the same buses. If they all started at the same time they would need ~3x as many buses and bus drivers.
It would make a lot more sense to have the small kids start at 7 and the high school start at 9. Elementary school kids are naturally larks while teenagers are notorious owls.
I think it's because people think "morning person" is the default, and correct, way of being. And that not being a morning person makes you odd or lazy. So when someone comes in challenging late-friendly scheduling, they're assumed to be the correct one, and that the workplace has somehow been in error by allowing later schedules.
But morning really is the default; it's our biological default. Most people wake up in the morning and go to bed at night naturally. Many people have small children, good luck remaining a night person with a 1 year old in the house. There are real reasons here, it's not just some arbitrary decision.
Grades in primary and secondary school jump significantly if you push start times back from 8 AM to more like 10 AM. It may be the biological default to wake up in the morning, but there's absolutely nothing that says that peak performance should be reached the instant you wake up. If anything, I'd expect exactly the opposite! It takes time to get caches warmed, adjust biochemistry away from resting levels and toward operational levels, and get dumb maintenance tasks (breakfast, travel to workplace, "milk the cows") out of the way and move to higher-value and more complex activities (hunting, crafting, socialization). Until you do those things you're not going to be operating well, and many early-morning tasks wouldn't require peak performance and optimizations for an early peak would be wasted. I'd also expect intellectual pursuits to be more strongly affected; you need to be able to not get eaten by a tiger at absolutely any time, but you can choose when to sit down and start knapping flint or talking to people, which means you have more freedom and reward when optimizing the timing of peak performance on intellectual tasks.
Then probably sunlight is not your biggest worry. Here in Helsinki lunch walks are a must to catch that small amount of light we get, even if it's -10 or -20.