When it comes to work (or other morning activities), I think there are actually two aspects to this that often get confused.

One is what you're talking about: the way people regard waking up early as virtuous.

The other is that, how early or late you arrive to an event sends signals about your attitude toward the event. Or at least it is interpreted that way.

For example, if you are very excited about seeing a particular movie or a concert and it has general admission, you will arrive early to get a good seat. Someone who is ambivalent about the movie will not make such an effort. Therefore, arrival time correlates with enthusiasm, and people know this, and they reason backwards.

There's also probably some stuff behind why people don't want to be the first to arrive at a party. Arriving fashionably late can show you only want to experience the best part of the party, which in a sense is a power move indicating you think you are more important than some of the other guests.

I think people sometimes have these perceptions in the business world too. If you have a later schedule, they're not sure if it's because you are aligning your work schedule with your productive hours or because you'd rather not be there. Ideally, people wouldn't make assumptions, but it happens.

Showing up a little late to a party is more courteous as the hosts have just a little more time to set things up without needing to entertain people.

Showing up early on the other hand often put's people who are not ready on the spot. If you regularly host parties who will get annoyed at people that show up 30+ minutes early unless they are willing to help.

To be fair these expectations vary wildly between cultures and countries. Where I come from the starting time of a party/event is regarded as actual starting time. You’re welcome, not expected, to arrive at that time and while there might be some minor preparations left, you’re in no way expected to help by being on time.

However there was a reddit thread (or was it HN?) a few weeks back discussing this very issue and if i remember correctly being on time was considered almost rude in brazil as well as a number of other countries,

This varies a lot from country to country as we noticed working with a very international group of friends in Spain.

My friend basically sent out an invite to her party with staggered start times based on nationality. Spanish Greeks were asked to come two or three hours before the real start time, French one hour and Brits and Germans were given the actual time.

Isn't what you saying exactly the problem mmaunder talked about?

I like to sleep from 3-12 and I like to take naps at 18.

This has nothing to do with me being unable to do a job or being not intersted in it.

I worked for a bunch of people who gave me a hard time for not being awake at 9.

> Isn't what you saying exactly the problem mmaunder talked about?

I was trying to make a distinction between perceptions of character and perceptions of attitude.

Though not everyone agrees, many people see waking up early as a valuable part of being self-disciplined and hardworking. That's a perception about character.

But that can't account for perceptions people have around events that happen in the afternoon or evening, and yet people still read things into arrival time for those events too. So there is a second factor in perception.

> This has nothing to do with me being unable to do a job or being not intersted in it.

I agree that it's absolutely possible for this to be the case. But perception doesn't always reflect reality.

Often people really do understand and just like to tease others who don't fit the mold. But sometimes people make assumptions, so basically I'm trying to be aware of what assumptions they might make and why just in case it happens.

I see, okay.

Yeah, I wish it was different tho' :/

There are, of course, some early risers who don't do this. But yeah, the ones who do are pretty unbearable. I had a neighbor who boasted of how she woke up at 4:45a to work out. Of course, she fell asleep in front of the TV at 8p...

>I had a neighbor who boasted of how she woke up at 4:45a to work out. Of course, she fell asleep in front of the TV at 8p...

Being sanctimonious is annoying, but that sounds like she's getting the right amount of sleep

And if she had bragged about getting the right amount of sleep, I wouldn't have cared. But she just went on and on about the superiority of early risers: how this successful VC or that successful CEO wakes up very early, and how in fact most successful people in SV wake up early.

It's not people who get up early and brag about it that are the problem. It's people who brag about useless stuff that are the problem.

It's the same with people who go to bed really late as if it's some kind of achievement. Or people who sleep less. Or people who sleep more.

All of these things are simply facts about your life. They don't make you any more virtuous, interesting, blah blah blah, than the next person.

as an early riser myself, what bothers me about this is that I personally feel like I'm only talking about because someone else is making a big deal out of it. I don't think I go out of my way to bring the topic up, but I'm constantly getting people saying things like "omg I saw when you sent that email/made that commit/whatever, do you ever sleep", and then I gotta say something like "well I was up at 5 so I knocked it out before I drove in..." and now it's a thing we're talking about and I'm the crazy guy.

It feels like a much bigger issue to late-risers than early-risers.

I really wish I could sleep by 2am. It would make life possible. My natural sleep pattern is 5am-12. I've literally spent the last decade trying to solve it. Until, I gave up.

I'm the same, but I've found a life hack: work remotely for a company in the US while in the EU ... then it lines up better!

it's been a conscious effort on my part and I'm still very susceptible to falling off the wagon for a week at a time. I don't think it's very natural for people tbh. I was always a late worker and still kind of am when the shit really hits the fan, but I am a believer that when I have to put in the extra hours, I'm usually more efficient in the morning that late at night. That motivates me to keep trying.

For some people it is the most natural thing in the world.

Move to a new time zone and that 'natural' 5am-12 would shift to match that time zone. So, it's really not about biology it's about how you set up your environment.

That said, as long as it's working for you great! Just don't assume it's impossible to change if it's causing you problems.

This is not your fault, as you really do not know the lengths and depths and tears and effort it has taken for me to change my sleep pattern to be consistent. But there is no "assumption here".

A main problem is - even when i've had to be awake at 9am every day (yes awake at 9am, not working at 9am) it causes me to fall really ill. Mentally and physically your body feels wrecked and it doesn't matter how tired you are, you wake up at night.

I now, after a decade, manage a sleep cycle that doesn't change every day by a few hours and I can just about function enough for meetings.

I can just about get to 1pm meetings and it's taken so much effort just to be able to get here!

I've written nearly 4 articles covering the different strategies i've used to be able to wake up early in the morning. I've slept through some of the most important things - which led me in my final exams to just stay up all night to get to 9am exams incase I wouldn't wake up.

What has worked is accepting that it is a genuine disability and problem. And as you say, adjusting my environment to suit my sleeping issues. Unfortunately, changing time zones doesn't work. But it's a nice theory (I've already tried this).

I'll be posting my articles soon which documents every strategy i've tried over the last decade, in hope it might help someone find a solution for them.

>change every day by a few hours

I personally know someone that lived on a 28 hour day for a while (6 * 28 / 7 = 24). He was able to keep a fairly normal workday during the week but over the weekend he was crashing in the day. It only worked because he was religious about managing light levels at home with blackout blinds and sunlamps on timers.

If your willing to try just about anything it might be worth a shot, but you end up making a lot of sacrifices and must keep a very tight schedule.

I've been on a non-24 hour rhythm :). My sleep would change every day by 4-6 hours.

I've had shutters for my windows so no light could get in the evening, light simulation alarm clocks, only used the computer for a maximum of 8 hours a day and got rid of my smart-phone so I had an old fashioned phone, to reduce phone use. I don't drink coffee or tea. Melatonin, sleeping tablets, waking up every day at the same time and going for a run.

Fyi, waking up every time at the same day makes me ill because I still can't sleep early even if i've had a lack of sleep for several nights before.

You can't crash at weekends either. Because if you crash at weekends it messes up your sleep cycle completely and you'll start Monday having slept at 6am on Sunday night.

A tight schedule means you have to do it every day. Then there's the other problem that happens when you crash out - you're really groggy for days.

When I was in school, I'd crash out at 4pm on a Friday night and wake up at 7am the next day. I'd have headaches and feel so drained. And I'd still go to my weekend job.

It's not a lack of motivation.

If you know anything about this guy and the strategies he uses, please do share. Always looking for suggestions.

You might be able to tweak it 45 minutes though by living at the edge of the time zone. But you have to figure out if you’re staying up with the sun or your work schedule.

If you stay up until the sun is nearly up then the eastern edge means the sun is up longer before you have to be at work. But if it’s N hours after you get home, then you’ll see more daylight on the western edge which might be more healthy for you.

For me I don’t want to move if the sun isn’t up yet. I need to move farther south so my winters aren’t as rough.

Does this change at all when the clocks go back / forward? How long does it take you to adjust then?

In my opinion the 2am is just a conceptual thing and there is nothing concrete about it - we change it twice a year and most people adjust fairly quickly.

my mind says conceptual thing, my body does not

It should be a bigger deal to late-risers because, you know, a typical schedule of work and socialising isn't compatible with rising late. This is particularly galling because it appears that late-risers are not uncommon.

Early risers speaking on the issue don't have anything interesting to say.

That last bit is obviously not true, and please don't post polarizing comments on divisive comments, a.k.a. flamebait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"I was up at 5 so I knocked it out before I drove in" comes across differently than "I was up at 5, but I go to bed around 9:30, so it evens out".

Just goes to show that as careful as we ought to be to make sure what we say is reasonable, we should also be careful to keep our interpretations charitable.

There's also an asymmetry: the person who works late can't rub it in, because the early person has already left the building.

"Why can't you be here at 8:00am?"

"But I was the only person here at 7:00pm when the server fell over."

Lately I’ve been toying with running my own company, and if I did (which I probably won’t)...

Everything is 24/7 these days. It’s fucking ridiculous that we’re trying to have all of our employees in the office during exactly the same hours the same five days a week, and then outsource to a place 12 time zones away which can cover most of the rest of the day, except that you can’t even have a meeting without inconveniencing literally everybody. It’s stupid, wearing a clown suit backward.

We should have heterogenous shifts. Say 9 days a fortnight with the 9th being a weekend. 25% of the staff is available on any weekend day, and everyone has one weekday off per week, and some fraction of the staff is available for extended hours the rest of the week.

That might mean that Scrum and scrumbut don’t work but I’m perfectly fine with that.

As much as I dislike having to play the game, late-in-late-out people can benefit by saving some email replies until the tail end of their workday...it always feels gross to me to do it intentionally, but I've found it'll often placate the types of busybodies who conflate arrival time with productivity.

I had a coworker who ended up working an hour more on average than everybody else because he would show up at 6 and try to leave at 3. But shit usually breaks around 3 and that’s plenty of time for people to complain about how you’re never around when we need you.

I tried to convince him to either work out or do a side project in the morning, or take at least an hour lunch every day. I wish I could remember what he ended up doing but it might have been “work somewhere else”.

I think there's a lot of selection bias in your assertion that early risers are self righteous. There are people I have known for many years before finding out they were early risers. One of the biggest surprises was from a guy I had been working with for about 10 years who was notorious for coming in late, usually after lunch. I was on the local news at about 5am one day and he asked me about it. Of course my first response was "What the (&# were you doing up at 5am?", and he said "Oh, I'm always up that early, I just don't feel like going in to work until later."

How about everyone knowing what the word 'nocturnal' means, but they can't think of the word describing the opposite behaviour and resorting to using the word 'normal'.

nocturnal - Done, occurring, or active at night. [0]

diurnal - 1. Of or during the day. 2. Daily; of each day. [1]

crepuscular - Resembling or relating to twilight. [2]

[0] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nocturnal [1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/diurnal [2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crepuscular

My natural wake time is 5:30 - 6:30 am and I am definitely a morning person. I can assure you that my being a morning person has more to do with me being too tired to stay awake beyond 10:30 pm than anything else.

I've found that people who stay up late also tend to tell you [edit: and brag] about it. For example, if a friend is out late partying you're almost guaranteed to hear about how late they stayed out the next day.

I think it goes both ways because people want to justify why they are not at 100% energy. Partly to not offend others when you're being abnormally unenthusiastic. A type of social defense mechanism.

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

The virtue of getting up early dates from the days when everybody was a farmer. Farmers who got a head start on the work that needed to be done even befode the sun came up outfarmed late risers.

These days it is considered a mark of professionalism and respect for the job to show up for work on time or early, at 8 AM or before.

You sound like the guy at my office who gives me shit for leaving at 2:30PM. Maybe to him my exasperation sounds like self-righteousness. I never can tell why some people are so interested in my sleep schedule.

You are never gonna make leaving at 2:30 work, mate. There are too many mid afternoon fire drills and you walking out the door while people are trying to solve really bad problems is never going to fly.

You are also going to be constantly having people trying to talk you into committing code after 2:00 (a perfectly reasonable time) but then getting pissed because you broke the build and went home.

Have people started talking about Core Hours yet? They will.

Very situational. I've been making 2:00-2:30PM work for 25 years. Maybe it's different in shops primarily filled with young people who show up late, work late, and have a philosophy of move-fast-and-break-things.

How do you know if someone gets up at 5 AM? They schedule all their meetings at 7 AM and think they're doing you a favor by imposing their schedule on you. See also: public school start times.