The Morning Person July 16, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in personal, work.Tags: lark, morning person, night owl, productivity, schedule, working hours
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I was the kind of person that went to bed by 9 and got up at 5. While this schedule worked great as a high school student, but I found that the college culture, especially in dorms, was far more rewarding for those who are night owls. However, when I returned to college to finish my bachelor’s degree, I started back on this schedule and found that I was more productive.
Then I met my husband, who, unfortunately for me, is much more of a night owl. Bedtime at 11 pm or later became the norm. And I’ve been struggling for a long time with the fact that I’m usually asleep during my most productive hours.
As I mentioned on my EngineerBlogs post earlier this week, I’ve been working some funky hours. Namely, my son’s babysitter was on vacation during the past week. In order for me to get any time at all in at work, I had to go in around 6 and leave around 8 so that my husband could get in his time. Not surprisingly, I really enjoyed this, although I did struggle with getting to sleep at a reasonable time. I found that I accomplished as much in those two hours as four hours during normal working hours. I suspect some of this is because I had no meetings and no coworkers to deal with, although I don’t think that’s all of it.
After this past week, I’ve decided that I’m going to keep doing this, using those early morning hours for work on my dissertation. Not that I don’t want to be productive at work, but I often struggle to work on my dissertation in the evenings or afternoons. I find that other things will get scheduled over the times I want to be working or that I’m working well after I’ve run out of steam. I think I will accomplish a lot more by shifting my hours to a time when nearly everyone else is asleep.
Now I just have to find a way to get to bed with all the noise and distractions of neighbors doing yard work and kids and husband who like to be up later than I.
So what are your productive hours? Are you one of the lucky ones who is most productive in the middle of the day?
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I suggest you invest in some disposable earplugs to help get to sleep without being distracted by the noise. I have done this before, and it works great! Of course you’d probably want to test it on a weekend to make sure the alarm still wakes you up with the earplugs in.
The problem isn’t hear the alarm – it’s sleeping with earplugs in. Unfortunately, I’m a light sleeper, and they’re just too irritating. I’ll just keep trying with a pillow over my head. (Why that doesn’t bother me but the earplugs do is a huge mystery.)
I am also a morning person married to a night owl…
I too go to bed insanely late and get up early.
Hub is at his most alert 10pm-2am, cannot function early in the morning. In contrast, I cannot do intellectually nontrivial work past 10 pm, brain shuts down, but I love doing things first thing in the morning.
I have no words of wisdom for ya, just sympathy.
I appreciate it, and I understand what you mean. I keep hoping that our younger one will be ‘normal’ in terms of schedule, and so far, that appears to be true. The older one is quite obviously a night owl.
Ditto on the earplugs, use ‘em all the time.
My most productive hours are 2 PM – 7 PM. Now that my kids are grown and gone, I like to teach my classes in the morning (the interaction keeps me focused, so I do fine) and then do my lesson prep and writing after 2, and then come home 7ish. Of course by then my husband is prostrate with hunger, but he doesn’t complain because the knows the answer would be “Your arms broken?” and he’d rather starve than cook.
My husband does that, too!
Although, he will cook if he does it on the grill. But the oven? Forget it!
It’s the opposite for me and my boyfriend. I’m the night owl. I’m trying to adjust to an earlier schedule, but when a deadline approaches I slip toward old habits. Might the different preference be useful in taking care of kids later on?
[...] have mentioned before that I am a morning person. The older son is most definitely [...]