The real reason parents want to kick their teenagers out June 3, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in older son.Tags: lark, night owl, sleep, work habits, working hours
3 comments
Or at least the reason this one does.
I have mentioned before that I am a morning person. The older son is most definitely not.
Things went fairly well when the older boy was working on his CLEP exam: he’d get up at 7 so that he could catch a ride to the library, where he usually studied until about 11 or 12. There were two or three days where he had ‘relapses’ and didn’t get up, but overall, he did very well. It led me to wonder if he was a morning person who was, unfortunately, jacking his schedule around so badly that he didn’t realize it.
Whether or not this is the case, I don’t know. However, since he took the CLEP exam, he’s fallen into some bad habits again, such as not getting out of bed until almost noon. This means he’s also up very, very late. And I’m a light sleeper. This is a very, very bad combination.
Since he’s done with high school and looking at college, it has occurred to me that maybe he should start looking to go to college a year early. Not only would he get done with college a bit earlier, I might be able to start getting some sleep, too.
The Morning Person July 16, 2011
Posted by mareserinitatis in personal, work.Tags: lark, morning person, night owl, productivity, schedule, working hours
8 comments
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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