Delayed sleep phase is defined in the article as going to sleep at 2-3am and getting up at noon. It said that most people wake up at around 7am but ~40% wake up noticeably earlier or later than that. So I wouldn't say it's irrelevant for the vast majority of the people.
(I personally like to wake up late, though it's not tremendously painful to adjust to another schedule.)
Agreed. Simply waking up naturally at 8 or 9am makes it challenging to keep a traditional work (or school) schedule. It's worse if you're not on the east coast, but are expected to join meetings with people who are.
Exactly. The East Coast can go to hell :) Meetings before 10am (MY time) in general can go to hell. I don't mind a quick status meeting with the team (that actually helps me get to work on time), but otherwise, morning meetings suck.
Being a teenager or in your twenties and/or consuming caffeine can also cause similar symptoms.
When I was in my twenties, I actually used to work on a 28 hour day schedule.[1] Now I've quit caffeine and hit my forties, and am one of those people that goes to the gym at 5:30AM.
I've never read this before, but I'm mid-20s and I'm pretty sure I'm on that schedule. In my grad-student years I noted the same tendency - my schedule would "roll backwards" a couple of hours each day. For what it's worth I'm under the impression that this is a well-known phenomenon with hackers. The Jargon File includes this reference:
My employer expects me to work a roughly normal 9-5. The best compromise I seem to have worked out is that I take Wednesday morning off and I work a little longer on the other 4 days to make up for it. This gives me the ability to rotate my sleep schedule on a semi-weekly basis. Wednesday morning I can sleep in and "reset". Tuesday and Friday aren't the most productive days because my internal clock is the most detached from my working hours, but around noon my grogginess will clear up and I'm on track, so it's workable.
Common, by definition, means "found often." If it's indeed 1 our of 100, that means there are 2-3 people in my office right now like this. That's a big enough issue for management to perhaps consider accommodating these people.
There's a few thousand in my building, but I very rarely see anyone in a wheelchair or on crutches. But we still have a handicap stall in every bathroom and a ramp for every step.
TBH, I actually feel worse if I sleep in. But it is interesting to think about if I get in to work before everyone else, I can leave early without anyone batting an eye. Late sleepers do tend to get shit on for no good reason, and as others have pointed out, allowing more flexible schedules would benefit everyone (commuting/traffic congestion as just one facet).
I agree that society should become more accepting of late sleepers. This would also have practical advantages, e.g. a more equal distribution of commuter travel. In London, everyone seems to work from 9 to 6pm, with predictable traffic chaos at peak hours.
One company I interviewed for starts day at 11AM, you are expected to be in the office until 7PM, sometime 9PM. I think they do it for timezone difference, heat and easier commute.
The article hits home for me. I can't go to sleep before 3-4am, and I can't wake up before noon. I had a job that required me to get up before 10am for a year, but what happened was that I would only get 5-6 hours of sleep a night and then sleep for 12 hours during the weekend.
My parents still look down on me sleeping until noon, as if I somehow sleep for fourteen hours a day, but nobody considers the ton of productive time I have at night, when everyone else is sleeping.
Can you give me some tips on self employment? In general where do I start from? Currently I'm taking a break from work and would really love to be self employed as opposed to going back to a job. I'm a software developer and most of my experience is in developing full stack web apps and in scaling web backends.
What do you want to know? In general, there are two ways software developers can make money: 1) services, i.e. contracting, work for hire, or consulting; or 2) products, i.e. build something someone wants to pay money for.
Thanks for the reply, and I apologise I did not see this earlier. So, these are my questions:
1) In a consulting business, what is the technique to discover clients and get a steady stream of work?
2) For a product business, how does a software developer without any business experience identify a good niche to develop a product in (I'm assuming the product would be a SaaS product) and what are some general techniques to market and sell this product?
I hope my questions were not too vague. If possible, could you share your approach to self employment as well?
your comment hits pretty close to home for me, too. This is my life right now.
Since I'm a Site Reliability Engineer we don't get the freedoms some developers get in regards to working times (I'm sure there are some companies which are fine, but coming in a midday all the time would probably not go over well anyway.)
I wonder why nightowls get such a bad rap, and why every human must do things at the same time, it's a strain on public transport and places to buy lunch etc; it reeks of an awful inefficiency for the sake of consistency and little else (maybe social interaction? I don't socially interact though..)
Humans will be gone long before the sun. Pessimistically, we'll extinct ourselves within the next few centuries. Optimistically, any remnant progeny of ours will be so distant from us today that they'll take the idea that they're descended from filthy animals (us) as as much of an affront as creationists re: our primate descent.
Same here. 4am on the best days. But the thing is I wake up, no matter what, after 5 hours of sleep. And then by 5pm I'm dull and red-eyed. Good again by 8pm to continue the cycle upto 4-5am. Terribly frustrating.
If you are a programmer, I might recommend working remotely from Asia. I do work for a UK company and live in rural Japan. It's midnight and I'm just about to knock off for the night. At the moment our standup meeting is 5:30 pm for me and I can easily pair program with people until 2am or even longer if I feel like it.
The irony is that I'm a morning person and I live here for family reasons. I'd love to work from 8 am or so ;-)
Please get your thyroid levels checked. You may have hyperthyroidism or Graves disease. Not a causation, but a correlation. Source: it happened to my cousin.
... and don't let them tell you you MUST get your thyroid extirpated or radiated. In his case, the meds worked. In Europe and Japan, most doctors recommend meds. In America, most doctors recommend radiation or extirpation (surgery).
Just a small note, hypo is the opposite of hyper. Hyperthyroidism => more active & nervous, hypothyroidism => less energy, more weight gain, cooler metabolism so you want to stay under blankets all day.
I had mild untreated hypothyroidism for a year and it didn't help me get to sleep earlier.
You know, it's funny, out of college I was dead sure I needed 8 1/2 hours of sleep a night just to maintain. 9 was better and 7 would slowly grind me down until I ended up sick.
Now that I get more regular exercise, I need a little over 7 hours a night to maintain. And the weirdest part is that my routine works out to about 40 minutes a day including transit time. And while I spend a lot more time resting now due to post-workout fatigue, I spent a lot of time vegging before because I was 'exhausted'.
So in all, by working out I net at least an extra half hour to an hour a day where I'm awake and useful.
Interesting, what sort of exercise was it. I'm already ignorantly constructing a hypothesis of it being mindless (IMO: jogging/running, swimming) and so acting like down time for the thinking parts of your brain ...?
- no big meals after 7PM, (but make sure you're not hungry at bedtime)
- no more than 2 alcoholic drinks with and after supper
- make sure your room is cool and your bed is cozy
Those are the easy fixes. However, the most common cause of sleep problems is stress. That's why your Mom told you to count sheep. If counting sheep isn't enough to turn your mind off, then perhaps seeking professional help for stress is your best option.
If you aren't stressed and the above steps didn't work, please seek medical help.
If you're still in your teens or twenties, it may get better as you get older.
> There are night owls among us — whose whole circadian schedules are shifted later — and morning larks, who are shifted earlier. (If you're curious, you can assess your chronotype with this quiz here.) These traits are determined by genetics and are extremely hard to change. What's more, the research is finding that if we fight our chronotypes, our health may suffer.
An owl is somebody who wakes up naturally later than 7AM, according to the article. The OP cannot fall asleep until 3AM-4AM. That's not an owl, that's a medical condition.
If you wake up at noon, then going to bed at 4am gives you a good 8 hours of sleep. That makes it a rather healthy time to go to bed for waking up at noon.
Not necessarily. I personally wake up naturally at around 10am and fall asleep at ~1am. That's without caffeine, without alcohol and without blue tinged electric lights (I fitted red lights), without much stress and without the internet or TV.
It's just my rhythm. It sure makes it difficult to get up at 7 for my 9-5 job.
Not necessarily. I go to bed late because I struggle to put down whatever it is I'm doing - be it reading a book, writing code, playing a game - it's always one more chapter, let's just get this one bit working, let's just beat this one level.
In the morning, my drive to do anything much isn't there - it takes a few hours for the furnaces to come online.
You could argue that that's a medical condition, but I'd argue that it stems from being more mentally active as the day progresses - which is kinda the definition of an owl.
That struggle isn't a medical condition but its not something to just shrug and give in to either. learning to stop thinking after a certain time of the day is a skill. It can be practiced.
It's not a disorder any more than wanting to eat lots of sweets is a disorder. Modern society is filled with lots of things to consume us especially at night when we should be quieting our brain. Was easy in the past when we didn't have video games or computers around.
Have you considered that pehaps he cant stop thinking because biologically his body is not ready to shut down? Sonetimes it's impossible to just stop thinking. Try taking 100mg of caffeine and try to meditate. Totally impossible.
What you fail to understand is that at 9:20am in the morning, like it is now, that my brain is swimming in serotonin and it feels like I got kicked in the face.
I DO NOT have the same neurochemistry that you do. So while all of that helps, it doesn't magically turn me in someone that gets up at the asscrack of dawn all bright and cheerful.
There are strong parallels between people who give this kind of advice to delayed sleep sufferers and people who think they can cure homosexuality.
Same problem occurs with introverts and all the extroverts that want to cure us.
What is odd is that while at the office we're worrying about health insurance for trans individuals there's about zero awareness of discrimination over sleep issues and introversion.
What I would love to see is some company based in the west coast with UK/EU remote employees who started mandating 8am (PST/PDT) standup meetings every day to get sued by DSPD suffering employees and lose. HR departments might start taking notice if they started being vulnerable to lawsuits.
Hmmmmm. There's gotta be something here. I don't even think you need something as extreme as UK/EU remote employees. We just need a good (and more common) way to diagnose DSPD, and then ask DSPD'ers if they are discriminated against at work, and then class action it up.
The person who was using the Facebook Chat status API to track his friend's sleep patterns comes to mind. But also, we're getting into creepy territory if a lawyer calls you and say: "hey! You work for BigCo and you're a delayed sleeper, aren't you? I know their work policies, have you had problems with that? Don't you want a bucket of money?"
Really? Its the sunlight or something that controls serotonin? Its certainly not the clock. Its hard to see how the display on an electronic device has any effect on sleep time. Likewise, how it can be justified that getting up late is some health requirement, because the clock again.
Oh yeah, so either you're aspy or you're trolling me.
By saying 'its 9:20am' i'm not saying that the clock controls me. I'm saying that at a time when a 'normal' person would have woken up, having had enough time to get up, have a shower, etc that I'm still feeling 'kicked in the head'. The 'normal' melatonin/serotonin cycle looks like a pretty sharp square wave and as people wake up those chemicals get rapidly flushed out of their CSF and they 'wake up' and feel alert. People with DSPD have a measurable blunted rise and fall time in their sleep chemicals. So the point is that "at 9:20" for me I'm still swimming in sleep chemicals, while another person will be fully awake.
Sorry if it came across wrong, but I was basically trying to write "rule out the obvious, and then seek medical help". Physicians can help with some causes of delayed sleep syndrome. Often they can't, but they can at least give you a diagnosis that you can take to your employer.
There are many areas of human physiology and health where professionals are at the expert beginner phase, but feel the need to appear authoritative (because that's what the patients expect) and so they pretend to know things that actually NOBODY KNOWS, or at least not yet. This is I think the biggest reason why medicine is failing us, and I think some a lot of it is fragile egos but the rest is due to how malpractice law is (not) working.
If there's every anything interesting wrong with you, like soft tissue damage, GI issues or neurochemistry, you're going to learn a whole lot about internal medicine, and you're going to find out the doctor is often making it up as they go.
If you get a good doctor, they are going to suggest things that nobody else even mentioned. If you get a passable doctor, essentially you will be in charge of determining your treatment and dosages (at 3 points in my life the physician was effectively letting me write my own prescriptions, because they couldn't see inside my head or experience my physical symptoms. They're going to set boundaries but you have some responsibility for your own fate. The bad ones are just going to talk to you about how your side effects are expected, or how you'll have a limp for the rest of your life, and you should just suck it up and deal.
(And by the way, if you have anything physically wrong with you, from 'fallen arches' to ligament damage, I can't recommend enough that you get a referral to a sports medicine clinic ASAP. General practitioners and osteopaths know fuck all about how the human body works mechanically, and they're going to tell you to cope with things that are completely fixable, sometimes without surgery. Meanwhile a sports medicine or rehab specialist will teach you how to avoid reinjury, which is something a 'doctor' will -never- do and is actually the most important part of your recovery - staying well).
Yeah, 3mg of melatonin before bed helps. Any more and the nightmares get crazy. Benzos are bad.
All the life adaptations make DSPD manageable. Any 'helpful ideas' I've probably thought of. I've spent time completely off of caffeine for months. I've lost 40# and exercise -- that's good for other reasons but it doesn't fix my sleep. Exercise at night is generally counter-productive and wires me awake. Weightlifting is completely counterproductive since the 'burn' from torn muscle fibers will give me insomnia. Nothing really works to deal with flushing out the sleep chemicals in the AM (I used to ride my bike to work in the morning and I'd hit the coffee machine when I got there just as hard -- even having cars nearly kill me on the road didn't wake me up).
Interesting, but sadly most of us cannot afford to get on the free running sleep schedule this article advocates. However, I really agree with the practice of not trying to go to sleep until you know you'll be able to knock out within a few minutes.
Either way, you're not going to be getting your "scheduled" sleep so might as well spend the time on something other than lying around agonizing about it. And, the right kind of relaxing activity actually helps me get to sleep sooner than I otherwise would have.
As I've explained to boss after boss after boss, any code I write before about 10 am will likely have to be rewritten at greater cost.
So do you want me writing 20 minutes of lousy code every morning and having 7 hours to fix it, or do you want me to write 2 hours of lousy code and only have 5 hours to fix it? It's your choice, Sport, but choose wisely.
Some of us are not newly minted grads. I've worked at one job longer than half of hacker news has been working total.
I've seen it go the other way too. One guy used to show up at 6:45 and his bosses were not amused that he was nowhere to be found at 4:15 pm.
If we're being perfectly realistic here in this thread, some guys just want minions. If you're getting dinged for something it may have nothing to do with that thing. You're being kept in your place and/or raises are being controlled by getting you to agree that the things that make you different from everyone else are bad and you should feel bad.
If they run out of things that actually matter, they'll declare that every team member should be exactly as good at every responsibility of the group as every other team member, and everyone who isn't exactly average will have work to do (and get a smaller raise).
One of my favorite bosses derisively called this "punishing people for their weaknesses instead of celebrating their strengths."
You may have some of the same problems I have. Flow state entry is easier to achieve when I can structure my environment, and of course that's super easy to do when you can take pretty much everything else out of the equation. Things like people, traffic, pets, TV shows, breaking news and the sun.
I am, I believe, a late riser, but I also stayed up late so I can have quiet time by myself.
But there are also other ways to get some of this time, and I use a lot of those now. Communication hygiene is the most obvious one. Just because you send me an email doesn't mean I'm going to drop everything and answer you. But it's not enough by itself. Other things like reminders, wiki pages to dump half-cocked notions onto, pomodoro (this is a big one) and when I can manage it, working remotely one day a week from a coffee shop where I don't know anybody, all achieve some of the same effects that nocturnal coding used to do.
That said, in an environment where 24/7 operations are the norm, encouraging part of your dev team to show up at 7 am and the rest to show up at 10 is actually the saner option, as long as your truck numbers can handle it.
At 3 the early birds can hand off to the late risers, and there's still a couple hour overlap with your second shift and on-call folks before anybody has to get woken up or cancel their evening plans.
You're sleeping well, just off cycle. The "secret" is to rotate forward. Take a week or two off and try rotating your sleep forward in 8 hour blocks. If you did that, you could get yourself on a more typical 11-7 sleep cycle and preserve the amount of sleep you get.
My mom struggled with this as a nurse on shifts. Alternating between 8 and 12 hour shifts as well as evening/night made it tough for her to sleep.
I used to be this way, but two things happened: first, I got married, which pushed my bed time closer to 1 a.m.
Then, I had a kid, which pushed my wake-up time to 6 a.m. (after several months of completely irregular sleep cycles). This resulted in me going to bed around 10 p.m. most nights due to really needing the sleep.
I'm still not a "morning person" now, but I'm comfortable enough with this schedule.
If you're interested in changing your schedule (even though it doesn't sound like you need to), I'd recommend slow changes. You can start going to bed a bit earlier (like 10 minutes) every night, and supplement with 2-3 mg melatonin taken 30 minutes before your desired bed time.
> We tend to assume that late wakers are the partiers, the deadbeats, the ones who are so irresponsible they can't keep a basic schedule.
> the data point to the idea that an [evening type] pattern is a risk factor for some disorders, whereas [morning type] is a protection factor," a 2012 review of hundreds of papers in the academic literature concludes.
It simulates a sunrise and sunset with bright LEDs. I always wake up before the audio alarm starts. Before this I was very difficult morning riser. I may be more light sensitive than you, but it works for me, and has some medical research to back up the idea.
The grandparents post is an alarm clock. The blue light things you use during early morning like with breakfast to prevent SAD. I found the alarm clock to be amazing for about a week and then not much different than other alarms after I adjusted to it. That said I still prefer it to other alarms.
The goLITE BLU is a serious and very useful mostly conventional light therapy device which helped me go from 7 to 8 hours of sleep, although recently I've found an even more conventional type like this makes an even bigger difference, enough to maybe get off a drug I've been taking for a decade (weasel word "maybe" because I'm off it but still seeing if I can get back to a regular 8 hours): http://www.amazon.com/Carex-Health-Brands-Day-Light-DL2000/d...
I have tried using this exact same model. It didn't make waking up any easier for me. I simulate it now also using hue bulbs but nothing can snap me out of my rhythms.
In my bedroom I use knockoff RGBW LED lightbulbs (I found some on amazon for $30 that work with a semi-sketchy app called Magic Home). You can set timers for different colors on the app, so in the morning they go bright blue and before bed they all go red. They also have a brighter white LED for daytime usage that's only slightly dimmer than normal bulbs.
It's pretty nifty. They're controlled over some UDP protocol that some people have had some success reverse engineering as well.
"...because it's not my fault. I'm really, really trying, and it's just not working."
Nothing is EVER anyone's fault anymore. Snowflakes are too precious to actually be responsible for their OWN TIME! Makes you wonder if they;ve tried going to bed earlier for a change - maybe even longer than a night or two... god forbid they miss something unimportant at night... Jimmy Kimmel maybe.
Don't try to fight your biology and never play to your weakness.
I might generally agree with your sentiment, it feels like too many people are too willing to not take responsibility for themselves, but I can tell you I've needed to engineer my life around my sleep schedule. It's partly why I'm an engineer. I've been a night owl since I was a baby, and I can tell you, I'm never more miserable than when I consistently need to function before 10am, and I'm extra useless any day I need to set an alarm for the day. So I make it clear to my coworkers that if they avoid scheduling meetings before 10, I won't schedule any after 5. After that, anyone who tries to discuss hours gets to hear instead about output.
To me it's a simple question: Do you want employees performing to their best? If the answer is yes, and the way to do that is having them come in at 10 am rather than 7, that costs you literally nothing. Let them set a schedule that works for them. Now if they work "best" with a corner office on the 10th floor and shag carpeting, ok, we probably can't do that but in such case where it costs the business nothing as it is when it comes to which particular block of 8 hours you come in for a day, who cares? Let people choose what works best for them.
why NOT give them the corner office though? You answered your own question. You say it costs the business nothing - but if the business customers are in the office at 7am, you need to be as well else you ARE costing the business something.
From the business aspect, its not about your social life. It's about the 'survival' of the company and the continued employment of you and your co-workers.
If a Basketball player needed to be on the court at 6am, you would expect them to go to sleep at the proper time in order to perform to expectation at 6am. They are adults, right?
Most people at work and in college are adults and are expected to perform as required for the classes/Job that THEY CHOSE and then some complain about the expectation that they be in and functioning at a specific time - that makes NO sense.
I love how we as a society have linked the time of day you start your work to your maturity, because those are obviously connected.
This is exactly the type of attitude that the article is arguing against. Sure, complete, 100% autonomy for an employee is unrealistic, the organization has needs too. But to say that the employee can have no flexibility at all and MUST be in the office, with the other employees, at this specific time because we said so? My response to that is why? And if you can't cite a reason that doesn't involve such abstract concepts as maturity (highly relative, not measurable) or without citing tradition (highly irrational, based on societal momentum and not fact) then I'm not interested and I'll work somewhere else.
Note that this leaves plenty of room for legitimate reasons, such as "the basketball game starts at this specific time, so we need you here" and that is totally 100% a reasonable thing to say.
How about "you took a job that requires you to be in the office at 7am. So, be in the office at 7am."
Being an adult implies that your take care of your responsibilities. You pay your bills, and you show up to class/work on time, etc... If you schedule a BioChem class that starts at 7am, don't complain when it starts at 7am. If you still don't understand this context, please stop now.
As a student, your world revolves around the schedule of your professor(s) Not your social life. In most professions from the NBA to IT, as an employee, your schedule revolves around that of your employer Not your social life. And most times, if you own your own business, your schedule revolves around the schedule of your clients, at this point, you don't have a social life.
Some people get lucky and either don't need to be confined to a schedule or have an open one. Great! but for the rest that don't, either stop complaining about the schedule of the job/class/career path that YOU CHOSE or get another one. It really is that simple.
Firstly, I've been steadily employed for 8+ years so please stop talking like I'm some stupid child. 6 of those 8 were during college when I attended classes during the daytime and worked third shift to support myself, I am well versed in the concept of "showing up when required" and happily did so because there was a rational explanation for those hours.
Secondly, I am not nor have I ever brought up students. Schooling is an entirely different ball game, you're not being paid to be there, you're paying to be there, you set a schedule more or less to your own preferences and so have less of a reason to be upset about it, and classes are not often the length of a regular job shift, so the timing isn't nearly as critical. I could go on, this is apples and oranges and I have no idea why you brought it up.
Thirdly, even though I never brought up social lives I'll say this: If my priority is to have time to spend with my wife, my friends, or my family, as long as it does not affect my job performance if I set my hours to suit those preferences it's exactly NONE of your business what those preferences are.
Finally, I'm not complaining about my schedule, but exactly the opposite and what I said from the top was that if a given company doesn't offer a flexible schedule that I wouldn't work there.
You're taking this way too personal. I am referring to people in general. I don't care what you do as an individual.
Actually, you what you said re: flexibility was in regards to the business having to have it, yet did not mention the employee. I countered with the fact that in general an employee's (work) schedule revolves around that of the business - not vice-versa. Also that an employee's primary concern is to remain employed, and to do that, they must do what the business requires of them (that they agreed to when they took the job).
Also, you said NOTHING about whether or not you'd work for them or not - it wasn't even implied.
Your statement was "But to say that the employee can have no flexibility at all and MUST be in the office, with the other employees, at this specific time because we said so? My response to that is why?"
I'm sorry, you said something about comprehension, so I decided to break down the conversation for you.
Your comments in this thread have been breaking the HN guidelines badly, by calling names, being uncivil, and conducting a flamewar. We ban accounts that do these things, so please re-read the rules and stop doing these things.
Please don't be personally rude in HN comments, even when someone else is breaking the rules and being provocative. That just makes the thread still worse.
I remember my physics professor telling us, "I've been begging them not to schedule this class so early, because we're losing the best people from the major." I think that was a 9:30 class or something.
> My response to that is why? And if you can't cite a reason that doesn't involve such abstract concepts as maturity (highly relative, not measurable)
I used to think this way until one day I realized that there are many very important things that are unquantifiable and abstract, yet still matter very much.
I used to think coming on time to work was arbitrarily set by my boss...but over the years I discovered that there are numerous good, but abstract and unquantifiable reasons for this.
The idea that, as an employee, you have to be able to understand a rule in order to not resent following it, is a flawed attitude, and a reflection of a deeper problem with authority or need for control.
Would the reason, "I need you here early to see if you can follow instructions from your boss without understanding them." be a goood enough reason for you?
For what it's worth, I found a way to control my own schedule for the most part and I work better in this environment...but I have come to appreciate that there are elements at play beyond our immediate understanding, especially when working with others...and whether i understand it or not, I should respect it's value or at least the role I play within that hierarchy and framework.
The attitude of our CEO and thusly the leadership in our company is that every minute a given manager is spending on disciplining employees for things as trivial as arriving late is not adding value to the company, it just makes the employee miserable. Now granted, if a given employee is knocking off work 15 minutes early and coming in 15 minutes late then that's something to discuss, but we operate on the idea of freedom + accountability. If you need to leave an hour early one day, do it. Take care of what needs doing, then VPN from home that night or stay late at the office the next day. We trust each other to do our jobs and hold each other to the fire if we aren't. As a result the whole company has a very flat organization chart.
My boss doesn't give me instructions I don't understand, nor does he require me to obey them from anyone else. This makes us much leaner as an organization and more focused on what actually adds value, not on the minutiae so popular with middle management at other places I've worked.
> we operate on the idea of freedom + accountability
> YMMV
Exactly. If your culture and environment is built on that framework, than it would inconsistent to be a stickler for time, etc...
However, there are many organizations where this is not the case. An accounting firm or law firm might need people in their seats early in the day in case a client comes by, so they see what they are getting for their money. A commercial real estate management company might need people wearing suits and ties to impress and demand better terms and higher lease rates from their tenants, etc...
There is an amazing book called, "Broken Windows, Broken Business" about how cleaning up grafitti in NY Subways led to a huge drop in crime. When people see you care about something as trivial as coming late...they will be damn sure not to screw up something important or be late with a client, etc...
People need to be aware of how their behavior influences others and in my experience, employees rarely see beyond themselves when it comes to minutia they dont understand.
The only place where following instructions without understanding them is a prerequisite and concerned to be a good thing is a slave labor camp. Or being on lowest positions in the military.
Resenting arbitrary unexplained authority is a healthy natural response.
Like I said, I used to think this way until I realized there are things simply beyond my limited frame of reference that I am not prepared to understand yet.
I completely disagree with your point about slave labor. If I have been in an industry for a decade and want things done a certain way because of my much deeper understanding, which a newer employee won't appreciate, I don't need to quantify why to my employees and it's very unhealthy for them to presume that they are even capable of understanding everything at play without the prerequisite experience.
I am not talking about an arbitrary middle manager getting hung up on minutia for his own ego powertrip. I am talking about how being in the office on time, how you dress and behave has deep influence on others and the team, culture, ambiance and work environment with profound impacts a single employee can't see, and is perfectly reasonable for a boss to want to control.
This idea that following instructions without understanding them not being a prerequisite of an employee is really unhealthy attitude if you want to work for someone else.
I suggest starting your own business and not raising outside money, otherwise you will be a miserable slave in a perfectly functional work environment.
Just to add to this... Have you ever walked into a restaurant, went to the restroom and it was dirty and wondered what else they dont clean up?
Employees in companies need to appreciate that order can impact many other aspects of the business and ability to keep clients happy, etc... and small broken things can have profound negative ripple effects.
Order and processes are obviously important. But those have very logical explanation. I am not against order; I just said that rejecting _arbitrary_ authority is good and healthy.
Society is geared against late sleepers on many fundamental levels. Daycares and schools typically start early and let out early. If you have two working parents they can split the dropoff/pickup only if both have early schedules, or can still do productive work at home, with a small child around. Not even the kids want to wake up at 6:30.
Yep, weekends are crack of dawn, weekdays are dragging them out of bed kicking and screaming at 7:20. Occasionally we let them sleep in on a weekday and they'll sleep until anywhere from 7:30-9:00.
I would always get up early on Saturday for cartoons, infact I only started sleeping in because I was no longer interested in the new shows. That was somewhere around 1999 because I remember hating the new Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.
If my employer let me come in @10am I would be 2x as productive. I have to drag myself out of bed every morning and spend 9am-10am not really doing much at work anyway. If I could get that extra hour of sleep it would be amazing...
How does this work, in your mind? Every stupid, indefensible policy I've ever heard of has been justified with this lame excuse. If somebody "abuses" something, take disciplinary action, how is that so damn hard?
As an employer of people you are motivated to ensure that people perform at their best. By forcing someone to not work a schedule that works for them, you're diminishing your own investment and you have no one but yourself to blame.
At our company we have people who come in at 6 am and we have people who don't get in until 9. Everyone sets their schedule to what works for them and I think we're better for it. Does that make it harder to schedule meetings? Not at all, we can always find an hour or two somewhere where everyone is around.
This sleep pattern started for me right around adolescence (12-13) so I assume that it's just part of my DNA. 3-4am is about the time I naturally fall asleep if left to my own devices.
I was in the military for 12 years and those 5am wake-ups didn't change my "wiring." I figure if that didn't nothing will.
As indicated, the world is just not built for folks like me/us. So that means I/we just have to put in more effort to work within it.
File this under the category: Things you have to do to survive in society.
Actually some part of the world is: the one set around the nigh life. I have people around me that live like you, by social design: musicians, bar tenders, events makers. If you want to live this life, then you better be wired for it.
I'm not, and when I try to follow them, I end up destroyed for a week.
One of my previous flatmate is. He stopped for a while and his social circle reduced a lot (while getting closer to me). Mostly, he misses the sex.
Yes, it's way easier to have sex (quantity wise) when you go out 3 times a week as he used to do. And you need to come back late as well, if you want to find a partner, you won't bring him or her at home at 10pm.
That's a good point. The night-life scene is fairly out of the norm for the majority of society however and comprises a pretty small percentage of industry in total, so I don't know if it makes sense to just say "well just go work night-life type jobs" as a solution.
Not even mentioning if that is something that any given person with delayed sleep wants to do.
Sometimes (most times actually) you just have to suck it up.
I'm a night owl and I think I know what's going on here, at least as far as I'm concerned.
It is that every so often I indulge in too much coffee, booze, etc, and this pushes back bedtime by an hour or two. Or I get excited about something new like a book or a video game. Since the night time is quiet and I am undisturbed by others, I like it, and I don't bother to correct it.
Note that merely giving up coffee, as the doctor in the article recommended, wouldn't help. It is the irregular 'binges' that push our body clocks. The extreme case would be a hard drug user who occasionally parties for 2 nights in a row.
Of course eventually some social obligation or appointment causes me to have to get up at a normal hour one morning and then the process resets and slowly advances all over again.
Two comments about this:
(1) society may be correct to judge me, because there are addictions involved and they can be harmful.
(2) it's unhealthy because when one eats during a period which was recently 'sleep time' the body doesn't digest the food so well. The heart doesn't seem to like it, and I think I read that LDL cholesterol is elevated. This is one reason why night shift workers pay a price in terms of health.
It may be for you, but it isn't for me. I have been concerned about this issue enough in the past to have lived 6 months without caffeine and with almost no alcohol. I have fitted red shifted lights and banned tv/computers after 9pm. It didn't work.
Some people just have a different rhythm and nothing short of genetic engineering is going to change it.
I travel back and forth between Singapore, for reasonable lengths at a time, and to ease the jet lag adjustment period I choose to be a morning person in one and a night owl in the other. It works pretty well.
Is the hypothesis that your body naturally gets tired some number of hours after the sun goes down?
To all the people commenting about how this article "hits home": what is jetlag like for you? If you travel 5 time zones away do you become a morning person? Have you tried to keep that, but does it slip away and you revert to staying up late?
That's exactly what happens to me. When I was living in Honolulu and traveling to the East Coast a lot, I would be a night owl on the east coast and then would have the wonderful experience of being a morning person for about a 2 week period before I reverted back to being definitively not a morning person.
I'm naturally a late sleeper, I travelled from UK to California then Floria for a couple of weeks and found I pretty instantly became a morning person in the new time zone.
Though I'm not sure if that is down to exhaustion from a 23 hour journey forcing me to sleep earlier and longer for a few nights and thus re-jigging my sleep cycle.
The funny thing I found is if you accept the things you can't change and use them instead you can actually get some of the other world as well.People who get up early may be more successful than their colleagues in the morning and because of that can have a rest after lunch, that other people don't get. And we all know that sleeping 20 minutes after lunch has huge impacts on your health and afternoon work as well.
No. It's just hard to believe all people don't get more tired as the day goes on. In fact, eventually, as the day goes on we all get so tired we eventually fall asleep (all of us).
So the nuance is what's your tipping point where you are performing worse due to fatigue.
I start the day tired and wake up gradually until around supper. Then, I eat and do the chores. At around 9pm, I'm fully awake.
When I was a kid, my parents made me go to bed around 9pm. I used to get up every half hour saying "mom, dad, I can't sleep". They figured out quickly enough that sending me to bed early was a waste of time since I would spend 3 hours sitting or laying in my bed waiting, fully awake, feeling like going playing outside.
>Sorry, but you'll never convince me you get "sharper" at the end of the day than at the beginning.
I'm "sharper" at night because that is the only time I can expect to have no distractions. That means other people not being around; typically because they're sleeping. A [ job ] without distraction will always be more productive than [ job ] with constant distractions.
Not to mention I have a 'waking period' of about 4 hours. I'm not mentally checked in until several hours after I wake up. Caffeine helps with this but unlike a large portion of society, I don't rely on caffeine to wake me up in the mornings.
What I find extremely bizarre is that many of these so-called "morning people" need a cup of coffee each morning or they're as braindead as I am. It's almost like they aren't morning people at all and are relying on a stimulant to make them more alert and "mentally checked in".
The problem is that the majority of people don't work this way. It's difficult for a business to have meetings when a portion of the staff has decided to come in around noon and the other portion comes in at 9am.
You can try switching meetings around, but there is only so much time in the day.
Update: I was pretty rational with this discussion and it was still down voted. Either: 1) I have people following me and down voting the majority of my posts (which I suspect is happening to some degree) or 2) HN users aren't realistic.
Meh, my last company/team had work hours that were almost completely flexible. My team had one weekly 10 o clock meeting that I had trouble making consistently (I had a longer commute than most), and we moved it.
It's honestly not _that_ universally difficult, because in practice "completely flexible work hours" means that there will be a good few mid-day/afternoon hours during which everyone is around, and lumping the meetings into that time works perfectly well. Obviously the extreme case as described in this article would make it more difficult, but for most people I don't see why it wouldn't work and even the extreme case people would be somewhat better off.
That's fine for scheduled meetings, but what about unscheduled collaboration? Every time the issue of remote work comes up there is a camp that insists companies need their engineers collocated for communication reasons. It seems that allowing completely flexible schedules like this has similar issues. How do you address that?
My company wasn't a fan of fully remote work (as opposed to periodic wfh) for the same reasons, and I agree with them. I didn't find that to be a problem at all though because bilateral communication is much easier to do over email/IM/videochat/etc.
In my teenage years I hated going to sleep because I was riddled with anxiety, so generally I would stay up all night so that it made it easier to sleep the next day. My mom was a night owl, but my dad would go to sleep at 9pm like clockwork and I never understood how.
It wasn't until I started weightlifting the past several years where I've found myself actively going to sleep at reasonable hours (9-11pm) because not only am I tired from the exercising, but because I know my body needs the sleep to rebuild itself. My time inside the gym would be wasted without the sleep. I also track my calories obsessively fwiw.
I was a night owl when I was younger. Went to bed around 2am and felt like a sack of potatoes for a couple hours in the morning. I have no idea what time I would naturally wake up because I always had to get up earlier than that. I remember sleeping until the afternoon on weekends when I was a teenager. I slept through my fair share of alarms, didn't remember hitting the snooze button, etc.
Sometime in my late 20s after learning enough about health in general I realized that sleep was much more important than most believed and I decided my routine was unhealthy. I dealt with it with similar methods mentioned on other comments. No caffeine in the afternoon, blackout curtains, red lights, limit light when it's dark out, not eating late.
That was about seven years ago, I'm now 35 and I'm not a night owl anymore. Part of it is probably getting older, I've heard that this frequently happens to people as they age. But I noticed the changes within a few months of taking sleep hygiene seriously. A few years ago I threw out my alarm clock because I hadn't set it in a few years (I'm lucky that I really only have to be at work by 10am for a standup so it wouldn't matter if I overslept). I can't remember the last time I woke up later than 7:30am, that's late for me now. Usually it's around 6:30am. I am wide awake when I open my eyes. My main sleep problem now is waking up too early and not being able to fall back asleep. I'll then get tired and go to bed early, and wake up even earlier the next day.
I feel better than I have at any point in my life previously. It's certainly possible that many people here with sleep problems have naturally different rhythms. It's also possible that certain obese people are naturally obese and no amount of diet or exercise changes will fix it. I have personally come to the belief that having a sleep cycle which is not mostly aligned with the natural patterns is unhealthy, regardless of whether it's "natural" or not.
If anyone is interested in specific techniques I have all sorts of little hacks, although I don't have to use many of them anymore.
I'm not sure I remember any good books. There's quite a bit of info on the web though. Besides bloggers who exclusively focus on sleep, the only communities that take it seriously are athletics and paleo. And there's a lot of other bullshit that comes along with either of those.
Here are some things that have helped me.
It's not just the amount of light around you that matters, the amount of light entering your eye is much more important. Staring at a computer monitor might as well be staring at the sun as far as your brain is concerned. Get off the computer at least two hours before you want to go to bed. You like coding late at night? Sorry, you will have crappy sleep. The same is not necessarily true for watching tv. It is farther away from you and not nearly as much light enters your eye. It still has the same effect, just less.
Get rid of all light in your bedroom. Blackout curtains. A single led light on a piece of electronics will now keep me up at night. Get an alarm clock that lets you turn off the display.
Never do anything in bed except sleep or have sex. Reading in bed for a little while before you go to sleep is fine, reading for hours is not. Do it somewhere else, you are not tired yet. If you have a tv in your bedroom get rid of it (this is very important).
Use f.lux. If you like to read in bed buy a red spectrum book light and read with the lights off. I use a tablet and some app that lets you turn the brightness down very low, low enough that I can't see it with the lights on.
Try supplementing magnesium (I use Natural Calm). I am also convinced that diet plays a big part in all this, but I don't have much more to say than eating healthy will make it (and almost everything else related to health) easier.
To start off, stay up late and force yourself to get up early so that you'll get tired early the next night. Keep forcing yourself to get up early. If you get 4 hours of sleep for a few nights, wake up early and then can't fall asleep at a reasonable time go see a doctor, there may be something wrong with you.
If the reason you're not falling asleep is because you're coding or playing video games or something else that keeps you stimulated, you have to stop that at night. There's just no way around it. You have to start winding your brain down a few hours before you are going to go to bed. Read, watch relaxing tv, talk with your partner or friends.
There's probably a lot more, this is all off the top of my head.
I had a similar experience a few years ago when I was ~23. If I got in to work at even 10am, I'd still be a total wreck and mornings were hell.
After my boss gave me a bit of a talking to and futzing around with sleep tracking apps and alarms that woke me up at the appropriate point in my sleep cycle for a while I realised that if I just didn't stay up so late I'd feel better.
It was a bit of an adjustment at first and I think f.lux and exercise helped to modify my sleep habits, but I've been feeling tired enough to just want to go to bed at 11pm and haven't used an alarm in years either.
Obviously I'm older than I was when I was a night owl, but given I was able to make the change in a few months, at the prompting from a former boss, I'm less convinced that it's unchangeable.
Reminded me of a great sleep app I used to use. It's called Gentle Alarm and it really is a great hack. I don't know if the authors of the software came up with this idea but it works great.
Here's how it works. If you are woken up when you are deep REM sleep you will feel tired. If you wake up when you are in very light sleep you will not. This is what happens when you wake up naturally. The sleep cycle generally repeats itself every 90 minutes or so but everyone is different. The point is there are times you can wake up when you will feel refreshed, and times when you will feel tired.
Gentle Alarm configures two alarms. It plays a very soft alarm half an hour before your real alarm (all the times and volumes are configurable). If you are in deep sleep at that time you will not wake up to this alarm but if you are in light sleep you will. If you are in deep sleep then in half an hour (or whatever period) you will almost certainly not be in deep sleep. You will then wake up to your normal alarm. The system ensures that you are awake by your alarm time.
I've become convinced that many "night owls" are actually people whose bodies are confused by the intense illumination made possible by electric lighting and electronics, street noise, separation from the sun's set and rise, and other facets of modern life.
Younger people tend to be late sleepers. Older people tend to rise earlier. Normally, businesses are run by older people. They get to choose, and obviously they choose what they like.
The same goes for the thermostat. Older people put on weight and wear suits.
This article makes it sound like people have individual schedules that are somehow locked in. My experience is that my schedule changes and I can force it to change. I can get on a 7am schedule or a 11am schedule by slowly forcing it.
Also, there is a quiz (which I haven't looked at). Why do you need a quiz? Couldn't you just ask what time you get up on weekends?
>>The message is clear: Starting early is the way to get ahead; lateness is ugly as sin.
This message is the key. But its not what is literally understood here. Being the first is the key. By first I mean, being first to finish your course work as a student, being first in finishing most of the tickets at work, being first in taking initiatives in work and life, being first in taking up more responsibilities etc. When people talk of being first, its not just time.
Also productivity is the key here. I've been both a night owl and early riser based on how the situation would demand.
As a student I was mostly a night owl. College has its day schedule charted out. I would study late into the night, and go to college in the day. Most night owl's I knew during college, we were down with all our course work in 1/4th the term and would spend most of the time in mock exams, practice and revision.
At work and in my own start up I've tried various schedule with a ridiculous amount of productivity. And never felt discriminated in either.
Don't worry about being discriminated, if you are productive you will be getting astronomical miles ahead of everybody else. And people around you will notice this.
I am in Florida now and my clients are in California. My time zone has changed, but they now get better service from me because I can sleep until 12 and it's only 9 for them.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadDelayed sleep phase is extreme. Less than 1 percent of the population has it.
(I personally like to wake up late, though it's not tremendously painful to adjust to another schedule.)
When I was in my twenties, I actually used to work on a 28 hour day schedule.[1] Now I've quit caffeine and hit my forties, and am one of those people that goes to the gym at 5:30AM.
1: (28x6 == 24x7) https://xkcd.com/320/
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/phase.html
My employer expects me to work a roughly normal 9-5. The best compromise I seem to have worked out is that I take Wednesday morning off and I work a little longer on the other 4 days to make up for it. This gives me the ability to rotate my sleep schedule on a semi-weekly basis. Wednesday morning I can sleep in and "reset". Tuesday and Friday aren't the most productive days because my internal clock is the most detached from my working hours, but around noon my grogginess will clear up and I'm on track, so it's workable.
If it was 1% it'd be 1 in every 100, which I'd consider fairly common.
Even 1 in every 200 or 300 is still an awful lot of people.
My parents still look down on me sleeping until noon, as if I somehow sleep for fourteen hours a day, but nobody considers the ton of productive time I have at night, when everyone else is sleeping.
1) In a consulting business, what is the technique to discover clients and get a steady stream of work?
2) For a product business, how does a software developer without any business experience identify a good niche to develop a product in (I'm assuming the product would be a SaaS product) and what are some general techniques to market and sell this product?
I hope my questions were not too vague. If possible, could you share your approach to self employment as well?
Since I'm a Site Reliability Engineer we don't get the freedoms some developers get in regards to working times (I'm sure there are some companies which are fine, but coming in a midday all the time would probably not go over well anyway.)
I wonder why nightowls get such a bad rap, and why every human must do things at the same time, it's a strain on public transport and places to buy lunch etc; it reeks of an awful inefficiency for the sake of consistency and little else (maybe social interaction? I don't socially interact though..)
I'm guessing the earth will melt first.
The irony is that I'm a morning person and I live here for family reasons. I'd love to work from 8 am or so ;-)
I had the same kind of sleep cycle when I was a teenager / young adult. I didn't have hypothyrodism or Grave's disease.
It gradually got a bit better as I aged and I'm down to needing a more normal 7.5 hrs of sleep.
Its still 9:20am in the morning, though, and I still feel like I got kicked in the face getting out of bed, which is entirely normal for me.
I had mild untreated hypothyroidism for a year and it didn't help me get to sleep earlier.
Still get called lazy by the actually lazy fuckers who go to bed at 8pm and get up at 7am and spend 11 hours out of every 24 catching flies.
Now that I get more regular exercise, I need a little over 7 hours a night to maintain. And the weirdest part is that my routine works out to about 40 minutes a day including transit time. And while I spend a lot more time resting now due to post-workout fatigue, I spent a lot of time vegging before because I was 'exhausted'.
So in all, by working out I net at least an extra half hour to an hour a day where I'm awake and useful.
The standard advice is:
- no caffeine after noon
- no screens after 8PM
- no big meals after 7PM, (but make sure you're not hungry at bedtime)
- no more than 2 alcoholic drinks with and after supper
- make sure your room is cool and your bed is cozy
Those are the easy fixes. However, the most common cause of sleep problems is stress. That's why your Mom told you to count sheep. If counting sheep isn't enough to turn your mind off, then perhaps seeking professional help for stress is your best option.
If you aren't stressed and the above steps didn't work, please seek medical help.
If you're still in your teens or twenties, it may get better as you get older.
> There are night owls among us — whose whole circadian schedules are shifted later — and morning larks, who are shifted earlier. (If you're curious, you can assess your chronotype with this quiz here.) These traits are determined by genetics and are extremely hard to change. What's more, the research is finding that if we fight our chronotypes, our health may suffer.
It's just my rhythm. It sure makes it difficult to get up at 7 for my 9-5 job.
In the morning, my drive to do anything much isn't there - it takes a few hours for the furnaces to come online.
You could argue that that's a medical condition, but I'd argue that it stems from being more mentally active as the day progresses - which is kinda the definition of an owl.
Let's go back to australopithecine principles, so we can all sleep better. Except someone will need to stay up to look out for predators.
And there you have your evolutionary basis. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/night-owls-creative-intel...
What you fail to understand is that at 9:20am in the morning, like it is now, that my brain is swimming in serotonin and it feels like I got kicked in the face.
I DO NOT have the same neurochemistry that you do. So while all of that helps, it doesn't magically turn me in someone that gets up at the asscrack of dawn all bright and cheerful.
There are strong parallels between people who give this kind of advice to delayed sleep sufferers and people who think they can cure homosexuality.
I almost said the same thing in another post, but thought it was too controversial. Kudos to you for saying it - I agree the mindset feels similar.
Same problem occurs with introverts and all the extroverts that want to cure us.
What is odd is that while at the office we're worrying about health insurance for trans individuals there's about zero awareness of discrimination over sleep issues and introversion.
What I would love to see is some company based in the west coast with UK/EU remote employees who started mandating 8am (PST/PDT) standup meetings every day to get sued by DSPD suffering employees and lose. HR departments might start taking notice if they started being vulnerable to lawsuits.
The person who was using the Facebook Chat status API to track his friend's sleep patterns comes to mind. But also, we're getting into creepy territory if a lawyer calls you and say: "hey! You work for BigCo and you're a delayed sleeper, aren't you? I know their work policies, have you had problems with that? Don't you want a bucket of money?"
By saying 'its 9:20am' i'm not saying that the clock controls me. I'm saying that at a time when a 'normal' person would have woken up, having had enough time to get up, have a shower, etc that I'm still feeling 'kicked in the head'. The 'normal' melatonin/serotonin cycle looks like a pretty sharp square wave and as people wake up those chemicals get rapidly flushed out of their CSF and they 'wake up' and feel alert. People with DSPD have a measurable blunted rise and fall time in their sleep chemicals. So the point is that "at 9:20" for me I'm still swimming in sleep chemicals, while another person will be fully awake.
Please don't be personally abrasive or call names in HN comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If there's every anything interesting wrong with you, like soft tissue damage, GI issues or neurochemistry, you're going to learn a whole lot about internal medicine, and you're going to find out the doctor is often making it up as they go.
If you get a good doctor, they are going to suggest things that nobody else even mentioned. If you get a passable doctor, essentially you will be in charge of determining your treatment and dosages (at 3 points in my life the physician was effectively letting me write my own prescriptions, because they couldn't see inside my head or experience my physical symptoms. They're going to set boundaries but you have some responsibility for your own fate. The bad ones are just going to talk to you about how your side effects are expected, or how you'll have a limp for the rest of your life, and you should just suck it up and deal.
(And by the way, if you have anything physically wrong with you, from 'fallen arches' to ligament damage, I can't recommend enough that you get a referral to a sports medicine clinic ASAP. General practitioners and osteopaths know fuck all about how the human body works mechanically, and they're going to tell you to cope with things that are completely fixable, sometimes without surgery. Meanwhile a sports medicine or rehab specialist will teach you how to avoid reinjury, which is something a 'doctor' will -never- do and is actually the most important part of your recovery - staying well).
All the life adaptations make DSPD manageable. Any 'helpful ideas' I've probably thought of. I've spent time completely off of caffeine for months. I've lost 40# and exercise -- that's good for other reasons but it doesn't fix my sleep. Exercise at night is generally counter-productive and wires me awake. Weightlifting is completely counterproductive since the 'burn' from torn muscle fibers will give me insomnia. Nothing really works to deal with flushing out the sleep chemicals in the AM (I used to ride my bike to work in the morning and I'd hit the coffee machine when I got there just as hard -- even having cars nearly kill me on the road didn't wake me up).
You probably can normalize your sleep pattern by forcing yourself forward with sleep time a bit every day (if you want to of course).
And i'm over 40 now and not an idiot, someone else has 'helpfully' explained that to me in the past.
About 100 times.
If it had worked, I wouldn't be posting here.
Commenting like this will get your account banned, so please don't do it here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Btw, the comment originally consisted of just the bit I quoted. The rest is fine, but the first bit is not ok.)
I have to wake up at 7am for the last 5 years or so, and it's always a torture. I have to force myself to go to bed at 11pm to tolerate it.
When I can afford to wake up at 10am, I am bright and happy and can go to bed at 3am easily.
And there is nothing particularly "normal" in waking up early.
Either way, you're not going to be getting your "scheduled" sleep so might as well spend the time on something other than lying around agonizing about it. And, the right kind of relaxing activity actually helps me get to sleep sooner than I otherwise would have.
So do you want me writing 20 minutes of lousy code every morning and having 7 hours to fix it, or do you want me to write 2 hours of lousy code and only have 5 hours to fix it? It's your choice, Sport, but choose wisely.
it would seem a third way is being chosen.
I've seen it go the other way too. One guy used to show up at 6:45 and his bosses were not amused that he was nowhere to be found at 4:15 pm.
If we're being perfectly realistic here in this thread, some guys just want minions. If you're getting dinged for something it may have nothing to do with that thing. You're being kept in your place and/or raises are being controlled by getting you to agree that the things that make you different from everyone else are bad and you should feel bad.
If they run out of things that actually matter, they'll declare that every team member should be exactly as good at every responsibility of the group as every other team member, and everyone who isn't exactly average will have work to do (and get a smaller raise).
One of my favorite bosses derisively called this "punishing people for their weaknesses instead of celebrating their strengths."
I am, I believe, a late riser, but I also stayed up late so I can have quiet time by myself.
But there are also other ways to get some of this time, and I use a lot of those now. Communication hygiene is the most obvious one. Just because you send me an email doesn't mean I'm going to drop everything and answer you. But it's not enough by itself. Other things like reminders, wiki pages to dump half-cocked notions onto, pomodoro (this is a big one) and when I can manage it, working remotely one day a week from a coffee shop where I don't know anybody, all achieve some of the same effects that nocturnal coding used to do.
That said, in an environment where 24/7 operations are the norm, encouraging part of your dev team to show up at 7 am and the rest to show up at 10 is actually the saner option, as long as your truck numbers can handle it.
At 3 the early birds can hand off to the late risers, and there's still a couple hour overlap with your second shift and on-call folks before anybody has to get woken up or cancel their evening plans.
My mom struggled with this as a nurse on shifts. Alternating between 8 and 12 hour shifts as well as evening/night made it tough for her to sleep.
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1188944-treatment
Then, I had a kid, which pushed my wake-up time to 6 a.m. (after several months of completely irregular sleep cycles). This resulted in me going to bed around 10 p.m. most nights due to really needing the sleep.
I'm still not a "morning person" now, but I'm comfortable enough with this schedule.
If you're interested in changing your schedule (even though it doesn't sound like you need to), I'd recommend slow changes. You can start going to bed a bit earlier (like 10 minutes) every night, and supplement with 2-3 mg melatonin taken 30 minutes before your desired bed time.
> We tend to assume that late wakers are the partiers, the deadbeats, the ones who are so irresponsible they can't keep a basic schedule.
> the data point to the idea that an [evening type] pattern is a risk factor for some disorders, whereas [morning type] is a protection factor," a 2012 review of hundreds of papers in the academic literature concludes.
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-HF3520-Wake-Up-Colored-Simulat...
It simulates a sunrise and sunset with bright LEDs. I always wake up before the audio alarm starts. Before this I was very difficult morning riser. I may be more light sensitive than you, but it works for me, and has some medical research to back up the idea.
Also, how is it different from this one? http://www.amazon.com/Philips-goLITE-BLU-Therapy-Device/dp/B...
It's pretty nifty. They're controlled over some UDP protocol that some people have had some success reverse engineering as well.
"...because it's not my fault. I'm really, really trying, and it's just not working."
Nothing is EVER anyone's fault anymore. Snowflakes are too precious to actually be responsible for their OWN TIME! Makes you wonder if they;ve tried going to bed earlier for a change - maybe even longer than a night or two... god forbid they miss something unimportant at night... Jimmy Kimmel maybe.
I might generally agree with your sentiment, it feels like too many people are too willing to not take responsibility for themselves, but I can tell you I've needed to engineer my life around my sleep schedule. It's partly why I'm an engineer. I've been a night owl since I was a baby, and I can tell you, I'm never more miserable than when I consistently need to function before 10am, and I'm extra useless any day I need to set an alarm for the day. So I make it clear to my coworkers that if they avoid scheduling meetings before 10, I won't schedule any after 5. After that, anyone who tries to discuss hours gets to hear instead about output.
From the business aspect, its not about your social life. It's about the 'survival' of the company and the continued employment of you and your co-workers.
Again, reading comprehension, work on it.
Most people at work and in college are adults and are expected to perform as required for the classes/Job that THEY CHOSE and then some complain about the expectation that they be in and functioning at a specific time - that makes NO sense.
This is exactly the type of attitude that the article is arguing against. Sure, complete, 100% autonomy for an employee is unrealistic, the organization has needs too. But to say that the employee can have no flexibility at all and MUST be in the office, with the other employees, at this specific time because we said so? My response to that is why? And if you can't cite a reason that doesn't involve such abstract concepts as maturity (highly relative, not measurable) or without citing tradition (highly irrational, based on societal momentum and not fact) then I'm not interested and I'll work somewhere else.
Note that this leaves plenty of room for legitimate reasons, such as "the basketball game starts at this specific time, so we need you here" and that is totally 100% a reasonable thing to say.
Being an adult implies that your take care of your responsibilities. You pay your bills, and you show up to class/work on time, etc... If you schedule a BioChem class that starts at 7am, don't complain when it starts at 7am. If you still don't understand this context, please stop now.
As a student, your world revolves around the schedule of your professor(s) Not your social life. In most professions from the NBA to IT, as an employee, your schedule revolves around that of your employer Not your social life. And most times, if you own your own business, your schedule revolves around the schedule of your clients, at this point, you don't have a social life.
Some people get lucky and either don't need to be confined to a schedule or have an open one. Great! but for the rest that don't, either stop complaining about the schedule of the job/class/career path that YOU CHOSE or get another one. It really is that simple.
Secondly, I am not nor have I ever brought up students. Schooling is an entirely different ball game, you're not being paid to be there, you're paying to be there, you set a schedule more or less to your own preferences and so have less of a reason to be upset about it, and classes are not often the length of a regular job shift, so the timing isn't nearly as critical. I could go on, this is apples and oranges and I have no idea why you brought it up.
Thirdly, even though I never brought up social lives I'll say this: If my priority is to have time to spend with my wife, my friends, or my family, as long as it does not affect my job performance if I set my hours to suit those preferences it's exactly NONE of your business what those preferences are.
Finally, I'm not complaining about my schedule, but exactly the opposite and what I said from the top was that if a given company doesn't offer a flexible schedule that I wouldn't work there.
Work on your reading comprehension.
You're taking this way too personal. I am referring to people in general. I don't care what you do as an individual.
Actually, you what you said re: flexibility was in regards to the business having to have it, yet did not mention the employee. I countered with the fact that in general an employee's (work) schedule revolves around that of the business - not vice-versa. Also that an employee's primary concern is to remain employed, and to do that, they must do what the business requires of them (that they agreed to when they took the job).
Also, you said NOTHING about whether or not you'd work for them or not - it wasn't even implied. Your statement was "But to say that the employee can have no flexibility at all and MUST be in the office, with the other employees, at this specific time because we said so? My response to that is why?"
I'm sorry, you said something about comprehension, so I decided to break down the conversation for you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Please don't be personally rude in HN comments, even when someone else is breaking the rules and being provocative. That just makes the thread still worse.
I used to think this way until one day I realized that there are many very important things that are unquantifiable and abstract, yet still matter very much.
I used to think coming on time to work was arbitrarily set by my boss...but over the years I discovered that there are numerous good, but abstract and unquantifiable reasons for this.
The idea that, as an employee, you have to be able to understand a rule in order to not resent following it, is a flawed attitude, and a reflection of a deeper problem with authority or need for control.
Would the reason, "I need you here early to see if you can follow instructions from your boss without understanding them." be a goood enough reason for you?
For what it's worth, I found a way to control my own schedule for the most part and I work better in this environment...but I have come to appreciate that there are elements at play beyond our immediate understanding, especially when working with others...and whether i understand it or not, I should respect it's value or at least the role I play within that hierarchy and framework.
My boss doesn't give me instructions I don't understand, nor does he require me to obey them from anyone else. This makes us much leaner as an organization and more focused on what actually adds value, not on the minutiae so popular with middle management at other places I've worked.
Doesn't work for everyone, YMMV, etc.
> YMMV
Exactly. If your culture and environment is built on that framework, than it would inconsistent to be a stickler for time, etc...
However, there are many organizations where this is not the case. An accounting firm or law firm might need people in their seats early in the day in case a client comes by, so they see what they are getting for their money. A commercial real estate management company might need people wearing suits and ties to impress and demand better terms and higher lease rates from their tenants, etc...
There is an amazing book called, "Broken Windows, Broken Business" about how cleaning up grafitti in NY Subways led to a huge drop in crime. When people see you care about something as trivial as coming late...they will be damn sure not to screw up something important or be late with a client, etc...
People need to be aware of how their behavior influences others and in my experience, employees rarely see beyond themselves when it comes to minutia they dont understand.
Resenting arbitrary unexplained authority is a healthy natural response.
I completely disagree with your point about slave labor. If I have been in an industry for a decade and want things done a certain way because of my much deeper understanding, which a newer employee won't appreciate, I don't need to quantify why to my employees and it's very unhealthy for them to presume that they are even capable of understanding everything at play without the prerequisite experience.
I am not talking about an arbitrary middle manager getting hung up on minutia for his own ego powertrip. I am talking about how being in the office on time, how you dress and behave has deep influence on others and the team, culture, ambiance and work environment with profound impacts a single employee can't see, and is perfectly reasonable for a boss to want to control.
This idea that following instructions without understanding them not being a prerequisite of an employee is really unhealthy attitude if you want to work for someone else.
I suggest starting your own business and not raising outside money, otherwise you will be a miserable slave in a perfectly functional work environment.
Employees in companies need to appreciate that order can impact many other aspects of the business and ability to keep clients happy, etc... and small broken things can have profound negative ripple effects.
Not my experience, and a standard complaint when commiserating with other parents is how early their kids wake up on the weekends.
My 6 year old reliably wakes up about 15 minutes earlier on the weekend than she does on weekdays.
At our company we have people who come in at 6 am and we have people who don't get in until 9. Everyone sets their schedule to what works for them and I think we're better for it. Does that make it harder to schedule meetings? Not at all, we can always find an hour or two somewhere where everyone is around.
Left to my own devices I reliably wake up at 11am-12pm, which I would venture is not acceptable in your work environment.
I was in the military for 12 years and those 5am wake-ups didn't change my "wiring." I figure if that didn't nothing will.
As indicated, the world is just not built for folks like me/us. So that means I/we just have to put in more effort to work within it.
File this under the category: Things you have to do to survive in society.
I'm not, and when I try to follow them, I end up destroyed for a week.
One of my previous flatmate is. He stopped for a while and his social circle reduced a lot (while getting closer to me). Mostly, he misses the sex.
Yes, it's way easier to have sex (quantity wise) when you go out 3 times a week as he used to do. And you need to come back late as well, if you want to find a partner, you won't bring him or her at home at 10pm.
Not even mentioning if that is something that any given person with delayed sleep wants to do.
Sometimes (most times actually) you just have to suck it up.
It is that every so often I indulge in too much coffee, booze, etc, and this pushes back bedtime by an hour or two. Or I get excited about something new like a book or a video game. Since the night time is quiet and I am undisturbed by others, I like it, and I don't bother to correct it.
Note that merely giving up coffee, as the doctor in the article recommended, wouldn't help. It is the irregular 'binges' that push our body clocks. The extreme case would be a hard drug user who occasionally parties for 2 nights in a row.
Of course eventually some social obligation or appointment causes me to have to get up at a normal hour one morning and then the process resets and slowly advances all over again.
Two comments about this:
(1) society may be correct to judge me, because there are addictions involved and they can be harmful.
(2) it's unhealthy because when one eats during a period which was recently 'sleep time' the body doesn't digest the food so well. The heart doesn't seem to like it, and I think I read that LDL cholesterol is elevated. This is one reason why night shift workers pay a price in terms of health.
Some people just have a different rhythm and nothing short of genetic engineering is going to change it.
I travel back and forth between Singapore, for reasonable lengths at a time, and to ease the jet lag adjustment period I choose to be a morning person in one and a night owl in the other. It works pretty well.
Is the hypothesis that your body naturally gets tired some number of hours after the sun goes down?
To all the people commenting about how this article "hits home": what is jetlag like for you? If you travel 5 time zones away do you become a morning person? Have you tried to keep that, but does it slip away and you revert to staying up late?
Though I'm not sure if that is down to exhaustion from a 23 hour journey forcing me to sleep earlier and longer for a few nights and thus re-jigging my sleep cycle.
Sorry, but you'll never convince me you get "sharper" at the end of the day than at the beginning.
I go to sleep as soon as I believe I'm able so I can wake up again. Sleep is a necessary evil, but it is necessary. So let's get it over with.
In the morning, I'm 100% the coder I am at 9pm.
So the nuance is what's your tipping point where you are performing worse due to fatigue.
When I was a kid, my parents made me go to bed around 9pm. I used to get up every half hour saying "mom, dad, I can't sleep". They figured out quickly enough that sending me to bed early was a waste of time since I would spend 3 hours sitting or laying in my bed waiting, fully awake, feeling like going playing outside.
Does sunshine get brighter or darker as the day goes on? Could it get brighter, then darker?
Do you get closer to work during the day, or farther? You're at home at the end of the day- does this mean you never go towards your workplace?
Work through this with me.
I am the most productive about 2 hours before sleep, at midnight.
I'm "sharper" at night because that is the only time I can expect to have no distractions. That means other people not being around; typically because they're sleeping. A [ job ] without distraction will always be more productive than [ job ] with constant distractions.
Not to mention I have a 'waking period' of about 4 hours. I'm not mentally checked in until several hours after I wake up. Caffeine helps with this but unlike a large portion of society, I don't rely on caffeine to wake me up in the mornings.
What I find extremely bizarre is that many of these so-called "morning people" need a cup of coffee each morning or they're as braindead as I am. It's almost like they aren't morning people at all and are relying on a stimulant to make them more alert and "mentally checked in".
You can try switching meetings around, but there is only so much time in the day.
Update: I was pretty rational with this discussion and it was still down voted. Either: 1) I have people following me and down voting the majority of my posts (which I suspect is happening to some degree) or 2) HN users aren't realistic.
It's honestly not _that_ universally difficult, because in practice "completely flexible work hours" means that there will be a good few mid-day/afternoon hours during which everyone is around, and lumping the meetings into that time works perfectly well. Obviously the extreme case as described in this article would make it more difficult, but for most people I don't see why it wouldn't work and even the extreme case people would be somewhat better off.
It wasn't until I started weightlifting the past several years where I've found myself actively going to sleep at reasonable hours (9-11pm) because not only am I tired from the exercising, but because I know my body needs the sleep to rebuild itself. My time inside the gym would be wasted without the sleep. I also track my calories obsessively fwiw.
Sometime in my late 20s after learning enough about health in general I realized that sleep was much more important than most believed and I decided my routine was unhealthy. I dealt with it with similar methods mentioned on other comments. No caffeine in the afternoon, blackout curtains, red lights, limit light when it's dark out, not eating late.
That was about seven years ago, I'm now 35 and I'm not a night owl anymore. Part of it is probably getting older, I've heard that this frequently happens to people as they age. But I noticed the changes within a few months of taking sleep hygiene seriously. A few years ago I threw out my alarm clock because I hadn't set it in a few years (I'm lucky that I really only have to be at work by 10am for a standup so it wouldn't matter if I overslept). I can't remember the last time I woke up later than 7:30am, that's late for me now. Usually it's around 6:30am. I am wide awake when I open my eyes. My main sleep problem now is waking up too early and not being able to fall back asleep. I'll then get tired and go to bed early, and wake up even earlier the next day.
I feel better than I have at any point in my life previously. It's certainly possible that many people here with sleep problems have naturally different rhythms. It's also possible that certain obese people are naturally obese and no amount of diet or exercise changes will fix it. I have personally come to the belief that having a sleep cycle which is not mostly aligned with the natural patterns is unhealthy, regardless of whether it's "natural" or not.
If anyone is interested in specific techniques I have all sorts of little hacks, although I don't have to use many of them anymore.
Here are some things that have helped me.
It's not just the amount of light around you that matters, the amount of light entering your eye is much more important. Staring at a computer monitor might as well be staring at the sun as far as your brain is concerned. Get off the computer at least two hours before you want to go to bed. You like coding late at night? Sorry, you will have crappy sleep. The same is not necessarily true for watching tv. It is farther away from you and not nearly as much light enters your eye. It still has the same effect, just less.
Get rid of all light in your bedroom. Blackout curtains. A single led light on a piece of electronics will now keep me up at night. Get an alarm clock that lets you turn off the display.
Never do anything in bed except sleep or have sex. Reading in bed for a little while before you go to sleep is fine, reading for hours is not. Do it somewhere else, you are not tired yet. If you have a tv in your bedroom get rid of it (this is very important).
Use f.lux. If you like to read in bed buy a red spectrum book light and read with the lights off. I use a tablet and some app that lets you turn the brightness down very low, low enough that I can't see it with the lights on.
Try supplementing magnesium (I use Natural Calm). I am also convinced that diet plays a big part in all this, but I don't have much more to say than eating healthy will make it (and almost everything else related to health) easier.
To start off, stay up late and force yourself to get up early so that you'll get tired early the next night. Keep forcing yourself to get up early. If you get 4 hours of sleep for a few nights, wake up early and then can't fall asleep at a reasonable time go see a doctor, there may be something wrong with you.
If the reason you're not falling asleep is because you're coding or playing video games or something else that keeps you stimulated, you have to stop that at night. There's just no way around it. You have to start winding your brain down a few hours before you are going to go to bed. Read, watch relaxing tv, talk with your partner or friends.
There's probably a lot more, this is all off the top of my head.
After my boss gave me a bit of a talking to and futzing around with sleep tracking apps and alarms that woke me up at the appropriate point in my sleep cycle for a while I realised that if I just didn't stay up so late I'd feel better.
It was a bit of an adjustment at first and I think f.lux and exercise helped to modify my sleep habits, but I've been feeling tired enough to just want to go to bed at 11pm and haven't used an alarm in years either.
Obviously I'm older than I was when I was a night owl, but given I was able to make the change in a few months, at the prompting from a former boss, I'm less convinced that it's unchangeable.
Here's how it works. If you are woken up when you are deep REM sleep you will feel tired. If you wake up when you are in very light sleep you will not. This is what happens when you wake up naturally. The sleep cycle generally repeats itself every 90 minutes or so but everyone is different. The point is there are times you can wake up when you will feel refreshed, and times when you will feel tired.
Gentle Alarm configures two alarms. It plays a very soft alarm half an hour before your real alarm (all the times and volumes are configurable). If you are in deep sleep at that time you will not wake up to this alarm but if you are in light sleep you will. If you are in deep sleep then in half an hour (or whatever period) you will almost certainly not be in deep sleep. You will then wake up to your normal alarm. The system ensures that you are awake by your alarm time.
It worked amazingly well for me when I needed it.
The problem isn't the person but the environment.
Younger people tend to be late sleepers. Older people tend to rise earlier. Normally, businesses are run by older people. They get to choose, and obviously they choose what they like.
The same goes for the thermostat. Older people put on weight and wear suits.
Also, there is a quiz (which I haven't looked at). Why do you need a quiz? Couldn't you just ask what time you get up on weekends?
Works for me, but I run my own company so... it's a bit easier to do. :D
This message is the key. But its not what is literally understood here. Being the first is the key. By first I mean, being first to finish your course work as a student, being first in finishing most of the tickets at work, being first in taking initiatives in work and life, being first in taking up more responsibilities etc. When people talk of being first, its not just time.
Also productivity is the key here. I've been both a night owl and early riser based on how the situation would demand.
As a student I was mostly a night owl. College has its day schedule charted out. I would study late into the night, and go to college in the day. Most night owl's I knew during college, we were down with all our course work in 1/4th the term and would spend most of the time in mock exams, practice and revision.
At work and in my own start up I've tried various schedule with a ridiculous amount of productivity. And never felt discriminated in either.
Don't worry about being discriminated, if you are productive you will be getting astronomical miles ahead of everybody else. And people around you will notice this.
Changing time zones might be a viable option.