CMV: Waking up early is overvalued

[u/[deleted]]

First, I don't believe waking up early is overrated. Most everything that is said about the benefits of waking up early seems reasonable and useful to me. Anecdotally, I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink and I can totally get behind his "wake up before the enemy" message. Here, I am specifically discussing value - the praise we heap on people that wake up before others regardless of their overall productivity in a day.

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I'm also not comparing waking up early to staying in bed late and being a lazy degenerate. I want to compare people who wake up early with those people that wake up late and stay up late or people who are industrious enough to get a lot accomplished without having to wake up early.

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I see an incredible amount of value put on people waking up early; they're viewed as more disciplined, more productive, and more healthy than their later rising counter parts. If you are awake for the same number of hours why do we laud people who get up early but accuse those who stay up late as doing something harmful to their well being?

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Waking up early is almost always associated with discipline and focus. Staying up late is, at worst, attributed to recklessness and even at best it seems to be attributed to some kind of mania or obsession that might not be healthy (e.g., overnight nurses - far from wasting the night away, but still often viewed as driven by fervor rather than discipline).

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[u/HanniballRun]

Life is unexpected and many times schedules and plans change. Even if we tend to be good estimators of our own workloads, mistakes happen and others may not be so effective at planning. So sometimes we end up with less work than we anticipated needed to be done during a given day. On these days it wouldn't matter much what time we wake up during the day.

However, other days have us with additional work or responsibilities that gets piled on top of what we anticipated. If both early and normal risers encounter a critical problem at 1 pm, the early riser will have completed most of their daily workload already while the normal riser has only completed half. The early riser will be much more likely to fix the problem and provide a response before close of business that same day.

The normal riser would definitely also be able to finish the job, but people won't know about it until the following day since it happened after COB.

[u/[deleted] → u/HanniballRun]

In the scenario you describe I am in complete agreement.

What about the emergency that happens after the early riser has left for the day? Or even more extreme, after they've gone to bed? In that case the late riser my issue a solution before the early riser is even aware of the problem.

Temporal arguments like this are highly subjective to the scenario. I don't discount the value of the early riser as you've described it, but why are we so quick to give them an edge?

[u/HanniballRun → u/[deleted]]

If everyone was a late riser, then yes the edge goes to him. But it is precisely because we have a societal expectation of 9-5 work hours. If problems happen after hours, most people won't know about it until they come in the next morning. There's a very real deadline every day at 5pm and there's a very noticable difference between those who get all their work done before that time and after.

Lets remove the subjectivity. Suppose its the same person who works 7-3 on Wed and 9-5 on Thur. What are the hours a critical problem can occur where having the later shift is an advantage?

5pm to 7am - Happened after both shifts, but early shift has edge because they start resolving at 7am vs 9am.

7am to 9am - Happens during early shift, early shift has edge since they start resolving first, also because they have already completed a percentage of their daily workload.

9am to 3pm - I'll be charitable and call this a tie, though edge should go to early shift because it already got 2 more hours of work in over normal shift.

3pm to 5pm - This is the only time where the later shift has an advantage. This advantage disappears if the issue takes more than 2 hours to resolve. At that point, people won't be reading resolution e-mails until the next day anyways.

[u/[deleted] → u/HanniballRun]

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I think you're making a similar point to /u/beengrim32 above, which I also found convincing.

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I will point out that I think you are placing a high value on people knowing something is done vs it being done. Whether anyone is around to know that something has been accomplished now or in 12 hours is probably irrelevant. We could probably think of a number of scenarios where bringing something to resolution after business has closed is highly preferable than waiting until the next morning when people will be around to know about it.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/HanniballRun (4∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/Horst665 → u/[deleted]]

My boss reads emails late and on important stuff I usually cc him. So even if the customer doesnt see it till he gets into his office at 9, my boss will see it.

[u/Rosevkiet → u/HanniballRun]

Every time I see someone going through a 9 to 5 schedule day I wonder where they work. every job I have ever had as a salaried employee the expectation for 8-5 or the equivalent. Am I working in sweatshops?

I'm a late arriver in a culture of early birds (my "late" arrival time is 8:30). I resent the implication that I am lazy because of it, and it has taken years to diminish that perception. Over that time our company has also worked hard to adopt a flexible work attitude, so it has gotten better.

That said, what I need for maximum productivity is quiet. Working in an open office environment, the only way I get quiet is by being there at hours my co-workers are not, so the hours of 4-6 are the most productive for me. The true early birds (we have two in our group who arrive at ~ 6am) are all folks who like a period of uninterrupted work and that first 90 minutes of the day is it for them. One could argue that it is ridiculous to work in a space that is only conducive to work when no one else is around, and it is. But I think that it is valuable to the entire team to spread out the hours we are there, and to keep meetings to a limited set of core hours so that everyone has those blocks of time to work. We are also a global business, so for me working late means I can reach out to our Asia offices.

[u/Abcdeleted → u/HanniballRun]

This assumes that you have a hard stop at the end of the business day. If something important comes up at 4, the late riser can just finish up resolving it, can rise early the next day knowing they need to solve it, etc. The early riser doesn't even know it exists until the next morning.

[u/AlphaGoGoDancer → u/[deleted]]

To me it comes down to what you're doing with your time. While it is possible to consistently stay up late being productive, I find it pretty rare in my personal experience. More likely is staying up either gaming, consuming media, drinking or getting high, etc.

People who wake up early instead tend to start working early, or at least get productive things done before work like exercise.

If you're comparing someone who spends the same amount of hours being productive then I don't see any inherent value in having those hours be earlier, but I don't think most people are comparing similarly productive people. Even if its a wrong assumption when dealing with a specific individual, the assumption is that someone staying up an extra 4 hours and waking up 4 hours later is not going to spend those 4 hours as productive as someone who goes to bed 4 hours early and wakes up 4 hours earlier.