This used to be me and I used to believe it was just the way things were. I'd naturally sleep 10+ hours until noon on the weekends, struggle to wake up for work, and then struggle to fall asleep before midnight. I had little energy for exercise and always felt stressed trying to find the time to stay on top of all of my other responsibilities.
But the truth is, it's perfectly possible for anyone to adjust their sleep schedule and become a morning person. It just takes some conscious effort and the will-power to suffer through a week or two of re-adjustment.
1. Set your alarm for the same time every day, including weekends. Wake up as soon as it goes off and don't snooze. Yes, it's hard at first. But it's not inhuman, so just deal with it. It'll get easier.
2. You can have a cup or two of coffee as soon as you wake up, but no caffeine after noon.
3. Put down screens like phone, laptop, and TV after about 8pm. The artificial, bright light throws off off your body's natural instinct to get sleepy when it gets dark. Spend some time preparing for the next day so you aren't stressed in the morning, and then read a book or something until you feel tired.
Bonus points if you get a workout in sometime during the day. It'll help you fall asleep earlier which will make waking up early easier. Also realize that alcohol reduces quality of sleep, so cutting back or avoiding it altogether will make waking up easier.
That's not 100% true. I've done it, and deal with a couple of weeks of pain to realign my schedule.
I then went to bed late ONCE, and slept late the following morning. My schedule had the re-sync'd back to it's original form, undoing three weeks of work.
I can't really explain it, but it doesn't matter how much effort I put in, just staying up very late ONCE, screwes up my schedule, and I have to go back to two weeks to pain to realign my clock again.
It was similar to giving up smoking, the first couple of weeks are very easy to relapse, after that it slowly gets better - but you are always at risk of slipping back into bad habits if you aren't careful. I slipped many times, but each time learned some lessons and built some good habits.
It took a lot of time and effort - obeying the alarm, avoiding computers at night, giving up caffeine, etc. etc. - but I think it was worth it to feel awake and alert all day instead of being an exhausted grumpy zombie out of sync with the rest of the world.
How long had you been doing the night owl schedule before that? You're trying to break a habit that you've been forming for years in a matter of weeks (for the record, I was a self proclaimed night owl until about a year ago)
1) Multiple alarm clocks, strewn about the room where you have to get up to turn them off.
2) A sunrise alarm clock.
3) Exercise, hard and heavy, first thing in the morning, before anything else, and every day. You'll fall asleep much faster and sleep much better.
1. Sure, that works, for a time, possibly even a few months. Until you begin subconsciously turning the alarms off or hitting the snooze. That leads to a self-reinforcing loop of "turn alarm off --> pleasure from sleep --> no mental block to turning it off next time --> turn alarm off".
Anecdotally, the periods where I've lasted longest as a "morning person" lacked any sort of alarms at all.
2. That's simply not true. Coffee takes about 5-7 hours to wear off, so if you're going to bed around 2100, your safest cut off would be 1400, but generally 1600 wouldn't be that bad either. I've also had coffee and had deep, restful naps just an hour later. If you're really, truly tired, coffee is not a significant inhibitor after 5 hours.
3. That is simply not an option for most people. Family members, roommates, gyms, all might have TV screens or people browsing their phones and talking loudly and doing various activities. You can't simple "escape" the digital world entirely at 8pm. This is realistic on vacation, and I can confirm it results in better sleep, but in day2day, you're bound to slip eventually.
4. Workout - working out can prevent you from falling asleep from all the adrenaline generated during the workout. Just like coffee, it's better to not do it within 3 hours of sleep but many people don't have the luxury of choosing when they go to the gym (if they go at all).
But what's the end result? You wake up earlier, and you get tired and sleepy in the afternoon, around 1-2pm. Most workplaces don't allow you to nap for an hour, so you keep feeling tired and unproductive for the rest of the day. Not to mention waking up early makes you feel really hungry if you don't eat a big breakfast.
Your counter-argument here appears to be "it's hard." Sure, it is, but your goal is to make it easier by ensuring a routine, a better nights sleep, etc. Some mornings still suck, but they still suck when it's 9am and the bed is warm and you're already late and don't want to go to work.
> That's simply not true. Coffee takes about 5-7 hours to wear off.
I didn't make any factual assertions regarding caffeine, so it's not something that can be true or false. I suggest avoiding caffeine after noon because it's a crutch. It also ensures there's no chance your body is affected by stimulants when the sun goes down and it's time to wind down. I know from experience that it's far easier to retrain your body to sleep easily and wake early if you minimize chemicals like caffeine and alcohol that interfere with your brain's natural behaviors.
> That is simply not an option for most people. Family members, roommates, gyms, all might have TV screens or people browsing their phones and talking loudly and doing various activities.
People did it for millions of years. In general you shouldn't be working out once you cross that time threshold, either, since you want your body to be preparing to sleep. Spend some time in the kitchen preparing your breakfast and lunch. Do some laundry or house cleaning. Get your things ready for the next day so you wake up without stress. Then grab a physical, paper book and read until you start to feel drowsy.
> many people don't have the luxury of choosing when they go to the gym (if they go at all).
Possibly the number one greatest thing about waking up early is that you all of a sudden have an extra two or three hours all to yourself. You can work out early in the morning, work on side projects, actually sit and eat breakfast, etc. I basically eliminated my afternoon crash since I no longer skip breakfast and overeat at lunch, and I don't hit a major caffeine low.
You seem to be conflating waking up early and being a morning person. With a rigid schedule night people can adjust to an earlier schedule (i did for several years) but that wont make someone with later rhythms be as productive as they would be on a more natural (for them) schedule
I find that the key ingredient is others' expectations. If I'm going to be arriving at a workplace with the person I report to sitting right opposite me, and sleeping in means arriving an hour or more after them, then I can get in gear, avoid pressing snooze, and catch the 07:33. At my previous job, the norm was to arrive between 10 and 11: I was rarely up more than 15 minutes before my carpool arrived, and the idea of getting up earlier regularly gave me headaches.
Edit: some stuff I've done for a while: no caffeine after 18:00, no blue light after 21:00. Falling asleep is much harder if I don't do these things.
You were able to align yourself using a couple of techniques, but missed out on some of the most potent which include
1. Melatonin
2. Blue light therapy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder
[0]Here's a relevant quote from Wikipedia "Depending on the severity, the symptoms can be managed to a greater or lesser degree, but no cure is known."
I can confirm that this works, but this part's really killer if you have young kids since it means (very nearly) zero kid-free screen time, ever. Also hard if you have, say, friends over and want to watch a movie or play some Mario Kart or something, since most of that's going to be later in the day if you've got kids. Seriously restricts your solo or couple entertainment and unwinding options. Winters especially are incredibly tough since going out in the yard isn't even an option (dark too early). Basically books and tabletop games are all you've got, and yeah, people got by with that (or less) since forever and were basically fine, but you won't be keeping up with the various TV series or games your friends and coworkers are into, for example.
There are real costs to making your sleep schedule sane, and they mostly come out of free time for entertainment/side-projects/online-classes/100-other-things-that-require-a-screen.
What I am supposed to do during four hours with basically no media? That sound a bit extreme. 90 minutes of that ought to do. Oh, if you DO watch something (eg. movie), try an app like redshift, to reduce make the light blueish, which is what actually deprives you of sleep.
Quite false. Yes, the standard sleep hygiene rules[0] can be helpful to those not already following them but they're not effective for everyone, particularly if they have a complicating condition.
[0] For those interested, a more complete list is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hygiene
Yes, lots of inexperienced founders/leaders drink deep of the open office koolaid and do it wrong. But doing it right (allowing flexibility, having private spots, etc.) yields better overall results because people are more creative in groups. The chance serendipity of investigating new ideas with your fellows will always result in a better work product.
I'm never going back to an office, if I can help it.
The stereotype that we have to work late, be in an office are just illusion.
I do agree that occasional chatting/communication is important otherwise, though, although I'm not really sure open plans foster that - seems to me to foster broadcasting rather than more productive one-on-one conversations.
There is nothing stopping a completely remote company from having "jam" sessions between developers. Is there any solid evidence that working in an office together yields a better work product? We see plenty examples of products that are built by completely remote organizations, and no one has ever pointed to them and gone "man, if only they worked in a face to face situation this would be so much better!"
Considering that the Linux kernel was developed 90% on a mailing list, I think it puts the lie to "face time is required for development."
Some make the cut, other's can't handle it.
Large enterprise corporations with dozens of people on the tech team and a rigid process? That's not a creative environment. Startups MUST foster a creative environment.
It's a job, it's not a fucking Montessori school, or a correspondence course. If you don't want your employability to dry up once rockstar ninjas become commonplace enough that the demand bubble for them pops, you will cultivate the essential skills of showing up when and where your employer demands and otherwise being their huckleberry. Know what that means? It means someone who can be counted on. Showing up at the office on time is a first-line test of dependability. That's why companies ask it of you.
In this day and age, dependability is delivering your tasks accurately and on time. Everything else is just chaff.
More managers should get with the program, and understand that skilled workers want to Work to Task, Not To Time.
Not antiquated enough: throughout history the large majority of workers have been farmers. Even without being able to read and write, they were/are entirely responsible of their work - and farming wasn't easy at all.
Same for artisans, shopkeepers at al. When people are not bossed around they can manage themselves.
The truth today is sadly, that there are not much managers left who are really able to "manage".
If your "style" of management needs constant synchronous contact to the people you manage, you aren't a manager but a glorified courier.
I wonder if the people who are so against remote work, are the concerned they don't have the skill set to only be judged on output?
This is the crux of your argument, and it's debatable whether this will ever happen. My feeling is that rockstars will always be rare. I don't think this is a function of supply and demand but rather just human nature.
I personally could be a rockstar if I wanted to. I bet a lot of us could. I just don't care to organize my entire life around my work. It's not that I don't know how to do it, there's no magic trick about it, it's not some rarefied thing that only one in a million can figure out.
I just want to focus on other things, not vomit code at feverish pace all day long. I don't think anyone but the most driven among us ever will.
Rockstars are not created by market pressure. Therefore there is no asset bubble for their services waiting to pop. You and I can safely sit here and dream up ways to lift up the entire profession because it won't get stolen out from under us by ninjas.
If you truly believe that, your opinions are severely lacking some level of realistic perspective.
Point being, have you considered that your "night owl" tendencies are an artificial condition caused by too much electronic device exposure late at night, and that a change in lifestyle might do you good?
"...I cannot trust employers to provide me with an adequate work environment."
A recent contract I had, had quite poor office space - small old desks, old 17" monitors, no personal storage, chairs in poor repair, and a badly working hot-desk system (I have yet to encounter 'working' hot-desking). As a designer, I was expected to work on these 17" monitors (or 15" laptop screens) do multiple large document work, and loads of complex diagrams in Visio. Not a fun experience.
In comparison, my home office contains an executive office chair bought to my specifications, a large desk laid out just for me, and a nice 24" 1920x1200 monitor (soon to be replaced with a 27" 2456x1440 one). I have Skype for audio and video calls, and my kitchen has food and drink in it that I actually like.
When I'm in the zone, and working from home, my productivity is doubled compared to working in a poor open plan environment, so where I can, I request work from home arrangements in my contracts.
Like the author of the article, I too am not a morning person - people may scoff at this, but it's a real thing. Before noon I am almost useless, the proverbial bear with a sore head. Once the sun is past the yard arm however, my focus kicks in, and I can power through my tasks until about 8pm-10pm. It's a full working day, just offset.
I don't really know the point I'm making here... but I do empathise heavily with the article author.
In one company I consulted for, a morning person almost got fired when a regional manager noticed he left 2 hours earlier than everyone else. It was hilarious, in the saddest possible way.
1) Managers scheduled meetings at 3:00 or even 4:00. "Yeah, I know you normally leave at 3:00, but this is the only time I could find where everyone was free." Dolt. I'm not free.
2) I'm sitting at my desk at 2:45 and someone walks in with a Problem. It's not something that can't wait until tomorrow in the great scheme of things. But they're planning to work until 7:00, and if I don't solve this problem they're going to be unable to do anything until tomorrow.
3) I'm in the groove. My fingers are flying, code is being created. Five or six mental balls are in the air. I'm in a mental state that doesn't happen all the time, or even every day. I don't want to stop, and it's time to go home. If I came in late like everyone else the longer I stay the better my commute. But since I came in early every minute I stay is two minutes I lose from my day. So do I shut down and leave, or do I mentally commit myself to staying for at least three more hours?
Beyond that, while being all alone is great if you have everything you need, I found people need input from me and vice versa quite a bit more often than I expected, which really cut down on the actual productivity.
When do night people fit in the time for that sort of stuff? I would imagine that you could do that sort of thing in the morning when I'm working but my perception (perhaps false) is that night people sleep in later.
1 - I wake up at 8 and get repetitive stuff done from 8-9 before I leave for work. this wakes me up and gets my day started. anything remaining gets done after work
2 - a simple couple/few hour shift from your paradigm. at work from 10-whenever. get stuff done for a couple hours after i get home. we're getting up later but we're also going to bed later.
The real problem is how to socialise when you work until 10pm - it ruins Friday night :/
Barely done an ounce of work before 11:00 in my entire working life. At home at least I can ease into it and work later comfortably. While I'm working in an office there is always someone super focused on how many bums are on seats at 9:30 every morning (even in places with flexible hours this always seems to inevitably happen at some point). So I'm forced to under sleep and just procrastinate for the first few hours of the day to keep them happy.
Not to mention get stressed while trying to fall asleep because I'm scared of oversleeping.
I worked exclusively from home for two years. The cabin fever was so bad I couldn't take it anymore. I may be in the minority for programmers but I need other people around and I need the energy of an office.
From a management standpoint. A good whiteboard session goes a long way to kill communication issues on projects that are creative or not 100% straightforward. Although, of course, you don't need to be in the office "every" day for that.
A good compromise was going to a free coworking space for the afternoons which has been working out great. I don't have that rush to leave the house in the morning, I chat to some people, I can come/go as I please, I am not constantly interrupted like when I am in the office. It has the benefit of being 5 minutes away on my scooter, too.
For me it's a great balance. I feel way more productive and energised. Every 3 months I go work from the office for a week and the thing I notice more than anything is that I am absolutely shattered by the end of the week. Offices and commuting are incredibly tiring and pretty terrible for work life balance.
Early on my initial reaction was to find a co-working space. My employer was more than willing to help out. I started looking around the city and eventually found one I thought I liked. After a few days I realized I hated it. I wanted to escape the office scene and here I was, given the freedom to do that, right back in an office.
The second thing I tried was going to more meetups. This failed mostly because meetups are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This clashed with my workout schedule. When I changed my workout schedule I found that going to meetups was a major chore. I rarely found any value in it and my networking skills are super shitty. I'd go, sit for an hour, not talk to anyone and leave. A complete waste of time.
The last thing I tried and something that has worked for me for over a year now is a combination of coffee shops, a co-working space, and my home office. I'm a man that needs options. I can't be tied down to just working at home, or just working at an office. Somedays I don't want to see or hear anyone. Those are the days I stay home. Other days I want the noise and movement of a coffee shop. So I'll venture out to the 100s of shops in my area. I meet more people there than I ever did at meetups.
Sometimes though, I'll go nowhere for weeks. Like you say: options. It's nice to have them.
Totally. I find that things are resolved much more quickly when I'm in the office vs. working from home.
I have a bunch of friends on IRC that work in unrelated (though usually IT) fields. I don't ever feel lonely. I don't think I would last without IRC, though.
So, er, everyone else has to be accommodating of this guy's abnormal working hours, because the first two hours of the day that society normally considers to be working hours aren't convenient for him?
And it's okay. Not everyone can be a good fit for every company.
What I find less great is the suggestion that all employers should "accept your employees for who they are and optimize for their abilities" - does anyone really think that if everyone just worked whatever hours they found most pleasing, this would genuinely result in a situation that was even vaguely practical? What would happen to the people with children who actually find that working 9-5 is convenient because they get to spend a few hours with their children when they get back from work before they go to bed? Would those guys just sit around stuck for two hours in the morning whilst the night owls had a bit of a lie-in, and then have to cart the laptop around with them in the evening so they can Slack their late-working colleagues whilst they're giving the children a bath?
I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just a dinosaur (who actually happens both to work remotely and to work strange hours sometimes too).
What's a "normal working hour"?
I would never fit in any workplace (tried a few but none fit), I have a big chair, 3 big monitors and a bong, also can talk with my team fellows every time I want, but we really don't need to talk too much, if you understand your product, understand your clients and your needs, that's just not too much to talk, just hard work to do.
And much better than all the places where people go out drinking after work. I wish this were more socially acceptable.
Some of my friends have said that citicholine has been helpful for them. Wondering if you have any techniques yourself?
PS. "Distributed teams" isn't the same as "working remotely", although many things that make the latter work apply to the former too.
It can also mean that the potential empolyer will expect you to relocate.
I call it "FU Money" - because when you want to walk away, you can tell 'em and leave. It's a great position to be in.
Do you know what the most popular type of monitor stand is in a major corporation? Paper reams. In fact recently where I work they came around to people with these and asked they not do it because it screws up their paper ordering/estimation.
Why is this a problem? Because offices are super picky about the $100 equipment order but NOT about the $2000 plane ticket/hotel. One is considered a necessary expense and the other is "waste".
People are more productive when they are comfortable/have the tools they need. The building doesn't matter as much. Just an opinion.
You don't want to allow work from home? Cool, give me my two large enough monitors, my adjustable stand, a motorized sit/stand desk, and maybe something simple like free coffee/soda so I'm not spending $X/day on it. Let me come in at 10 and stay until 6 if it suits me.
At the office, make sure there are places I can go to escape from noise when I need to. What would even be MORE awesome is if you somehow worked it out if I could get a discount on noise cancelling headphones.
Pretty simple stuff, and really at the core of what is written here. The title is just meant to infuriate some of you.
That always annoys me, because I don't drink that crap. Soda in particular is extremely unhealthy.
If you're going to offer free food/drinks, then give people an actual choice so people like me aren't feeling left out. Don't just assume that everyone likes Coke(TM), or Starbucks(TM), or nasty Folgers(TM) coffee. Try offering some healthy food or snacks, like yogurts or fresh fruit so employees stay healthy.
>At the office, make sure there are places I can go to escape from noise when I need to.
1000 times this! I once worked at a horrible place like this where there was no place to escape to. They told me I could go sit in the "break room" for a break; except that this stupid room was extremely brightly lit and had a stupid TV blaring CNN all day long. We were explicitly not allowed to go to other parts of the building and use the comfy chairs in the more dimly-lit common areas to relax for a bit, away from the noisy open-plan work area.
>What would even be MORE awesome is if you somehow worked it out if I could get a discount on noise cancelling headphones.
No. First, they should be free, but secondly, they simply don't work. I tried that at the above place. It was even worse than putting up with the open-plan environment, because then I constantly had people walking up behind me and tapping me on the shoulder, which was horribly disturbing and made me flinch badly. Maybe I should have just backhanded someone reflexively so people would have stopped doing it.
The fundamental problem with all this stuff is that employers simply do not give two shits about the happiness or comfort of their employees in the office, and are simply too stupid and shortsighted to see how this translates directly into both increased productivity and retention.
That's OK too, was just being specific for illustration. I don't really care the result, but I do enjoy caffeine. Haha. My point was just to follow on with the "I'm more comfortable at home because $X".
Example: I like soda. It is free in our cafeteria until 2:30 when they close. After that it is $1.80 in the machine for a bottle. Sure I can bring my own but come on.
> The fundamental problem with all this stuff is that employers simply do not give two shits about the happiness or comfort of their employees in the office, and are simply too stupid and shortsighted to see how this translates directly into both increased productivity and retention.
Pretty much.
> Remove the safety nets and let the bad actors fail
I like to have a safety net.
> Without tons of rules and process, it becomes very obvious who cares about the organization and who does not, thanks to the lack of rules & process and not because of them.
An abundance of rules and process provides a system that bad actors can and will game, giving the appearance of adding value without actually moving the needle.
> Even if we wanted to, we can’t write a rule that will magically make people engaged. We have to compel them by building a workplace they love and can do great, meaningful work in.
>when I’m forced to be in a chair in your office at 9am:
> - I force myself to be up early and rush to work, feeling ill prepared
> - I try to focus and be effective in the morning, but struggle and the day is off to a bad start, killing my mood and momentum
> - I’m tired in the afternoon and cannot work effectively at my peak work time. I drink tons of coffee trying to kickstart my productivity
> - I go home when I’m finally starting to get going
> - I am restless in bed and can’t sleep because I drank too much coffee and I’m worried about getting up early
> - By the end of the week I am tired, frustrated, angry, and disappointed with my performance
But if your work is clearly defined and you have easy access to all the information, then probably yes, being completely alone is most productive for me. But for example in the past I worked on a project with ~100 other developers, and not every information required to do the job done was readily available...sometimes it was acquired only by discussing with a colleague, and doing that in person is often the quickest way.
Working in a cubicle environment is no different here. There's nothing preventing you from getting up, leaving your cube, and walking 10 meters to another cube to ask a question.
I love being close to my kids, my wife, and the general comforts of a home office. There are many other reasons I prefer to work remotely. That said, if there were no companies allowing me to work this way, I wouldn't say "sorry, I only work remotely" and become unemployed.
Primary discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230508
There are always trade offs. Thinking specifically about workplace hours, having at least some amount of time everyday where you know everyone will be in the same place physically has some major benefits: knowing you'll have a chance to pair with someone, having some overlap where you get to joke a round while making coffee, perhaps eat a meal together, draw on a whiteboard (each of which have virtual alternatives that aren't as good IMO). But if having any such constraints at all means you miss out on 5-10% of really smart creative people, is that too large a cost?
Help I'm trapped in cubicle... and the programmer next insists on having a mechanical keyboard. (He is not old enough to remember real mechanical keyboards.)
Can you describe to me the difference between the nature of work that requires group creativity and individual focus (or rather, which employee roles fit more into one or the other)?
How much of each do the various roles of your employees spend their time on?
How much control (or influence) do your employees have over whether or not they are in an environment that suits their need for focus (and when that focus ends)?