I’m typically up before the sun is, 5-5:30 AM, and this is the time when I’m most productive and creative. I’m an early bird.
But I’ve been reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep and early on, he mentions that early birds and night owls are genetically determined—chronotypes. Some of us simply are wired differently for sleep.
Living in a society that views and encourages “normal” as waking early and starting at 8 or 9am, I feel right at home. But the night owls in our society really get a raw deal. Not only are they expected, both through cultural norms and company policies, to adhere to an unnatural schedule, they’re at a distinct disadvantage in how their success is measured. For a night owl that does their best work in the evenings, the expectation of creative excellence at 9am is a tall order.
So it’s no surprise that there’s a rise of non-traditional schedules and organizations with flexible work hours to help address this. But I think we’re a long way from an even playing field. Remote roles and distributed companies feel like the perfect fit to solving this issue. If you can work from anywhere, and rely on asynchronous tools to stay in touch – where’s the problem in keeping different schedules?
Economics may have set the early-rising mentality of the workforce early on, but as sleep science advances, and workplace options diversify, the traditional, clock-punching, 9-5 companies lose a lot of their power. Adapt or get left behind.