For those people that manage to get up pretty early, 4-5 in the morning, how do they cope with the weekend and what kind of weekend schedule do they have ?
What time do they usually go to sleep and what is their noon daily pattern (weekday and weekends).
Most importantly how do they spend their time after 7pm during workdays and weekends ?
I'm generally up between 4:45 and 5am during the week. I either go to the gym or work on one of my side projects before work (or go through HN like today). Around 730am I'll shower and take the train to work.
On the weekend I often go out with friends until 1 or 2am. I'll naturally get up around 5am, but I'll just get a glass of water and go back to sleep until 9am.
Admittedly, I do go to bed very early during the week. I'm often in bed by 8pm and usually read for an hour. I try to be asleep by 930pm. If I have a date or meet friends for drinks during the week, it does throw things off.
I used to be "late to rise, late to bed, fuck parties, let me live in peace when everyone else sleeps and doesn't distract me with nonsense", but recently my SO beat some sense into me, and I'm slowly joining the "early to rise" crowd now.
Care to share some of the arguments that made you change your views? For instance, wanting to build a family (having kids tends to force a morning schedule).
Here's an idea. I'd be interested in fellow HNers thoughts on it.
Get up really early, say 5am. Finish work perhaps 3pm. Sleep for four hours until 7pm. Go out, do other stuff, party as much as you like until 1am. Sleep.
8 hours sleep a day in 2 chunks of 4 hours. Would that work?
From personal experience when I tried this briefly in high school, I wasn't getting very deep sleep and just kept ending up tired. Perhaps if I had continued I would have adjusted, but I gave up after just one week.
I've done this sometimes, I think it's pretty dependent on you being able to fall asleep quickly. Which you can train yourself to do. But it would usually be more of a 3hr/4.5hr split to match with REM cycles. Or just 3&3. I felt fine. If anything I prefer it, but realistically I've found it hard to do while working 9-6. I end up wanting a sleep time in the afternoon.
Sometimes I do 6hrs at night and take a nap on lunch for about 45minutes. This is okay, but hard to do outside of winter as it's too hot to sleep in my car.
I used to sleep in (11AM, 12PM)... then I had a baby. Here I am, 7AM, already doing 2 hours of work because baby woke up for a feeding. This is my normal now. After work (which is now 3 or 4 depending on when I wake up), I spend my entire time with my family. No work, no distractions, lots of play, and lots of fun.
I'm one of the early birds. I'm awake by about 5 AM without an alarm, regardless of weekday or weekend. That keeps my sleep schedule consistent.
I get to the office between 6 and 6:30 in the morning and take a 30 minute lunch, so I'm out by 3 PM. This gives me several daylight hours in the afternoon before heading to bed around 8 PM to start the cycle over again.
This is probably longer/more detailed than you wanted but here it goes. I'll preface it by saying that I think I'm lucky in that I'm not the type that needs 8h of sleep every night. I usually start waking up naturally after 6h-7h, but I can regularly go weeks on end with 5h-6h. The plus side is my body is very good at letting me know when I'm not getting enough sleep, and I pay careful attention to that. While I actually wish I could sleep even less, I value it greatly and know how important it is. But I don't force myself to get 8h if my body wants to be up.
I'm up at 5am M-F using my alarm. I do my usual routine of showering, getting dressed, feeding and playing with my dogs, etc and I'm on my computer by 6:30am.
I usually spend about 30m drinking my coffee and watching some quick (but informational/educational) youtube videos or reading on HN/reddit/etc; this gets my brain ready to work. This is what I'm doing right now while I type this.
At 7am I'll start my actual work. How my workday goes varies by the day, but I'm always done by 4pm.
If I am working on a personal project at the time (I'm usually trying to better myself in some way; learning a new programming language or getting better at one I already know is the most common thing for me) then I'll do that until around 5p. From 5p-6p I'll wind down and do some more redditing or something similar. Something that is a little mindless but again, usually informative in some way.
Around 6p-10p is spent with my girlfriend doing whatever. Usually we cook dinner together but other than that it's just whatever we feel like doing that day. I do my best to stay off my phone and such during this time.
I'm typically heading to bed by 10:30p and asleep by 11p. Having a good night time routine is very important. I don't go up to bed until I'm actually tired, and I follow the same routine when I do. I am usually fast asleep within 10 minutes of putting my head down.
If at any point I start to feel tired or burned out then I don't change my routine much, but I'll spend more time doing things like watching random youtube videos or reading on here than I do normally. Every so often I have to totally disconnect and just work on some home projects. Doing actual work with my hands has been a great rejuvenator for me.
On the weekends I don't set an alarm but I'm usually up by 7am. This is a combination of me waking up naturally, or my dogs waking me up because they're wondering why I wasn't up 2 hours earlier to feed them.
My girlfriend typically sleeps until at least 9a-10a on the weekends so I'll spend those first few hours doing the same things I do from 4p-5p during the week (working on personal projects, learning a new programming language, etc). If it has been a particularly tiresome week then I'll just watch tv or do something else that doesn't require my actual attention.
Starting in the early afternoon on the weekends my focus shifts to my girlfriend and whatever we have to / need to / want to do. Could be the usual chores that come along with owning a home, or running errands, or going out to some event. Bed time on the weekends is just whenever I feel tired. It's almost always later than during the week, but not by too much. I'm usually heading up to bed around midnight or 1am on the weekend
What time do they usually go to sleep and what is their noon daily pattern (weekday and weekends).
Most importantly how do they spend their time after 7pm during workdays and weekends ?