Why is there a virtue associated with being a morning person and a suspicion of vice associated with being a night person?
In my first full time job as a technician in a science lab, people came in at all hours. More of the technicians were 8:30 to 4:30 varieties, except one who came in at 7:00 and left at three, and I who came in at 10:00 and left at 8:00 or 9:00, sometimes much later. The grad students started wandering in around 1:00, mostly didn’t get to work until after most of the techs were gone and often worked until midnight.
I have always liked working late. The place gets quite, one has peace to really work, one can play whatever music one likes, and if you have no commitments one can spend as much time as needed to do something right. I have also liked the company of night people. Night people seem to be more philosophical and contemplative, perhaps in keeping with dark and quiet. In my experience morning people seem to often be more impatient and unwilling to work out the picky details of trouble-shooting and pick their way through complicated processes.
If one IS a night person, forcing oneself to be in early is often very counterpropductive. Getting up early means being short of sleep, groggy and slow, thinking poorly, coordination off. An extra hour or two of sleep can make an enormous difference. Too often we humans short ourselves on sleep and function poorly as a result as it is.
In this first lab job of mine the early morning arriver got chosen to be the tech supervisor. I have always wondered if her early arrival was taken as dedication by the lab head. Soon after her promotion she expressed disapproval about my hours. She admitted that it was ok with the lab head, but she disliked having 3 hours when I wasn’t there, and she wanted to see me getting more work done. As she did not know the projects I was working on I tried to explain all the work I was doing. She shut me up, and told me to write out a log of everything I did, and when I did it, for the next two weeks.
That was a pain, having to stop all the time to write everything down. I did complain a bit. At the end of the two weeks, the supervisor read through my log, and checked up on my experiments. Then she said she was glad she’d made me write everything down, as it clearly forced me to work. I was furious. I had worked no differently than before, she simply had not ever checked to see what I was doing before.
I have seen this happen to many a night person. Morning people seem to suspect that the night people are playing around, not working. They rarely ask, instead the worst is assumed. A friend is currently getting this from her boss.
Interestingly, night people rarely assume that morning people fool around and don’t work when they come in early. We too buy into the idea that being early is a virtue in and of itself. We suspect that we have an almost moral defect in not being able to sleep early nor rise early. Yet it seems that there is no correlation between how hard people work and their prefered hours. The only exception being that if you force a person to work short of sleep they do not perform well.
Night people do their work, and also rarely mind finishing up things for morning people.
Why is the reverse not true?
Ideally there are all types working together early people to get things started then regular hours folks to carry through the middle of the day, then night people to pick up loose ends and work through problems. No one is better than the other.
I like to wander in late, sip at my coffee, come up to speed in the afternoon, and work into the quiet night. I play good music and serve as unofficial advisor for any late working students in the department. It is nice to have the equipment to myself. At the end I leave to a starry sky and empty roads - a lovely peaceful close to a long day.
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6 comments:
"Ideally there are all types working together early people to get things started then regular hours folks to carry through the middle of the day, then night people to pick up loose ends and work through problems. No one is better than the other."
I've worked Early, Late, and Interminably Long (early and late combined) workshifts .
Early and Late shifts both have the advantage of less other people around while working, and out-of-peak-hour travel. I cannot ever remember experiencing any discriminatory attitudes to late shift workers. However, as an early shifter, i have faced that "oooh look at you slinking off work early!" attitude when leaving (when one knows that one has already worked more hours than the commenter will put in in the same day).
I currently work an early shift. I like it, even though i'm more of a night person ... or used to be. I'm OK now as long as i stick to earlyish mornings even on non-work days.
I am, by nature, a night person. Life (ie, my job) requires that I wake up at 6AM. This in turn means that to get enough sleep I should be asleep at 10PM. This rarely happens, although I do try to at least stop reading and turn off my light at 10.
That supervisor sounds like an idiot. "Clearly forced you to work" indeed. Pfft.
I have a supervisor that periodically mentions that she is in every day at 6AM, but since she's a workaholic that lives 5 minutes from the school I don't feel a burning desire to emulate her.
In summer I seem to burn the candle at both ends. Essentially a night owl, I also have to wake early enough to get anything done before the heat of the day makes it impossible.
Work timesheets are hellish, but I guess one way to defend against accusations of ‘slacking’. In one job the management insisted our science team account for every 15 minutes – so we invariably sent them back worksheets with at least one 15 minute interval for “filling out worksheets”!
I do as myo does. Left to myself I would stay up late and sleep in, but since I find that if I keep to quite early hours at the weekend as well the week is easier to handle.
It does bother me that I know I'm not getting my best hours of sleep in, and that I have to be winding down at the time I'd most like to be getting started.
OTOH, I really like finishing work earlier in the day if I do the early start. A long evening is a thing of beauty.
Ata's mother is a dedicated early riser. Ata and Mr Ata come under some level of disparagement for their late-riser habits. Although she tries to hold it in, the lectures on how good it is to be up early just can't help but slip out...
I'm a late person. I was only made more apparant when I was working five and six nights a week, usually getting home between 1am and 3am.
Getting up for uni on a Monday morning was absolute hell. Eugh.
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