It is generally agreed upon in our society that people who wake up early are better people. They are more productive. They contribute more to society. Every time they poop, a unicorn gets its wings. Well, actually, I don’t know about that last one. Oh, wait. I don’t know about any of these things, because the whole ‘people who wake up early are inherently better people’ thing is a line of bullshit and it plays directly into my recent contemplation of ‘productivity’ and who gets to define it.
Here’s the thing. At some point, people decided that work and school should both start early in the morning. This may be an outgrowth of farming life, where people kind of have to start early to get things done whether they want to or not. As a result, people who could naturally get up early were rewarded for it, while people who would prefer to sleep in got penalised.
Sleep schedules are actually not universal. My sleep schedule, for example, goes through flips. Right now, I am going to be fairly early and getting up fairly early. This is not because I am better person than you, it is because I have the luxury of a schedule where I can go to sleep when I am tired, and wake up when I am not, and right now my sleep needs happen to dovetail nicely with social expectations about sleep schedules. Sometimes, I go to bed late, really late, and also wake up late. This is not because I am a worse person than you, it is because…see above. You get the idea.
The point is that a lot of studies have demonstrated that sleep is variable, and that disrupting sleep schedules is actually rather harmful. People who do better when they sleep in have a hard time functioning in the morning. For students, it can be hard to learn. For workers, it can be hard to accomplish tasks, even things that are considered ‘basic’ or ‘simple.’ People who are forced to get up early aren’t ‘more productive’ because they wake up early, they are just annoyed and bitter and sometimes develop sleep disorders by trying to force their bodies to do things they don’t want to do.
Meanwhile, people who naturally pop out of bed at 5:00 AM are rewarded for their discipline and focus.
I know, it doesn’t make any sense to me either. The fact of the matter is that my ability to focus and complete tasks is highly crepuscular, but for someone else, this might not actually be the case, depending on internal rhythms and personal preferences. I am good in the morning, I am good in the evening, and around afternoon, I am useless. Sometimes I take a siesta, in fact, once it is evident that I am not going to get anything done and I am kind of tired. If I was forced to work in a regular office environment, it would be a nightmare. In fact, it was a nightmare when I worked in offices, because having to fit my schedule to something rigid and set was just a complete disaster. Not because I was out late partying or any such business, but because the time schedule in the workplace didn’t mesh with the time schedule inside my body.
I’m extremely spoiled, if you want to call it that, right now. I don’t use clocks, I don’t keep track of time, I sleep when I want to and don’t sleep when I don’t want to. Sometimes that means I go three days without sleep. Sometimes it means I sleep for extended periods of time. I don’t really care and I pretty much let my body figure its own scene out. I’ve structured my life in a way that allows me to do that. But it strikes me as unfair that other people cannot do this.
Did my health improve when I wasn’t constantly bending my sleep schedule to meet the needs of an office? Yes, yes it most certainly did. I was also more relaxed and happy. Shouldn’t everyone be able to access that, especially since it would be relatively easy to implement? Would it really be the end of the world to offer flexible working hours? It could, in fact, improve service, because there might be people around at 3 AM and also at 9 PM. And employees would be happier, better able to focus on tasks. If someone wanted to take a big break during their unproductive hours of the day and come back later, it could happen.
Would this require a radical thinking of workplace environments? Well, yes, it would. But maybe that would be a good thing to think about doing, because office environments are very unhealthy for many people. Implementing flex scheduling could save money and lost productivity in the long term by keeping employees healthier and happier. And, as I mentioned, it could even earn money, by providing more service at more hours of the day.
Sure, scheduling meetings might be challenging, although I personally highly doubt the usefulness of meetings anyhow, because they largely seem to consist of sitting around arguing for hours when one could just as easily issue a written memo and get everyone up to speed, or have a conversation over email and allow people to participate at their own pace.
A rethinking of office culture, and of school culture, might result in some very positive changes for a lot of people. Staggering classes in a way that allows people to select morning, afternoon, or evening classes could, for example, help to address class size problems while also accommodating sleep needs for teachers and students.
And we could start to deconstruct the myth that people who get up early are somehow better people, while allowing people who really are not inclined to wake up at the rosy fingered crack of down to get some damn sleep already.
