But is it worth it if you're not having trouble with your sleep? Just for the purpose of being an early riser?
I used to get up just after 5 for house crew practice, but ordinarily I don't really consider that a decent hour. I would NOT practice a musical instrument that early in the morning. I don't think that my roommates or neighbors would care for it.
What is the ideal hour?
I did crew one year also. I always used to fall asleep after practice, during my 9 o'clock class.
I'm often a pretty early riser, for an academic, but I don't necessarily find that my productivity goes up when I wake up early. More likely I just spend a couple more hours sitting around in the morning thinking, "What happened?" Which is not unpleasurable. (In possibly related news, I don't drink coffee.)
re 3: lately I've been getting up early on the weekends and then falling asleep around 11 or 12 or 1. I'm not getting up early on purpose (at least I'm not doing anything to wake myself up; on sundays I do want to get up early for the farmer's market), it's just working out that way. V. strange.
the signs are, ben, that you are old.
I can speak from experience that what happens when you have kids is that they become the alarm clock. And they don't have a snooze function.
I do disagree with the author's assertion that we sleep more than we need. Maybe, maybe not.
By design, though, our internal clock is out of synch with the real world, and left to our own devices we'd sleep later and later. We'd stay up later and later too.
We are designed to sleep until we need to get up, so his idea of pegging that waking time and letting the bedtime float is very sound.
I think we're too obsessed with productivity as a society, anyway. Right now, I'm working in a group that seems to define productive as "in early," so I'm involuntarily shifing my hours to get in between 6:30 and 7 every day. I'm doing almost exactly what the guy in the linked post did, and I think it sucks. I don't have more energy, and I'm missing out on my core-productive hours that kick in at 3 and end at about 9.
I supppose its a YMMV thing.
Some of us are owls. I never reach full consciousness till early afternoon, no matter when I go to sleep/wake up. The Biophysicist, on the other hand, wakes up the second the sun rises. [He is, however, dangerous until that first cigarette and cup of coffee, after which he is depressingly functional.]
When I was in law school, I was raising a toddler and working a 40-hour week, and I discovered that I could survive on four hours of sleep a night during the week, then make up some of the deficit on the weekends. Nowadays, I usually work at night, when I tend to be perky, and sleep in till nine a.m. or so; ten if I'm up past three a.m. I haven't found that being a night person detracts from my productivity.
The early bird may catch the worm, but I'd rather have steak.
I'll take the bait, Ben: How is that possible?
Time travel, motherfucker.
So wait a minute, you're claiming that you're your own father? That's disgusting, you sore burnt grammarian.