[earlz]

It blows my mind some of the comments here of people who do this. I can literally not recall a time that mornings were not miserable.. and that includes when I am jet lagged (either going to a country, or coming back) and naturally fall asleep by 9pm and awake by 5am. Mornings are boring and I can never really get into enjoying them. The most fun I've had was one time in China I woke up at 4am and went to photograph things at 430am.. But that's not something I'd do every day, and even at the time I felt kinda cranky about it.

I have 2 kids, so have to have some structure to my sleep schedule. Left to my own devices, my natural bed time is 3-4am and I'm awake at 11am-12pm. With kids during school (in summer they sleep in too) it's a bit more reasonable though probably less healthy. Asleep by 1 or 2am and wake up at 8am. They're 9yo and 6yo and the oldest is responsible for getting the younger up if she doesn't wake up with the alarm. They're both 90% ready by the time I wake up (they prefer to wake up at 7am or even 6:30am to have some play and tv time before school). This includes getting themselves dressed, hair and teeth, and the picky youngest packing her own lunch. Their school starts at 8:45am and I'm typically out the door at 8:30am and back by 9am.

I don't really start working until 10am most days, but I'll do some passive stuff like read emails and industry news type stuff while having coffee. At 10am I'm getting started, at 11am on a good day I'm hitting a stride. Typically not doing my best coding work until at least 2pm though after lunch. Depending on how in the zone I am and what I'm doing, I work until 5:30pm to 7pm. I have the benefit of being remote and setting my own hours though, so it's definitely a blessing I know many people aren't fortunate to have. Have dinner with the family after I stop working, and then just relax with dumb activities (TV, social media) and of course bonding stuff with family, until the kids go to bed at 9pm. When they go to sleep I sometimes work for a couple more hours (coordinating with 12 hour different timezone is fun), but more usually relax with peace and quiet playing games, messing around with interesting research (both hobbies and work), or just dumbly watching TV, or do some hobbies (analog photography/darkroom printing)

I sacrifice sleep more than I should, and typically will have a 10 minute power nap after I'm done working.. But honestly, as long as I'm getting 6-7 hours of sleep, I feel just as well as when I'm getting 8 or 9. When I get less than 6 though I definitely regret it the next day. And I don't mean just sleeping in on weekends. I had about 2 weeks this summer where I had no kids, no wife, and basically nothing guiding my sleep schedule. I'd tried naturally sleeping for a week with no alarm and realized I felt more tired and it was consuming a lot of time. I was waking up at 11 or 12. So I started setting my alarm to a more reasonable 10am and was in bed by 3 or 4am, and always felt well rested after I got out of bed.

Some people can not "relax" and enjoy mornings. My goal with mornings is to get that phase of day over with so I can work and then get to a free evening. When I'm jetlagged it's pretty interesting becoming a forced morning person, but it's always proven to me that having 3 hours of free time in the evening is so much more valuable to me than 3 hours of free time in the morning.