Posted on 12/07/2022 2:32:01 PM PST by nickcarraway
If the idea of waking up at 5am for productivity makes you want to roll over and hit snooze until Saturday, don’t fret, says HR expert Adrian Tan.
When the circuit breaker was tripped in 2020, my kids were doing home-based learning every day.
Because I had to provide on-site tech support to three demanding users throughout the day, I couldn’t begin any serious work until late in the afternoon. I thought rising early to avoid that distraction could be the productivity hack I needed.
Inspired by retired US Navy SEAL officer Jocko Willink's – who posts daily photos of his watch at 4.30am before his morning workout – I roused at 4.30am, had a quick shower, then went for a morning run. All this before the sun had risen.
(Excerpt) Read more at channelnewsasia.com ...
What's difficult is switching around too often. At the mine where I used to work, the operations people (haul truck drivers and such) had to work a horrendous combination of day shifts and night shifts, the exact details of which I have forgotten. A shift was 12 hours, from 6:00 to 6:00, and over 21 days a driver would work a total of 7 days and 7 nights, switching back and forth twice. Then he or she would get 7 days off before starting the four-week cycle over.
I don't think I could have kept that up for very long, but there were some workers who did it for decades.
These are the same types who are always trying to see if they can be the sickest person in the office when they come down with something. It’s like it’s some type of badge of honor to them, yet it wrecks overall productivity when they infect everyone else. If you were to walk into another employee’s office and sit on their desk and yak endlessly such that they couldn’t get anything done you’d be disciplined and probably fired if you kept doing it. Yet, if you come in sick and end up causing that same employee to have to stay home with something, or kill their productivity while they’re in the office because you get them sick, then you’re viewed as some kind of hero because of your “dedication.”
Makes no logical sense, and should hopefully be a thing of the past after COVID. I’m retired now, but these people who would act like that used to infuriate me. They’d sit there all day hacking and sneezing all over everyone else, and nothing could convince them to just stay home, even though they weren’t accomplishing much anyway.
Getting up early and getting a jump on the days work helps mitigate the inevitable priority interrupts that slow delivery of actual real work assignments.
It’s a do not disturb zone, coffee zone, breakfast zone, get cleaned up zone, sometimes fool around zone before heading into the fray.
Back when I traveled all the time and drank, I worked from 11am to midnight, then drank for a few hours and did it again every day. Now that I no longer travel or drink, I wake up at 3 or 4am, usually work until sometime in late afternoon or early evening or whenever I get tired.
What about Cannon?
Well, if EVERYBODY was early to bed, early to rise, there wouldn’t be any crime at night. ;)
I love these 300 lb guys running...and not a sign of catching their breath. I just enjoy the short sweet stories.
LOL! You just made my day!
I’m up at 5:30am, no later than 6:30, every workday because I have meetings with Europe and I’m on the West Coast. I hate it, I am absolutely a night person and never get to sleep before midnight or 1am. I find all the people who brag about how early they get up are usually worthless at work after lunch and go home early and probably are in bed by 8pm.
If I hire someone to paint my house, for example, and he produces a quality result within the time we agreed and for the price we agreed then why on Earth should I care if he used a 2-inch brush or a 4-inch brush, or a roller, or how many breaks he took, or whether he was on the phone, etc.? One of the silver linings to the COVID circus is that it did force companies and managers to seriously consider the benefits of remote work, and to rethink the assumed need to have everyone in an office all day every day. If you have employees that you feel you have to monitor every minute, then maybe you just did a poor job of selecting them in the first place.
My pleasure. :)
Ditto
LOL, I would yell at those people. (I was union, so I could only be disciplined and not fired)
:)
“I find all the people who brag about how early they get up are usually worthless at work after lunch and go home early and probably are in bed by 8pm.”
Not many... The ones I know like myself can physically work 15 hours a day non stop. Very few can keep up with them. Ranching, farming, rural life style. Solid productivity from before daylight to after dark everyday their whole lives as “normal”.
I worked 3-11 p.m. during the majority of my career. There was no way I could go straight home, and go to sleep, so I stayed up. I’m in my 20th year of retirement, and stay up until 3-4 a.m. every day. Sometimes I get up at 10 a.m., sometimes I get up at noon. It all depends on what transpired during the day. I’ve never taken naps during the day. And although sometimes I can sleep six hours straight before I have to get up to hit the bathroom, the older I’ve gotten, it’s normally been 3-4 hours, and there are times that I have to get up twice during the night.
For thousands of years man’s normal sleep cycle was daylight to dark. It still is... Despite us trying to cheat it. Maybe this is part of why our culture has gone insane. We were just not built physically or mentally to follow this modern 24 hour cycle. That is city stuff, country stuff is STILL daylight to dark. And maybe that is why country folk are more sane... lol
With that said... There are many different fields of work where starting in the morning is almost imperative. Garbage collection, Construction, and others where getting most of it done before the rest of the world wakes up is the only productive way to do it.
Like myself, I do a bit of web development. At 3 Am the net is dead, and it is easier and faster for me to do my work because no one is on the sites I am working on. I also own a business where I have to work outside all day. But I am in the desert, so in the summer getting up at three and getting a project done before it gets hot is a huge advantage.
There are many many cases of this reality and why it is more productive to get started early.
I never felt that way either. My job in Corrections was the type that you didn't go home each day, and feel like you accomplished anything. You needed to have something else to occupy your mind when you left work. Earlier in my career I went to college at night, and spent my vacations traveling and doing historic research. Later in my career I worked 3-11 p.m. by choice because most of the brass worked days and weren't around. Many of the people who worked the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift, would get off work, head to the local bar, drink until 7 or 8 p.m., and spend all that time talking about what went on at work that day. I was never able to do that, and didn't want to. I had too many responsibilities I had to get home to.
I still have no clue how you did that job. I would have sold drugs or lived in the woods first...
:)
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