Early or late?

I know I missed a couple of blogs recently but alas, I was busy and totally forgot all about it. And I also didn’t have a blog ready in the pipe so I could just polish and publish. I was going so well on my 2026 target too!

A reminder I’m doing a weekly blog thing this year, with posts being published every Thursday (except this time, oops). One of my rules is “no AI generated content”, so instead it’s just me writing about whatever I feel like for that week. I’ll be putting some AI snippets in where relevant, such as when I wrote about Me and my friend Claude, but otherwise this is pretty old school and I think much better for it.

I’ve never been a morning person. Struggled all my life to get up in the morning, having to be convinced that the world is worth facing before 9am, with exceptions for special events.

I know everyone is different and ’early’ or ‘morning’ can mean many different things to people, so let’s calibrate on something right now.

I typically work from home and I typically roll out of bed, have breakfast and start working at home on a weekday by 9am. I use an alarm but it’s very easy to keep mashing that ‘snooze’ button for hours. 9am seems like an impossible task, some mornings.

If I get up earlier, I can wander around the house like a zombie for few minutes to feed the cat or do some minor task, then I’ll go lie down and go straight back to sleep again. I find it’s very easy to resume sleep even after I’ve got up. If I do go back to sleep, the dreams I have are completely psycho bordering on nightmares (morningmares?) and I remember A LOT about them once I full wake up. It’s very unpleasant, but a difficult habit to break all the same.

I don’t generally have a time of the day which my energy drops significantly, at a regular cadence, but conversely it does take me time to warm up in the morning to face the day.

I go to bed late, because that feels natural to me, although if I go to bed early thinking “I’ve got to get up early tomorrow morning ra ra” then I just roll around for hours wasting my time. Even if on that particular day I might have been up early.

I have a natural “it’s sleepy time” rhythm at about 6-7pm which came about when I used to commute 1.5-2 hours into the city in my first corporate job whilst living at home with my folks. My commute was a trek with a decent drive of about 45 minutes plus an hour train ride. The train ride home in the evening trained me (pun intended) to sleep at this time as it was a great time to catch up on some rest and meant I could stay up playing games or chatting online or whatever I was doing in 2006 on the internet (probably chatting, building websites and playing games). For my commute, I only missed my stop once going to work, and once coming home from work. These days, the epic yawns at this time, which can be a daily occurance, drives my wife crazy over dinner. But I can’t help it. It’s just when I feel like sleeping.

Scroll forward to 11pm or later and I’m very much not feeling like sleeping. If I do take up the opportunity of sleeping at 7pm, I will sleep for a good couple of hours, then get up again and do things until I feel tired again early in the morning, usually 2am to 3am. This was actually quite an effective pattern when I used to live by myself and shops would be close to home (and walking distance) and open late. So I could get up from my post-work nap, go to the shops to buy some ingredients and then cook dinner. This is not such a good plan if you live somewhere where the shops close early or if you want to hang with others who don’t possess a similar rhythm…

This week I’ve been trying the getting up early thing. Early for me, anyway: getting up between 6am and 7am. It’s a big deal for me. I know some people get up at 4:30am like clockwork every morning and are instantly awake and ready for the day. That is not me. I’ve managed to get up at earlly 4 out of 7 days this week, which is a huge milestone for me.

This early start wasn’t driven by any particular activity I needed to do, but it does help that we have a cat who decides it’s breakfast time randomly between 5:30am and 6:30am. She’ll enter the bedroom and start rummaging around. This is of course if it’s not Winter when she is clearly operating in “Winter Cat” mode OR we’ve been on holidays and she misses us a lot and is therefore fully obsessed over sleeping on the bed near us where it is safe and we should never go on holidays again. She has really noisy feet on the floor boards for such a light animal but I don’t want to trim her claws just for this. It’s like she walks with a lot of a ‘push’ into the floor with every step, misjudging the distance between her sausage body and the length of her legs. And she’s got twice the number feet compared to us! Objects around the room will be touched, bumped and prodded. There will be brief bathing sessions followed by ensuring the built-in wardrobe mirrors are rattled as she leans into them whilst walking along the wardrobe doors.

It’s a really annoying behaviour and while there are ways to stamp it out, it’s not a terrible thing to get up, feed her and then start the day.

She settles down after her meal and it’s nice to have a cat sit by you while you eat your breakfast. You do have to be careful though, because she is fully obsessed with peanut butter or oats and has been known to steal toast or sneak a taste of oats soaked in milk if you don’t keep a watchful eye on things. This is often difficult when in the early morning zombie state.

So this week I got up and did little things around the house in the morning and then got ready for work in a really slow, relaxed pace. It was so nice. There was nothing to be rushed about. Getting to work before 8am and actually being in the office is interesting as there’s nobody there, the lights engage as you walk on the floor. It’s peaceful and you get a lot of work done, much like working over a holiday shutdown period.

Despite getting up early, I don’t appear to crash out at a certain time in the arvo and I’m still staying up late. I did try to get to bed early but clearly I need to do this every night and ensure other noises and activities in the house aren’t going to disturb me while I get to sleep, because I totally failed on actually falling asleep early.

You are probably like “duh Nick, it’s so obvious you should be getting up early like the rest of us” and “circadian rhythms are a thing” but I am convinced we are not all rhythmically identical. I’d love to try a model like Munich ChronoType Questionnaire if I were to do more research into it.

I also know that training doesn’t happen over night. I can’t just flip a switch and decide that I’m a morning person suddenly and it’s going to work for me. Try telling the cat that.

Let’s see how next week goes as this experiment continues.

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