Clocking In

The first step in learning how to work is figuring out when to work. For most people, this is non-negotiable—your employer says you work from 9 to 5, so you do. My situation is a little more fluid, since I’m a writer who works from home in the Bay Area, 2,900 miles and three time zones away from my bosses.

I’m usually an early riser, but just to make sure I wasn’t missing out, I tried a few days of a night-owl schedule, waking up in the late morning and working until 4 or 5 a.m. There are some advantages to nocturnal working—among other things, fewer e-mails, tweets, and phone calls come in to distract me late at night. (There are also some short-term cognitive benefit—a 2009 study found that people who kept later schedules were more alert later in the day.) And I liked the fact that a nighttime schedule gave me an excuse to skip boring after-dinner events I’d otherwise feel obligated to attend.

The problem with nocturnal schedules is that they’re all or nothing. I can’t adhere to one every day because the entire American media works during the morning and afternoon, and my group of friends hangs out at night. And while some writers prefer the solitude of night—my colleague Kathryn Schultz wrote a great essay about the benefits of a nocturnal schedule—it didn’t work for me. So unless I’m prepared to abandon my social life and cut all ties with my colleagues, I’ve got to stick to a relatively normal daytime schedule. The good news is that daytime working is actually better for us—a 2014 study found that sleeping at odd hours messes with the way our bodies transcribe certain genes and possibly leads to higher incidence of diabetes, heart attacks, and cancer.

I also tried adopting a polyphasic sleep cycle, an old technique that has had a renaissance among Silicon Valley coders in recent years. Instead of sleeping at night, you nap in short intervals throughout the 24-hour day, which saves time and purportedly leaves you better rested while still getting you the same total amount of sleep. Thomas Edison reportedly preferred polyphasic sleep for its efficiency, but I found it intolerable, and only made it through only three nap cycles before giving up and falling asleep through the night.

Cris Sgrott-Wheedleton, a Virginia-based productivity consultant, gave me a bit of advice that applied no matter when I chose to wake up. When I told her that I work from home, she said: “Get up and make your bed. It gives you a sense of being on work time. You need to create an environment for yourself that creates the sense that you’re leaving personal time and entering work time.”

She also advised me to get dressed as if I were going to an office. The next morning, I put on some pressed slacks and my nicest button-down shirt, made my bed, and sat down at my desk with a new sense of purpose.