I am an entrepreneur(A coder too) who is surrounded by many more aspiring entrepreneurs. Most of the guys go to bed late, so they obviously wake up late. Many of them are stressed not because they are not early risers but everywhere they see a bold statement from self-help gurus saying “Waking up early makes you successful”.

Getting up early does not magically make you a successful person and getting up late does not magically make you a loser. Don’t take pride in getting up early and don’t feel sad that you are not an early riser.

I normally wake up between 7.30AM to 8.00AM and go to bed around 12 AM. Whatever creative code I have ever written I wrote it between 10 PM and 12 AM.

There are many self-help gurus in this world who are always bragging about how getting up early helps and they make sure that they add this line — “Early bird gets the worm”.

Early bird gets the worm

That saying is absolutely true but only for birds. If a bird wakes up late his friends might have already finished all the worms(Feel sad for that bird). If you are waking up early means you are going to bed early and same way if you are waking up late means you are going to bed late. Both types of people get the same amount of working hours in a day.

Working in a startup cannot be organized

Consider it is 10 PM and you are about to go to bed. Your crash reporting tool reports there is a severe bug in your code which is in production. If you are working in a big corporate company then you may not feel like solving it right now but in a startup world, everyone tends to get that ownership mentality even if you own very minimal equity in the company. We enjoy coding so much that we won't be able to sleep after seeing a bug even if we try really hard.

Planning is all matters

It does not matter what time you get up but do you have a plan for what to do after waking up? If yes, then you are all set. If you don’t have a plan then it does not matter what time you wake up you will still be stressed. Don’t worry about people bragging about waking up early. They say all successful people wake up early, may be true but to become successful they all spent many sleepless nights. They say Mark Zuckerberg wakes up early may be true but while building Facebook he spent a lot of sleepless nights for sure. I don't think there is any difference between the number of successful entrepreneurs who rise late and who rise early. Aaron Levie(Box CEO) and Alexis Ohanian(Reddit Co-founder) are not up until 10 AM.

Plan everything for the next day before going to bed.

Health issues

Late risers are more likely to skip their exercise routine because they think that they already lost a few hours in the day or I would rather say people around them made them feel so. I am not saying you have to exercise as soon as you wake up but make sure that you do it. My energy level is really high when I wake up so I start coding((I am currently working on an app called Togetherly) as soon as possible after breakfast and a 10 mins meditation(I use headspace app). I squeeze some gym time around 6.30 PM.

Make sure that you follow these rules whatever time you wake up.

Meditate

Exercise

Eat protein-rich breakfast

Plan for tomorrow before going to bed

Stop eating fried and processed foods (I have seen almost all coders keep eating unhealthy snacks)

You are not tired because you wake up late

I have seen people telling that late risers feel more tired throughout the day. Feeling tired has nothing to do with what time you wake up. If you are feeling tired as soon as you wake up there could be two possible reasons

You are not sleeping enough.

Make sure that you listen to your body and get enough sleep.

You are very stressed.

Most of the time this is the culprit so meditation, planning, and prioritization are very important.