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Early morning university classes linked to poor sleep and academic performance

• easeout 4y ago
  Best advice I received on my way to college: Don't take any 8:00 AM classes. You won't go.
  • asdff 4y ago
    There's nothing like getting saddled with an 8am chemistry lab class on a Friday. Considering the deals your average college bar puts out on Thursday nights, odds are high either you or your lab partner are brutally hungover. You better enjoy smelling ethanol for the next 4 hours with that going on in your head.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      I always found that Tuesdays were the best deals. Although I've also found that self-control was not a problem both in terms of choosing not to drink, or drinking less and leaving earlier.
    • QuercusMax 4y ago
      How many students are actually going to bars and getting drunk? Most students are going to be under 21 for most of their college career. Hopefully by Junior / Senior year students will know how to manage their schedules.
      • TeMPOraL 4y ago
        That's US-specific, though. Most of the world has lower drinking age, with 18 being most common, I think - at least any country I know, other than USA, draws the line at 18 y.o. In those places, getting drunk and partying starts during the final year of high school.
      • asdff 4y ago
        A lot of students have fake IDs. Depending on where you look up the information it could be from anywhere from 32% (1) to 69% (2) of students surveyed, and keep in mind there is going to be a bias to lie since its technically a crime. Who knows how many more are borrowing a legitimate ID from an older sibling or similar looking older friend, or are just trying their luck that the bouncer isn't going to card tonight. At a big undergrad school, that's potentially a few thousand kids under 21 getting drunk a night even if a fraction of fake ID holders are capitalizing on their access. Then there's also the kids that prefer to stay in and play video games. League of Legends was the big draw when I was in 10 years ago, I saw kids put in serious shifts in that game in the study rooms of the dorms. All this being said, studying is often isolating and depressing and there are plenty of outlets for college students of every persuasion to put it off as long as possible. 1. https://www.veriff.com/blog/fake-id-statistics https://www.veriff.com/blog/fake-id-statistics 2. https://www.thelantern.com/projects/2021/04/28/fake-ids-join-textbooks-and-shower-caddies-on-the-college-packing-list-find-popularity-regardless-of-legal-and-university-consequences/ https://www.thelantern.com/projects/2021/04/28/fake-ids-join...
    • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      Heh, we had a Physics lab for 1 semester that was 3-"whenever you're done" on Fridays. It was not unusual for the Juniors to leave some Sophomore to watch the experiment before hitting the campus bar.
  • edding4500 4y ago
    I went to every maths class in university (maths I - IV) and they ALL were Monday 8am, Wednesday 8am. What a terrible decision, given that these are the classes most people fail.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > given that these are the classes most people fail. Depends on the country, but it could be that this is intentional - having those lectures at 08:00 raises the difficulty bar, helping to fail more students, which is exactly what the class is for in the first place. In my university time, the math class that most people fail would also have lectures at 08:00[0]. It was also widely known that the class is just about getting us up to speed with calculus, as it is to filter out a good chunk of the year. My understanding, shared by fellow students and even faculty members, is that universities in Poland (and I suppose most of EU) tend to admit ~1.5-2x the number of students they can handle, and use first two semesters to filter out tat ~0.5-1x excess. In STEM courses, those intro math classes were understood to be those filtering classes. -- [0] - What's worse, on the first lecture, the professor wisely noticed that some of us will be hitting rush-hour traffic trying to get to the lecture on time, and suggested that... we should all start 15 minutes earlier, so we can avoid the traffic by waking up and traveling 15 minutes earlier... I think I attended one or two more lectures of that professor, at which I fell asleep few minutes in, and eventually decided it's just pointless waste of life.
  • Claude_Shannon 4y ago
    Not everyone can choose. At my uni we are just assigned classes and that's it.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Same, but luckily the lectures weren't mandatory to attend so we just sent a different designated note taker from the friend group each time and the rest slept in and copied from them lol.
  • Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    You went somewhere that you had choice. I, on the other hand, went to a local branch of a state college. So many classes were only available in one time slot, which meant that I had both classes that started at 8am and classes that started at 6pm. Attendance wasn't always optional.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      I hated classes that started after 3pm, and schedules that weren't mostly back to back.
  • saurik 4y ago
    I once tried to take Quantum Mechanics at 8am. I went for a few weeks, and then I started falling asleep in in class. One day I realized before getting out of bed that I just fall asleep there, so I may as well stay in bed, and it was all over... ...so I tried again next quarter. This time, it was Quantum Mechanics A--I had previously tried skipping into C--so the professor probably just thought I couldn't handle the material without the stuff that came in A/B, and realized I was in "the wrong one". Well, it happened again. I tried a third time. This time, showing up to B, the professor must have figured out what was happening and I kind of remember her laughing at me a bit. When it happened a third time I gave up, stopped ever trying to do early classes, and, 20+ years later, give students the advice you were given ;P.
    • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      Scheduling Quantum before 10am should be a crime. It's hard to stay awake for even when it's not directly competing with sleeping in. Our class ended up rescheduling Quantum II because having it first thing after lunch was too much of an invitation to snooze. Luckily the class was small enough that a quick survey found we could push it back an hour.
  • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    The CS department at my university knew their audience. The very earliest classes started at 11, and you could easily build a schedule with afternoons only. The Physics department avoided 8ams, but tended to load mornings. It made the double major pretty easy to schedule.
• robg 4y ago
  Counterexample: Started going to bed at a good time in college, gave me a reason to skip going out, and my brain performance unlocked into better focus, learning, and memory. Bonus was the classes were smaller.
  • inglor_cz 4y ago
    People are diverse, but I don't think that any college actually cares about the early bird / night owl sort of diversity. That just gets steamrolled.
  • krageon 4y ago
    "Go to bed at a good time" is not a good solution for someone whose body structurally just doesn't work that way. It'll always be worse than going to bed according to what is natural for you.
    • raspberry1337 4y ago
      There's no "natural" rhytm that says that some people have to be late morning persons, the only provable circadian rhythm is in accordance with morning light. There's nothing that forces people to sleep between 1 am and 9 am UDM time, it's all adapment. This is the equivalent of modern fat americans claiming their body just structurally don't work with veggies.
      • ilyt 4y ago
        But changing that adaptation is super had. My internal clock doesn't go backwards, the only way for me to wake up earlier is go the other way round the clock and that takes weeks. Then one staying late and I'd have to do it all over again
      • gpvos 4y ago
        What's UDM?
      • gpvos 4y ago
        What does the abbreviation UDM stand for?
• inglor_cz 4y ago
  When I was an undergraduate student (1996-2001), I avoided the early classes like the plague. Ever seen frozen grease on a frying pan that was put out of the window on a freezing day? That is how my brain felt (and often still feels) in the morning. The funny thing is, the reason why the university held early classes was "low capacity of amenities". E.g. not enough classrooms. Very understandable in early post-Communist Czechia where there was "low capacity" of everything. But if American universities with their high tuition suffer from the same problem ... uh, is it caused by parasitic growth of bureaucracy that sucks all the money out of the actual educational part of the system? E.g. your tuition feeds thirty vice-probosts for Absolutely Necessary Stuff, but not enough teaching staff to have classes at a more reasonable hour? BTW I am very sure that the vice-probosts for Yet Another Absolutely Essential Bullshit don't start their workday at dawn.
  • chrisco255 4y ago
    Usually there are multiple time slots for various subjects. When I was at community college, before transferring to university, the 8AM slot was the only way I could fit in some classes, since I had to work M-F 9:30-5:30 (and then did night classes afterwards as well).
  • cafard 4y ago
    When the boomers were going to college, tuition was proportionally a lot lower. But there were a lot of us, and they had to schedule our classes somehow. Honestly I'm not sure how many 8:00 classes I actually took, though my first two years I commuted and 9:00 felt like 8:00.
• WWWWH 4y ago
  And that’s just the staff; imagine how the students feel.
• hkt 4y ago
  It absolutely shocks me that anyone is surprised by this. School and work are much the same. Rigid schedules that disregard people's actual circadian rhythms blight lives. Another example: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00375-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00375-z It may sound silly, but isn't it time night owls advocated for themselves?
  • sammalloy 4y ago
    It’s been known since at least the 1970s, probably even longer.
  • b112 4y ago
    It may sound silly, but isn't it time night owls advocated for themselves? Night owl advocacy?! You lot won't shut up about it! Personally, I don't care as long as a workday has some overlap. But I've watched these same "advocates" been granted the right to timeshift, then watched the same try to schedule 7pm meetings! You're welcome?!?
    • hkt 4y ago
      7pm meetings?! It sounds like we can both agree that all people, regardless of their sleep pattern, are capable of being buffoons.
• xupybd 4y ago
  We had a paper that had one 8am lecture a week. Without fail we went through questions that would later be in the exam. The same numbers and everything. Of the 50 or so in the class under 10 showed up to that 8am session.
• WaterSupreme 4y ago
  Let me be the first to call this what it is - a strongly written opinion piece. It's a lifestyle choice - if you go to sleep at 11pm of course 8am classess will make you detest them will have no concentration. Especially true if you use your phone up until you fall asleep. I was a student until recently and can say most of the burden is unfortunately on us. From my experience students lock themself in their room listen to music/play games/scroll social media until midnight. Instead of building a community where hanging out/studying with other students until lets say 8pm and then going to sleep would be the best for most students. When hanging out in groups you are filling our your need for socializing and more likely to regulate each other. When everyone is siloed in their own room you are more likely to see extreme disregulation like going to sleep at 1/2am on most days. Not everyone is a morning person I will concede that much. But being a morning person, there is NOTHING that makes a day more cursed for me than waking up at 9AM when the sun is already up and most people are out and about. In my opinion, what students (and all of us) need is universal digital hygene. A set of guidelines where we would finally be able to follow if we ever fall into disregulation. Not advocating for China style timeout lockdowns of your netflix/games, just a general set of guidelines so that if you stay up until 23pm /1am - it's your responsibility. Just like it's your responsibility to not regulate every other aspect of your life. You should be encouraged to be an adult.
  • jclulow 4y ago
    It's amazing to see you castigate the article as mere opinion and then go on to write a comment that is not merely mere opinion but also quite mean-spirited and making no room for the idea that different people work quite differently actually. I have ADHD, which I didn't know when I was a teenager in the era before the phones you're blaming for poor sleep hygiene. I have struggled for essentially my entire life with sleep routine. I can't for the life of me get to bed at the same time every day; after three decades of trying I just don't think it is something I am readily capable of doing. It works for a few days and then gets later and later and eventually it's so late that I'm ruined by 8pm and I reset for another cycle. This is, as it turns out, not uncommon among folks with ADHD and similar conditions -- and those conditions are more likely than you would obviously believe them to be. So, while it absolutely is my responsibility to regulate my life, I feel you can probably keep your sanctimonious encouragement to adulthood!
• j_crick 4y ago
  As a night owl who was forced to wake up early all the first two decades of his life to kindergarten, school or university, all I can say is “no shit, Sherlock”. I didn’t even choose to be a late sleeper, that’s how I always was. Yet the worldwide conspiracy to wake up absurdly early for any important matter is really annoying /s. As I’m approaching my 40s and am lucky enough to have a flexible schedule, waking up early is still borderline painful for me, and if I don’t wake up late enough, my day is usually not as productive as I would want it to be, if not outright ruined. Glad to see my impressions of this global early morning stupidity /s being validated somewhat.
  • ricksunny 4y ago
    Absolutely identify with this. 9am engineering classes were a struggle for me. Absolutely affected my attention & retention. Wish it could have been otherwise, for my choice of major that was the only schedule available.
    • leeoniya 4y ago
      i failed a 7:30am calc class in my freshman year of engineering school that was a 1 mile hike uphill in the middle of winter...NOPE!
  • blackhaz 4y ago
    No /s. That's exactly why I dreamed about working in my own startup. So I wouldn't have to wake, like at 6 AM to have a chance for proper shit and shower. Now I simply can skip sleeping altogether!
  • WaterSupreme 4y ago
    I am interested in your take on "conspiracy". While I understand it might feel that way for you as a night owl I would raise you a question. How else could we structure our universities and workdays if not according to our natural environment? We cannot fill the employment roles for professors, support staff, and every other type of worker even with this rigid 8AM system. In my head that new world would include layers and layers of renduncancies which would be a system we could not feed with our current worker population.
• seper8 4y ago
  One big problem is societies opinion that getting up early is considered good and getting up later in the day is bad, completely ignoring the different circadian rhythms of people and especially adolescents...
• danielfoster 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I remember taking an early morning marksmanship (shooting) class in college. Students had no trouble getting up early for this and the class had near-perfect attendance throughout the semester. Biology, on the other hand, was another matter.
  • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    I assume biology is full of mostly pre med and nursing students, so I’m surprised it wouldn’t be well attended, even early in the morning, at least at the university I went to.
    • asdff 4y ago
      The intro bio series usually lecture straight out of the book. You could very well get an A without attending lecture.
      • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        I don't know. I made the mistake of taking Chemistry my freshman year, and got my lowest GPA ever (2.7! I think I graduated with a 3.78). Pre-meds mess up the curve a lot, you really have to be on top of everything to do well in those classes.
        • asdff 4y ago
          Straight out of the book doesn't always mean easy. It just means there's nothing you'd get from the class you wouldn't get from the book, because the professor is using the powerpoint slides the publisher sent them which are made entirely from the book, and they aren't the type to have in class discussions you could benefit from. If you want extra help that will give you a leg up in those sorts of classes, you skip lecture and go to office hours.
  • Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    And these different activities require different sorts of effort. So long as you are awake enough to be safe and aim at the target, you can shoot a gun. Realistically, guns are designed to be used even if you aren't at your sharpest, and there is only so much you'll learn during a session. You are also active, while doing a leisurely activity (assuming here that even if it was an accredited class, it was optional). This isn't quite like taking a biology class where you are supposed to be sharp enough to learn - or prove you grasp complex subjects. It takes more mental effort. On top of this, classroom conditions are different. Stuck in a chair, in a room often too cold/too warm, listening to someone go on about the history of trees and how they developed into the modern tree. Thrilling.
• fwlr 4y ago
  If you think university is about learning, starting at midday is an easy win and it’s kind of baffling that administrators everywhere are sleeping on it. If you think university is about earning Reasonably Conscientious Employee accreditation, starting at midday would miss the whole point.
  • toxik 4y ago
    It is both, and the fact is that a day only has so many hours. Scheduling is already difficult, halving the number of hours would be impossible. “But just schedule evenings” maybe you object. Ok, so what about the other daytime obligations that teachers may have? Daycare, office hours of collaborators, etc. The 8-5 schedule is an emergent property of society, not a ruthless schedule imposed by the elusive morning person cabal.
    • mold_aid 4y ago
      Yeah in general I think we need to reconsider the role of the credit-hour in universities. Some of the biggest trouble I got into as a prof is when I sent my students out on campus for research during my hour as - and here's something not yet noted in this discussion - students outside of their assigned classroom at a time is actually a notable liability risk.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    At best, your opinion is equally baffling. You're suggesting a one-size-fits-all solution which would be worse than the current situation since you can generally choose earlier or later classes. Eliminating early classes will hurt people who do well in the morning.
  • asdff 4y ago
    They don't have enough lecture hall space or teaching staff to run all the classes midday.
• powersnail 4y ago
  It was painfully obvious that nearly nobody wanted to take 8:00 AM classes when I was in college. There were two friends of mine who took the same 8:00 AM math class one semester, and they never met in lecture, except on quiz days. Even the early birds I knew didn't quite like the morning classes, because they then had to rush towards lecture halls first thing in the morning, rather than strolling leisurely to the library, eating breakfast, or jogging and taking a shower, which I suspect is what many early birds most enjoy about being an early bird. The problem is that there are seminars and stuff that occur at at like 7 or 8 pm, so university life almost necessarily extends late (after lecture, dinner, assignments, projects) in the evening at least on some days. This is further exacerbated by the fact that given how many group assignments there are, individual student rarely have total control over their own schedule. Even if you carefully choose your classes, avoid all late-night sessions, don't party, plan your life, it's still incredibly hard to sleep before 11pm consistently.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    "it's still incredibly hard to sleep before 11pm consistently." I didn't really have that problem. I had one semester that was really had where I would stay up late to do solo projects and coursework. The rest of time it was easy to go to sleep before 11pm. I think the only times that I didn't would have been due to partying, but usually not on a school night.
    • asdff 4y ago
      For some majors that 1 semester you had is the entire program.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        Not that I saw. I was in computer science. I knew people in education, business, math, physics, etc. The reason my semester was hard was due to a poor professor and taking advanced classes as a freshman (several 300 levels, including math, which I struggle with). I do know doctors in residency and others that have rough schedules, but that's not undergrad.
• laurieg 4y ago
  I'd like to see a more nuanced discussion of what 8am actually is. I've lived in places where 8am means you've already had 2-3 hours of sunlight and places where 8am is pitch black. Clock time and sun time don't always match. Social time is another aspect, although linked more closely with clock time. After moving countries I found it very strange to see popular TV shows advertised with with a start time of half-past midnight. "Who would be up to watch it?" I thought. Of course, it turns out, there are plenty of people up watching TV at that time in this culture.
  • corbulo 4y ago
    Commute time is huge as well. I went to a University that had double to triple the amount of undergrads to parking spots. The student's time was a total afterthought. An 8am class would be showing up at 6-7 to find parking and get to the classroom. Disgusting, I never took courses that required regular attendance there for that reason. There's so many compounding variables that emerge from Universities total neglect of prioritizing learning. I don't think its as simple as early=bad.
    • mold_aid 4y ago
      This is an excellent point, but I have to tell you that it gets worse at the middle of the day because 8am courses are taken by a self-selecting group of students ("I want the 8am" and "I didn't start registering until the last minute"). The parking issue picks up at 10 am and nobody can find a spot - I drive around the faculty lots for 15 minutes on my MWF semesters and emerge at 5 pm to find everybody gone (as you'd expect). By 11 students are parked on top of berms, in staff spots (a ticket? the price of doing business), in motorcycle spots, everywhere. My course meetings start for real 5 minutes after posted time; it's all warmup for those in dorms who get there at the hour.
      • corbulo 4y ago
        You're absolutely correct. I was focusing on the post, but if your class is at 3pm you have to show up at like 8-10am or something ridiculous to get a spot. Parking permits are such a scam.
• cracrecry 4y ago
  In Spain you could select early morning or late classes in high School and in University. Late are usually there for the people that work. I did chose sometimes early morning, sometimes late depending on my job or my preferences. It made no difference at all. Just a different schedule. If you have early classes you need to sleep early. I believe most people that never experience late classes are just idolizing, because what I see is most people get to bed late and that is the main problem that they have. There is a tendency on humans beings of going to bed later, because everyday we can delay two hours going to bed but we can only change one hour ahead, so most people delay going to bed following friends on facebook or doing whatever they like. Just change your habits.
  • gpvos 4y ago
    That would be great. But: were the early and late classes given by the same people? That sounds not good for them, so I guess not, which would mean only larger schools and universities have enough people to do that.
• TrackerFF 4y ago
  Our (computer) computer networking class started 07.00, and finished up 11.00 - it should have been split into two 2 hour sessions over the week, but due to scheduling conflicts we had to go for one 4 hour session. Class attendance was nonexistent after the first two weeks. Grades were abysmal. But to be fair, it was a horribly boring class as it was thought. Just hours of going through various communication protocols, that early in the morning?
• say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
  The problem is going to bed late, not getting up early. Unfortunately, heavy course demands can keep a student up late into the night.
• hedora 4y ago
  Really? I had to check to see if this was an Onion article or not.
• bacro 4y ago
  Early morning classes are such a bad idea. Hopefully, this bad practice can change in the future.
• 2-718-281-828 4y ago
  is there a theory on why those inclinations exist? why would someone strongly prefer to wake up at 6am versus someone else at 10am - but "prefer" not as "I'd like that better" but as "it's impossible for me to adjust to it without mental and physical harm"? as far as my observations go it's not really a hard wired neurological fact but rather a result of psychological resistance and self-reinforcing circumstances: I don't like my job -> don't want to go to bed yet (need to do sth I enjoy and also b/c I want to artificially stretch time until having to work again) -> I don't want to get out of bed (because I don't like my job and I also happen to sabotage my sleep by avoiding it at night and hence I didn't sleep enough) -> apparently I'm an owl ... one question would be ... are there owls who enjoy whatever forces them to get out of bed early?
• kwhitefoot 4y ago
  Thank goodness I went to a traditional uni. in the UK in the mid 70s. In the physics department there were no classes, only lectures and tutorials. Lectures were optional. and the class of your degree depended only on the finals and final year dissertation/project report. We were able to arrange our own working patterns and were responsible enough to do it.
  • gundmc 4y ago
    > In the physics department there were no classes, only lectures and tutorials. In my experience in the US, "class" is used interchangeably with lecture. Although some subjects will also have labs, small group discussion, or recitation. I'm not sure what distinction you have in the UK.
    • kwhitefoot 4y ago
      Ah, two countries divided by a common language, or something like that! I don't know how it's done in UK universities now either, but I do know that many (most?) of the less prestigious universities have switched to modular courses where it is the accumulation of points that counts rather than performance in finals. I always think of classes as a kind of compromise between a lecture which is a large number of students and no individual contact between the lecturer and student except for the occasional clarifying question and a tutorial which is a very focussed meeting with a tutor and typically four or five students where exercise that were issued the previous week are discussed in detail. Classes always seem to me to be the worst of both worlds: big enough for weak students to hide in (and thus fail to get the help they need) but not big enough to get an economy of scale.
• fleddr 4y ago
  It's hard to say who is truly a night owl and for who it's a lifestyle. I've always considered myself to be a night owl. I struggle to go to bed on time. Yet on some of my lengthy remote travels I learned it's all bullshit. There, the sun sets at 6PM. There's little artificial light, and nothing much to do, so some 2 hours after dinner people tend to go to bed. So for weeks I went to bed around 9pm and wake up super fresh at 5-6am like some crazy morning person. Just like that. Zero issues. So no, I'm not a night owl, it's distractions that make me not want to go to bed, it's not that I can't.
  • acomjean 4y ago
    I think people tend twords early bird/ night owl, but it’s adjustable. I tend to like to stay up late, but when employment forced me to be at work at 7am I adjusted my sleep schedule to accommodate. But with a flexible schedule now I’ve moved it later. except the dog keeps me in check ..
  • giantg2 4y ago
    It's interesting that the article doesn't seem to mention anything about evening activities. They're solely focused on when they went to sleep and woke up, yet seem to completely ignore why they went to bed at a specific time. I had a before school class in high school and 8-9am classes in college. It was never an issue for me. Anecdotally the people who had trouble at these times and even later where the ones who stayed up late playing videogame and drinking (caffinated soda or alcohol), partying, or working as a bartender (sounds like the study controlled for this last one with shift work exculsionl).
    • asdff 4y ago
      Depending on your coursework you could also be closing down the library studying organic chemistry for example. Its almost a rite of passage to do that while taking that class.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        I'm not buying that. I know people who took OChem. There's a certain point where studying is no longer effective and sleep is more beneficial. So it's really about time management, regardless of when the class starts.
• cyberlurker 4y ago
  I didn’t like 8AM classes but I took them to force myself to get to school early so I could get a parking spot. Then I camped there until my classwork was done. It worked for me but I think I would have performed better with later classes. 10AM classes are probably the best. Not too close to lunch, not too early.
  • gpvos 4y ago
    The concept of many students going to uni, or worse even to school, by car baffles me; usually they have good public transport connections and enough bicycle stalls, but I guess this is the US?
    • cyberlurker 4y ago
      Yup. Our public transport sucks everywhere. Even NYC. And as much as I would have loved to bike it is not safe. I biked to work for a while in different cities in California and the bike lane quality varied greatly. I am not a fan of LA. Northern California seemed better for biking. But also, outside a few areas in the US on the coasts, this country is much bigger and more spread out than EU countries. This makes driving a necessity for many people. People mostly burn gas because the alternatives aren't practical.
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      Remember that the US is very large, and not very dense. A European's notion of 'rural' and 'urban' is quite different from the experience of most Americans. In any case, many US universities are in rural towns that only really exist to serve that university. And you would find that the transportation patterns are entirely different for a big city school vs a rural one. While the bicycle transportation options in a university town are generally pretty good, it's also true that many people prefer to drive vs biking in 40F rain, -10F ice, or 90F and humid.
    • asdff 4y ago
      Schools have both. Highest rates of bike riding are always college towns. It's just that schools also have commuter students, who might live nearby to family in car range, at which point they save money hand over fist even with the costs of car ownership by not paying thousands on dorms or off campus apartments. Maybe apartment prices are super inflated near the school too, and living a 45 min drive out gets you something you can afford to rent. A lot of these college towns are in the middle of nowhere too, the college is the major employer and source of all activity, so transit is highly limited just like it would be for a european town in the middle of nowhere with maybe 10k people living year round in it.
• spirit557 4y ago
  The problem I had with early classes and even today - If I have in my mind I have to get up 7am or 6am for some event I know my window of error for a good night sleep is tiny: -Having trouble falling asleep that night? -Wake up in the middle night to pee but cant get back to sleep for an hour or two? - Wake up 1 or 1.5 hours before your alarm? If i know i have time to buffer against interruptions, I sleep better. If i know my window of error is tiny, Im doomed to poor sleep regardless.
• cafard 4y ago
  How many remain these days? My impression is that when my son went through college (2007-2011) he had no difficulty leaving his mornings clear. But I wasn't a helicopter parent, and have limited information there.
• xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  ah yes, yet another article from the prominent journal Nature Obvious Results
• jb1991 4y ago
  Hm, I wonder.. are they also linked to a lifetime of bad dreams about sleeping in and missing classes and being unprepared for tests.
• jspaetzel 4y ago
  Failed calculus one in my first year, mostly because it was at 7am. I'd make it to class and then promptly fall asleep during the lecture. I didn't register for anything earlier then 9am after that, things got better from there.
• willjp 4y ago
  An alternative take. I’m an insomniac that tries to get to sleep before midnight, but usually has 2-3hrs awake in between sleep and time to wake up. Sometimes I wish I could pretend I was in a different timezone.
• gpvos 4y ago
  Upvoting on principle.
• b112 4y ago
  Let me fix the title "Early morning university classes linked to poor sleep and academic performance, blurry eyed researcher says" What were the motives for this research, I wonder? And who clung on? Let me guess... those who can't get up at 5am.
  • troutpanda 4y ago
    Those hideous bastards who can't get up at 5am, like I do. Because waking up at 5am is HARD, and thus honourable. The study literally says "on average the highly trained students of this important university perform badly if they're asked to wake up too early". This might suggest that not-having-classes-at-8 might improve their performance, given that for some reason, on average, they can't get up at 5am. We could investigate their lifestyle, it is because of their excessive screentime? Is it because of video-games? Or, maybe, we could just not-have-classes-at-8, and we could just stop pretending that waking up early is good and everyone should absolutely do it, in spite of how hard it is.
    • b112 4y ago
      If first classes are at noon, people will complain about getting up too early. And some just naturally wake at 5, FYI.
• withinboredom 4y ago
  I have a feeling that a lot of this is due to a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' type problem. Generally high performing students (or more senior ones) get first dibs on classes, who will generally take the later classes. Thus lower performing students get the early classes.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    Performance didn't have any influence on section selection at my colleges. Is that normal somewhere else?
    • withinboredom 4y ago
      Being senior can be a proxy for performance (to some degree since colleges don’t keep students who get failing grades). FWIW, at my colleges that I went to, people on honor roll were given a few hours head start on class selection.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        That's not an applicable proxy. Sure they might have low performers dropout, but they doesn't provide any segregation in the remaining cohort for high performers getting to register early. Interesting. They didn't do that for us.
        • withinboredom 4y ago
          I disagree that is “not applicable” but as I said, just a hunch/hypothesis. It def requires experimenting and research to prove whether it is or isn’t a proxy, at least for this case.
          • giantg2 4y ago
            Literally, if you drop out you are no longer eligible to register for any classes. That has no application to determining that low performers are forced into earlier classes. The other part where high performers are given preference could be.
• sidlls 4y ago
  As an early bird and someone who rarely goes to bed before 11pm, I had the opposite experience. I think there's a middle ground here. There's no reason for a class, work, or anything to start before 9am, or after 4pm.
• lettergram 4y ago
  Or people partying… bet that as a higher link to poor performance and
• codeddesign 4y ago
  That’s ridiculous. This is like saying that your job is linked to poor sleep and performance. Plan and prioritize. If it’s too much, you are either over loaded or out having fun at night. Either way, decrease the work load. Theories like this one from Nature does more harm than good, by placing blame on the school or hours rather than the students lifestyle or choices. Snowflakes creating more snowflakes.
• samweb3 4y ago
  One easy way to flip your schedule is to stop eating 12-14 hours before you want to wake up. This is also great for when you are traveling timezones. For example, stop eating at 4pm, and you'll more easily wake up at 6am the next day. Do this for a couple days and you'll find yourself on the flipped the scheduled.
  • antisthenes 4y ago
    What's your solution for people who can't sleep on a hungry stomach?
    • oh_sigh 4y ago
      Just do it for a couple of days and you'll get used to it. Maybe drink some water if you really need something in your belly. And breakfast will taste the best it ever has.
• lumb63 4y ago
  This is unsurprising. In college I had a 7:35 anatomy lecture in the winter semester in the US Northeast. How many students do you think were making it to a 7:35 lecture in 20 below 0 temperature before snow had been plowed, before busses were running, and with wind blowing in their faces? It was poorly thought through. Anyone who is interested in this more should check out Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The book isn’t perfect, but it does discuss how we systematically harm our children by the timing of our school days. For example, teenagers need more sleep than younger children, but we have the teenagers up the earliest for school because they ought to be “responsible”. This reflects in their lack of classroom engagement and progress and test scores. IMO, if we want to consider our public education system an actual service to our youth, we should be doing what we can to meet their needs, rather than imposing our virtues and opinions on them.
• JohnBooty 4y ago
  I also met my best friend in college thanks to ridiculously early morning classes. Had an 8AM class freshman year. Guy in front of me would always fall asleep during class, so I'd kick his chair to wake him up. Honestly I mostly did it because I felt bad for the prof. There were only 15-20 of us in the class and it was quite obvious when one person dozed off.
• boringg 4y ago
  I would agree with this - classes before 9 am seem unnecessary. I would also argue that theres a moral hazard too pushing the start time back which means that this enables people to stay up later.
• balderdash 4y ago
  How is morning class the variable as opposed to partying, playing video game, staying up too late, working late, etc?
  • giantg2 4y ago
    Because they completely ignored evening activities except to exclude shift workers.
• wendyshu 4y ago
  I had an 8:15am or 9:00am class and I was struggling to get enough sleep. In the middle I told the instructor that I was going to skip lectures so I could sleep better. He didn't like that idea. I went ahead with my plan and used Khan Academy to get the material. My grade increased in the second half of the course.
• Glyptodon 4y ago
  Anecdote, but I've long thought my college GPA would've been as much as a half point higher if I never took a class that started before 9:30 AM.
• rintakumpu 4y ago
  Personal anecdote. I remember dragging myself to measure theory classes at 8am and constantly struggling with the material, even if I'd had a good night's sleep. After a few weeks I called quits on this insanity and switched to self-study, breezing through the course.
• brailsafe 4y ago
  All those lazy kids who can't afford houses probably, don't they know they should stop acting so entitled and shift to being day people?
• innocentoldguy 4y ago
  K-12 start hours are one of the reasons I pulled my kids out of public school. We did a combination of homeschooling and a private school that provided homeschooling assistance three days a week from 10:00 am until 2:00 pm. My kids did much better academically once we eliminated the 6:00 am wake up times.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    There are multiple variables at play here. I suspect that the quality of schooling played a huge part, especially the perspective of peer students. In my experience kids at private schools and homeschool had much better performance due to a reduction in distracting kids and the apathy culture present at many public schools. The fact they were able to go 10-2 also shows that they're at an accelerated paced over a normal day.
• cassac 4y ago
  This is only because people like to wake up at the last second and are still groggy during class. If you have an 8am class don’t get up at 7:55am, get up at 6:30am. You may like it less but you’ll be awake for class and you’ll do better. I don’t know at what point we decided these kids have to have everything done exactly optimal for them with no deviance to make their life harder but it explains a lot about how incapable they are when they do encounter hardships. You may now remove yourself from my lawn.
  • seymourhersh 4y ago
    > This is only because people like to wake up at the last second and are still groggy during class.m I didn’t see that data in the study.
    • cassac 4y ago
      You didn’t, but the study did talk about people skipping class, probably do to over sleeping.
      • seymourhersh 4y ago
        What does oversleeping through an early class have to do with not waking up early enough?
        • cassac 4y ago
          You are right I can only try to infer information from them that’s not provided. I would infer there is a distribution of when people get up and the 8am classes have the largest set of people getting up nearest to the class start time. Some of the people get up very early and the other end is people up so late they miss the class. The later the class the more people are awake so the better the performance. I’m saying the data they do provide does not refute my take on it.
          • seymourhersh 4y ago
• chrisgd 4y ago
  I received a D minus in two classes my first semester. I thought I was fully prepared for college (and I was if i had been at home and I didn’t have anyone next door to play James Bond on N64 while drinking beers and ordering pizza). I can totally see this being a problem and it happens more often with 200+ people seminars for freshmen. Best advice I can give you and didn’t realize until I was about to graduate is that you can retake a class and replace the grade.
• anthomtb 4y ago
  I guess I am an outlier here. I determined way-too-late in my college career that the (my) recipe for success was to attend lectures between 8:00AM and 1:00PM. Anything later than that and I would either fall asleep or could not concentrate. The best output of those afternoon lectures was transcribing whatever the professor said into my notebook. Which is nearly useless for mathematics-driven engineering classes, at least in my experience. But for the early and mid-morning classes, my brain was sharp. I could listen and watch the professor then copy only the key points and equations. My retention and understanding of the material became SOOO much better. And, as a bonus, the morning classes were poorly attended, meaning additional face time with the professor.
  • asdff 4y ago
    It was the opposite for me. 8ams I felt like I was in a dream state, even highly caffeinated. Sitting there in that chair for 50 minutes with the monotone professor droning on and on would lull me to sleep like a lullaby. Eventually I started just stabbing myself in the leg with a pencil whenever I would nod off, which would buy another 3 minutes of alertness or so.
• Anon84 4y ago
  I really can't stress enough how important a good night's sleep is. I've struggled with insomnia for years and am only now getting it under control thanks to meditation, relaxation exercises, etc... These two books [1, 2] were the starting point for getting me back on track to falling asleep faster and staying asleep longer (especially important now with a small baby) [1] https://amzn.to/3Io4NGy https://amzn.to/3Io4NGy [2] https://amzn.to/3Y5XKIN https://amzn.to/3Y5XKIN
  • 0xDEF 4y ago
    What kind of medication do you use?
    • Anon84 4y ago
      I guess you mean mediTation? I played around with different things, but mostly mindfulness.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Kind of odd that anyone thinks you need a study to confirm that if you go to sleep at between midnight and two in the morning (which seems to be the norm in this dataset although it's not very explicitly stated or easy to interpret), then having to be cognitively active at eight in the morning is going to be difficult.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    I would have liked to know why they are going to bed at that time. Those times were not normal during my time at school, except for partying.
    • asdff 4y ago
      Depending on your major closing out the library multiple nights a week is a typical experience.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        This sounds like a time management issue. Moving class start times back would not decrease the workload, nor provide extra sleep under the scenario you describe.
• jriot 4y ago
  All these comments about people struggling with 8am classes. From 18-19 I had air traffic control training, on the job after our initial schoolhouse, at 545am. You learn to adjust or fail.
  • standardUser 4y ago
    I had a restaurant job for a couple years where I had to regularly be in before 5am to accept deliveries. And those were 11 hour shifts. Just because I endured it does not in any way make me feel like we should impose that kind of schedule on others. What kind of nonsense is that? We should aim for schedules that work best for the most people most of the time, obviously.
    • jriot 4y ago
      Aside from the fact that the necessary jobs are on 24/7 schedules. Medical, food delivery (logistics), airlines, etc...
• zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  I prefer to wake up to the sunrise. I have to be to work at 6am though, so it doesn't happen as often as I'd like. It just seems weird to get up before the sun; I have no motivation.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• beej71 4y ago
  I had 8 AM classes last quarter, and my experience with attendance correlates with the study. Poor attendance by the students and droopy eyes in class, though most did well in the course. (Maybe I need to make the material more challenging! :) ) But I'm going to try not to start before 10 AM from now on, though I'm a 6-6:30 AM riser. The 10 AM to 2 PM timeslot seems to cover the most people.
• danbr 4y ago
  I had a professor in undergrad who scheduled his classes as early as possible, around 7:30am, because he was an early riser. Notoriously known for difficult assignments and exams, he would allow extra time for tests, if we showed up an extra half hour early. Who wants to take an exam at 7am?! There was a massive curve to everyone’s grades.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  Yeah those 8am classes means a very bad day for people. I remember
• wenc 4y ago
  The 8am class I had in my sophomore year of college was the only C I had. The professor who taught that class thought I was one of those low performers because I did so badly in his class. Later he became undergrad chair. I needed to retrieve my class rank for grad school applications, and the request went to him. He rummaged through the files in my presence. When he found mine, he said “it’s impossible”. I was 4th in class in a cohort of about 50. I was a decent student but I always underperformed at 8am. (I’m much older now and I’ve been keeping normal hours for decades since. I’m ok at 8am now. I still hate early morning 7am meetings with Asia however — I’m in pacific time.)
• fredgrott 4y ago
  funny thing for ADD people who use nootropics. My dopamine boost seems to fully show up at 8am if I take the nootropics at 5 am, that is even with the micro-dose of caffeine I do at 5 am and 1 pm. But since I pair caffeine and coffee-fruit with weak stimulants the peak seems to last about 8-12 hours. Thus, I do my reflections at 5-8 am with my planning at end of day. My own nootropics mix seems to work better with a micro-dose of L-DOPA as I double up on MAO-B inhibitors.
• Eumenes 4y ago
  This conversation has been going on for years in regards to public schools ... I wonder how long until this comes into the workplace, and I'm forced to work 11am to 7pm, or Noon to 8pm, because my co-workers can't manage their own sleep schedules (something we, as civilized people, have done for 1000s of years, with great success)
• bsenftner 4y ago
  I don't buy this. This is too much "exactly what a public click baity audience would like to read". Even if the research is real, dig with honesty and this is nonsense. Just drop the "University class" angle and this is obvious and not at all worth serious consideration, because it is obviously true not just for university courses, but life in general.
• dataflow 4y ago
  Is there any reason to believe that shifting everything later won't also shift whatever people do in the evening to make it come out as a net wash?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• taylodl 4y ago
  Many students may be forced to make one of two undesirable choices when faced with early class start times: sleep longer instead of attending class or wake up earlier to attend class. There is a third option - go to bed earlier. Farmers have been doing it for millenia. Which raises an interesting question - are early classes at agricultural schools well-attended and do those students experience these same problems?
  • giantg2 4y ago
    This study doesn't care about why. They seem to completely ignore evening activities except to remove study participants who are involved with shift work. I wonder what they would have found if they included those students. Perhaps the people best suited for early classes are also best suited for shift work. It would have been interesting to see.
    • McSwag 4y ago
      Agreed, as I read I was thinking that “okay this is a clear case of correlation but not causation.” The root cause is late sleep schedule or even more simply, the lack of sleep. Granted, moving class times to a later time is one broad solution to a generalized problem.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        "moving class times to a later time is one broad solution to a generalized problem." Is it though? Without determining the cause by looking at the underlying factors, I don't think we can conclusively say it's a solution. It could be, but it might not be if this is based on something like "people who are late to registration are late to class", people who have fuller schedules require earlier classes to fit it in, or something. Hell, it might even be that the professors who teach in the afternoons are more relaxed in personality and grade more leniently.
  • asdff 4y ago
    Farmers go to bed early because they rely on daylight to work. College students rarely have that liberty. Maybe they work part time, maybe they are studying, maybe socializing. You can cut out the socializing sure, but anecdotally I remember a lot of my peers in college grinding it out in the library until the PA system kicked them out multiple nights a week. Some of the classes students take just suck.
• Razengan 4y ago
  WHY is human civilization still geared towards working in the daytime?? When was the last time any of us did anything that REALLY needed sunlight? Except farmers and maybe construction workers. This makes even less sense in hot climates, where they spend an asston of energy to cool themselves while insisting on working over the afternoon. Honestly, why can't we nudge the working hours up a bit in the day so that everyone starts their job after noon, and comes home at night, with a few hours of free time before and after sleep. Elect me and I will abolish getting up in the morning.
• trestletech 4y ago
  Alternatively: "students who wait to the last-minute to register for their classes get stuck with the 8AM classes and perform worse than students who registered early."
  • asdff 4y ago
    Oftentimes scheduling windows open up by class and honors rank. So honors seniors get first, then seniors, then honors juniors, and so on. Freshman schedule at the end, and for first semester freshman on summer orientation, you are scheduling a good 3 months after the last sophomores scheduled their fall classes. Maybe your orientation is late in the summer, now you schedule behind all the other freshman.
• galleywest200 4y ago
  I strongly prefer to get all of my activities out of the way as early as possible. I have ADHD and a looming afternoon activity locks me into place and I cannot be productive until that afternoon activity is set to start. Its a curse.
  • hbn 4y ago
    Me too (not about ADHD, I have no idea) I think it's just stress about being late for things that my mom instilled into me. I've had frequent nightmares about being late for things for basically as long as I've been independent with being places. If something is happening later in the day, I can't do anything that might distract me from missing the appointment. It usually ends up with me mindlessly watching YouTube videos and glancing at the clock until it's time to go do the thing. So yeah, I took early morning classes in university whenever I could. And I pretty much always attended them!
• electrondood 4y ago
  I think this is more a function of college students enjoying staying up late for social reasons/the psychological feeling of independence. High school students tend to stay up later than their families as well, and after your family goes to bed you have more space to be your own person.
• gatane 4y ago
  Water is wet
• smm11 4y ago
  Schools in my part of California have been starting later. The kids are just as tired at early classes, they're staying up later.
  • asdff 4y ago
    Pre college schooling I'm assuming. Its hard to have a good night sleep as a highschooler, especially if you have extracurriculars and a job. You basically have to go to bed after finishing homework, to wake up for school again. 5 days of no fun if you want to get actual solid sleep with those constraints. Usually highschoolers give themselves a little free time, and the only freetime they can get is in the night at the cost of sleep, because nothing else can budge.
• nimajneb 4y ago
  [dead]
• jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  In other news: the sky is blue, and the sun rose from the east this morning
• johndhi 4y ago
  FWIW, I'm biologically NOT a night owl. Hate staying up late, am constantly bargaining with my wife to let me go to bed earlier, can't stand the idea of sleeping away the day.
• PeterStuer 4y ago
  'Early afternoon classes linked to poor middle aged professor delivery.' I was an extreme night owl down to my late 20's. Having kids forced me to change. It took 7 years. Since my 40's, have me teach an 8am class and it will be 3x as goed as a 2pm.
  • saurik 4y ago
    FWIW, I'm 41--but do not have kids!--and if you want a good delivery from me you still have to make it happen in at least the afternoon if not the evening: I teach a class sometimes... at 6pm; and when I speak at various collegiate hackathons--which already have unhealthy schedules--I opt in to speaking at midnight ;P.
• 8ytecoder 4y ago
  The discussions under this article makes me irrationally angry. There’s a lot of people saying “just go to bed early” or “just wake up early”. Simple solution, isn’t it? Except it’s not. This belief by both night owls and morning types is affecting a lot of people and their health. Circadian rhythm is different for differently people. Sleep chronotypes are somewhat well researched and there’s clear indication that a good percentage of people are in one extreme or the other and the a big chunk in the middle. It’s also important to note that this shifts with age. There’s also evolutionary bias for why natural selection would have favoured staggered sleep schedules - in a group setting this would have allowed different people to stay alert at different times during the night and thereby increasing the chances of survival of the entire group. Irrespective of all of this - it fucking doesn’t matter. If some people say they struggle to get up early and are sincere about it, it makes sense to provide very basic accommodations. For example, what’s the harm in having meetings only after 9pm? Also don’t schedule meetings after 3pm so those who are the morning types can wind down and get home? We make all sorts of reasonable accommodations for food preferences, religious beliefs, …etc. If some people are more productive during certain hours, it fucking makes good business sense to let them work during their best hours - within reasonable limits. I can only recommend people to read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker for the health and economic damage we do this society in the name of perfect adherence. (I have an ADHD diagnosis but looking at the effects of poor sleep sometimes I wonder if I really have ADHD or if it’s just the poor sleep that’s been fucking with me all my life)
  • cududa 4y ago
    Hit the nail on the head on how I’m feeling. SO many people here commenting on how their body and mind operate as if it’s a universal experience that applies to all humans, and that others are lazy if they don’t operate in the same way.
  • TheKarateKid 4y ago
    Exactly. Public schools are finally starting to re-evaluate having high school students start the earliest, especially when younger kids are the ones naturally up earlier. Sadly, a lot of the reason for this scheduling is because no one wants sports practice to start at 4pm and we all know how that's always prioritized in our society.
• gchallen 4y ago
  One thing to always note in these studies, particularly at the college level, is whether students were randomly-assigned to different sections. (I glanced at the study and couldn't confirm that this was how it was done, although they do reference studies that show similar results for random assignment.) The reason is that registration at universities has become akin to airline boarding, comprising a complex schedule of priorities allowing certain privileged groups to register first—students in various honors programs, students enrolled in the same major as the course, athletes, and so on. As a result, more desirable class times (or instructors) will frequently be populated with more successful or well-prepared students compared with unfavorable times. (And 8AM is about as unfavorable as it gets.) Whether or not registration prioritization makes any logical sense or serves any objectives other than making some students feel special is another question. (It's certainly not optimized around minimizing time to degree. Because why would we care about that? /s) And clearly it can have the effect of putting students who are already at risk into schedules that place them more at risk. But the effects of non-random assignment can also pollute studies like this. Why we're holding classes at 8AM at all is another great question. You'd be tempted to answer "because space", but you might be surprised to find that many large classrooms are idled as early as mid-afternoon. Students seem to also dislike afternoon courses, but I suspect that faculty preferences are more the reason that those time slots don't get used.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  Going back a bit in my career, I've looked at (real, raw) data on this topic in a different way and come up with a conflicting conclusion on the academic performance side. Students taking the same course appear to perform significantly better when they take that course <= 9:00am. This trend is stronger the more students take the course. The difference tends to be on the order of the difference between, say, a B and a B-. (and I also chose specific courses where students are likely to have a variety of choices). I found that it tended to be the better students who self-selected into taking earlier courses, IIRC. The authors add confounding factors when they structure the question as "# of early courses taken" and compare it to overall GPA. For example students who are able to take later classes tend to be Juniors & Seniors, and they may have different GPA's for other reasons-- program retention requirements for example often have higher requirements than for freshmen/sophomores. Students also have different constraints if the have a job, or commute and live further away. Again, I'm only commenting on the academic performance side of the conclusions, not attendance or the other (interesting!) areas the study covered. My guess is that if the study's authors controlled for variables like student class standing, employment, age, and other factors their results might be weakened a bit. Or it could be that their results don't apply uniformly outside their own school (Though mine came from a school that was substantially similar in terms of market niche)
• nickstinemates 4y ago
  I love to fish, especially in tournaments. That means getting up at 3am to drive to the lake to blast off at sunrise. I do not like to wake up early, and do not do well anxiety wise the night before I have to wake up early for something. I tend not to sleep very well. But damn do those days feel great. I don't really notice til 3-4pm, then my brain basically shuts off. Otherwise, I am trying to find the 'productivity sweet spot' for me these days. I have found, for me, it ramps throughout the day until I hit the zone, around 3-4pm. I can stay here until 9-10pm easily, if I can avoid the outside distractions of life. The rest of the day I can learn pretty well. I spend most of my waking time reading and absorbing information. I don't feel inhibited from doing so really any time.
• fwungy 4y ago
  I heard in a Paul Chek podcast that morning/night preferences have a genetic component. You may not be able to alter it by choice. He also mentioned that living away from the timezone you were born in can also cause sleep issues, based on his experiences with clients he has coached.
• baby 4y ago
  I’m so happy that I just skipped any classes that would start early during university. Some of these classes would start at 7:45 am. What a joke.
• dgunay 4y ago
  I live on the west coast, and work for people on Central time. I regularly take my first meeting of the day having just rolled out of bed. There is a 7AM weekly all-hands meeting that I simply don't attend most of the time, because it's usually pretty light on information and my productivity will tank for the day if I cut my sleep short to make it. I recently travelled while working; through the Eastern and Atlantic timezones. It was hilarious how much more effective I felt. I was fully awake for morning meetings and had several hours for focused work each day where no one could bother me. People who work in the "ahead" timezones truly have a slight advantage in the corporate world, IMO. Makes me wish I worked for a company on Hawaii time TBH.
• mgarfias 4y ago
  8 am calc class my freshman year, can confirm