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I’ve found that if I really want to learn something, I just get up an hour early, makes some coffee/tea and get to it. It’s the only thing I can control with an

I’ve found that if I really want to learn something, I just get up an hour early, makes some coffee/tea and get to it. It’s the only thing I can control with any certainty. The quiet time while everyone is asleep provides a distraction free environment. I also like giving my most productive/energetic time to my own projects/learning, as opposed to work, but that is just me. After work time is for dinner, family, and fun projects that I don’t need additional motivation for

markus_zhang 3y ago
Can relate. Recently I have grown some interests in building Neverwinter nights EE modules so I get up early to read DND source books and look at the scripts of the official campaigns. After work usually there is too much noise to get a large chunk of time. I do have 60-120 mins after my kid falls to sleep but I'm always in a gameplay only mentality during that time.
xattt 3y ago
Waking up early works but only if your kids don't have a variable time range, say 5:30 - 7:00, when they get up :)
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  Haha First thing I thought when I read this. Waking up early to have some free focus time is what I _used_ to do. Now I can sometimes squeeze some late nights but not as productive cause I am half dead by then.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    To some extent it works for me to take like an intuitive estimate for the rolling average of earliest kid wake up time over the last couple weeks, and then subtracting an hour and a half. But this doesn't work with infants or for like a month around both daylight savings time switch.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    Children are fun, but they will get in the way of productivity. Get up early, they learn that at get up as well. Trying to work in the evening, I'm getting to old to work past 20:00. Sadly my most productive time, the time where I feel like doing the most work, is between 13:30 and 18:00, which has a pretty big overlap with "picking up kids, getting dinner ready and other household chores".
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > Sadly my most productive time, the time where I feel like doing the most work, is between 13:30 and 18:00, which has a pretty big overlap with "picking up kids, getting dinner ready and other household chores". Me too, I almost blurted out something like this to wife today - that I can't help it, my best hours seem to be between ~13:00 and 19:00, which is exactly the time that's torpedoed by a series of distractors like "dinner", "picking kids up from facilities", and everything else that's going on. By the time we're clear of all that, I'm too mentally or emotionally drained to do or enjoy anything.
      - xattt 3y ago
        Thank you for saying this out loud. I thought I was the only one. I’m doing grad school right now, while working full-time while maintaining family responsibilities. My ways of working and achieving during undergrad (mid-afternoon to late evening sessions) are not mapping well to grad studies. Getting up early is hap-hazard and working late at night leaves me dead tired for the next morning. However, I’m glad that my kids are getting the best of me during my peak productivity time.
  - yoyohello13 3y ago
    Once they become teenagers, you'll have plenty of time in the morning before they wake.
    - DoingIsLearning 3y ago
      That's my mistake now, I keep making new ones. :)
- sanderjd 3y ago
  haha yep. You can chart my level of productivity and ambition as an exact correlation with my kids' age and sleep stability. Not to mention daylight savings shifts screwing everything up twice a year :)
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Not to mention that any noise louder than a whisper and they wake up (happily) screaming about how daddy's up and is it time for breakfast and what are we doing today and can we [go to space/get an elephant/move to Paris/...]?
- jebarker 3y ago
  Or if you have children or pets that still occasionally wake up needing something in the middle of the night. Once you've been up randomly for 30 mins somewhere between midnight and 3am, getting up at 4am is much less appealing
bluedino 3y ago
>> I just get up an hour early, makes some coffee/tea and get to it. This works well for me for getting a headstart on the workday, but I can't seem to "learn" anything in either the first hour or so in the morning, or the last hour or so before I go to bed. Plus, with the latter, if it's anything interesting, it keeps me up at night.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I find it's the opposite. Once I've acquired momentum for my workday I can't really focus outside of that domain until I shed that momentum, which can take hours, and then it's sleep time. Mornings are the only time I can learn what I want to learn and not what the man wants me to learn.
cheschire 3y ago
I learned a similar concept in a drivers ed course many moons ago. The only space around your car that you have any control is in front of you. Granted you don't have complete control, but your decisions do impact how close people are to your front more often than the other sides. And what you're describing for time management is similar. You have influence over how much space you leave between you and the things in front of you on your calendar, but you'll never have much control over the end of the day, and how exhausted the final events of the day end up making you feel.
smoe 3y ago
I have also discovered that in the morning before other duties works best for me although I have never considered myself a morning person. At night it is much more difficult to be consistent with a habit, with things coming up spontaneously (e.g. friends wanting to go out for dinner), time for family and also tiredness after working all day varies a lot. Whereas in the morning it was much easier to just block 1-2 hours with nobody interrupting and while I might not be the most productive/energetic at that hour, it is pretty much consistently the same every morning.
brightball 3y ago
Yep. Motivation will make you find time.
- criddell 3y ago
  I'm tempted to do this but I also know that the extra hour of sleep is likely a more productive and healthy use of that time. I'd probably take the time from just about any other part of my day. Of course, YMMV.
mrits 3y ago
Morning is best for me as well. I'd also add that I'm not able to get very much more learning done with endless free time than when I worked full time. After a few weeks of a study plan and the motivation fades I find it really hard to "learn" for more than a few hours a day, which I was able to do while working full time. It probably depends on your financial state and other motivating factors as well. It was easier to be motivated when I was poor in college than as a 40 year old that could do whatever I wants whenever I want.
georgeburdell 3y ago
Just me personally, but I have significantly more trouble getting up early than staying up late. My family obligations end around 10pm (my toddlers are night owls too) I naturally arise at 8am, and I would spend 30-45 minutes trying to go to sleep 90 minutes earlier and wake up at 6:30 instead. It’s over an hour if I try and wake up at 5 and I am likely to sleep through my alarm. I tried this for weeks and it did not improve. By contrast, staying up to 12-1am is effortless and I get a solid 2-3 hours of independent time to catch up on work or learn
TeMPOraL 3y ago
I envy those who can wake up on schedule. In my natural state, I wake up randomly between 09:00 to 12:00; the only way I can wake up earlier, or at specific time, is if someone else forces me out of bed, and makes sure I don't fall back asleep within the next 15 minutes. I've been like this for as long as I remember. So even without kids and their adjustable schedules (ready to get up as early as 04:00, but waiting for us to wake up until ~06:30), to get in that morning hour of learning, I'd have to ask my wife to wake me that hour earlier - which already defeats the point of having alone time. And even if, my brain never really wakes up until ~12:00 - 13:00 anyway. Having your biological clock stuck in an opposite timezone to everyone else sucks, but you only learn how bad once you start a family.
- yurishimo 3y ago
  I want to say thank you for sharing your experience. As someone who also feels forced to function due to outside pressure, it's interesting to hear others talk about their experiences. One thing I've naively assumed, is that having kids will awaken some instinctual facet of my psyche to respond to the stimuli inherit in having young children. Maybe that is still _likely_ true, but your experience was that nothing about your internal clock fundamentally changed? Today is a perfect example. It's 10pm currently and I need to wake up in 9 hours and be walking out the door in 9.5 to make it to the office in time. On the 3 days I do not go to the office, I don't roll out of bed until maybe 15 minutes before our daily stand up at 9:30am. Even then, I might just get up with enough time to go to the bathroom and unlock my laptop. I should be getting into bed now, but I still need to take a shower and wind down. I'll be lucky if I'm asleep by midnight. One thing that has changed since I was a kid, is that I can fall asleep in just a few minutes if I make a conscious effort. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate into better sleep quality as a whole, but it certainly takes one piece off of the table that many struggle with. This ended up being ramble-y, but again, thank you!
  - Sinnytk 3y ago
    And thank you for going on that ramble. Resonates with me so much
  - 3y ago
pwpw 3y ago
Spot on advice. I am not a morning person whatsoever, but investing time in myself during the mornings before work is how I gradually switched from accounting into software engineering. When the 2020 lockdown happened, I of course no longer had to commute to work. Rather than using the time gained for more sleep, I took advantage of the opportunity and doubled my morning learning time. Now that I’m a software engineer, I use that time to continue refining my craft because there’s plenty more for me to learn!
tzhenghao 3y ago
Same. When I was at my first SWE job after college, I’d get up at 6am and try to beat Chicago traffic to be at my desk at 7am. That’s when I’d pull up HN or my list of technical topics I’d like to learn, then go for it until my teammates arrive. Rather shamelessly, I even had Leetcode open and went through exercises weeks before I left the job. Good reflex training having to force close it right around 8:30am though :)
mock-possum 3y ago
Oh wow. If I’m trying to learn something, doing it first thing in the morning after I wake up, especially if I have to wake up early to do it, basically guarantees I will retain nothing. Morning is a good time to be productive and creative, but to learn?? No way, not for me.

markus_zhang 3y ago

Can relate. Recently I have grown some interests in building Neverwinter nights EE modules so I get up early to read DND source books and look at the scripts of the official campaigns. After work usually there is too much noise to get a large chunk of time. I do have 60-120 mins after my kid falls to sleep but I'm always in a gameplay only mentality during that time.

xattt 3y ago

Waking up early works but only if your kids don't have a variable time range, say 5:30 - 7:00, when they get up :)

DoingIsLearning 3y ago
Haha First thing I thought when I read this. Waking up early to have some free focus time is what I _used_ to do. Now I can sometimes squeeze some late nights but not as productive cause I am half dead by then.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  To some extent it works for me to take like an intuitive estimate for the rolling average of earliest kid wake up time over the last couple weeks, and then subtracting an hour and a half. But this doesn't work with infants or for like a month around both daylight savings time switch.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Children are fun, but they will get in the way of productivity. Get up early, they learn that at get up as well. Trying to work in the evening, I'm getting to old to work past 20:00. Sadly my most productive time, the time where I feel like doing the most work, is between 13:30 and 18:00, which has a pretty big overlap with "picking up kids, getting dinner ready and other household chores".
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > Sadly my most productive time, the time where I feel like doing the most work, is between 13:30 and 18:00, which has a pretty big overlap with "picking up kids, getting dinner ready and other household chores". Me too, I almost blurted out something like this to wife today - that I can't help it, my best hours seem to be between ~13:00 and 19:00, which is exactly the time that's torpedoed by a series of distractors like "dinner", "picking kids up from facilities", and everything else that's going on. By the time we're clear of all that, I'm too mentally or emotionally drained to do or enjoy anything.
    - xattt 3y ago
      Thank you for saying this out loud. I thought I was the only one. I’m doing grad school right now, while working full-time while maintaining family responsibilities. My ways of working and achieving during undergrad (mid-afternoon to late evening sessions) are not mapping well to grad studies. Getting up early is hap-hazard and working late at night leaves me dead tired for the next morning. However, I’m glad that my kids are getting the best of me during my peak productivity time.
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  Once they become teenagers, you'll have plenty of time in the morning before they wake.
  - DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    That's my mistake now, I keep making new ones. :)
sanderjd 3y ago
haha yep. You can chart my level of productivity and ambition as an exact correlation with my kids' age and sleep stability. Not to mention daylight savings shifts screwing everything up twice a year :)
CalRobert 3y ago
Not to mention that any noise louder than a whisper and they wake up (happily) screaming about how daddy's up and is it time for breakfast and what are we doing today and can we [go to space/get an elephant/move to Paris/...]?
jebarker 3y ago
Or if you have children or pets that still occasionally wake up needing something in the middle of the night. Once you've been up randomly for 30 mins somewhere between midnight and 3am, getting up at 4am is much less appealing

bluedino 3y ago

>> I just get up an hour early, makes some coffee/tea and get to it. This works well for me for getting a headstart on the workday, but I can't seem to "learn" anything in either the first hour or so in the morning, or the last hour or so before I go to bed. Plus, with the latter, if it's anything interesting, it keeps me up at night.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I find it's the opposite. Once I've acquired momentum for my workday I can't really focus outside of that domain until I shed that momentum, which can take hours, and then it's sleep time. Mornings are the only time I can learn what I want to learn and not what the man wants me to learn.

cheschire 3y ago

I learned a similar concept in a drivers ed course many moons ago. The only space around your car that you have any control is in front of you. Granted you don't have complete control, but your decisions do impact how close people are to your front more often than the other sides. And what you're describing for time management is similar. You have influence over how much space you leave between you and the things in front of you on your calendar, but you'll never have much control over the end of the day, and how exhausted the final events of the day end up making you feel.

smoe 3y ago

I have also discovered that in the morning before other duties works best for me although I have never considered myself a morning person. At night it is much more difficult to be consistent with a habit, with things coming up spontaneously (e.g. friends wanting to go out for dinner), time for family and also tiredness after working all day varies a lot. Whereas in the morning it was much easier to just block 1-2 hours with nobody interrupting and while I might not be the most productive/energetic at that hour, it is pretty much consistently the same every morning.

brightball 3y ago

Yep. Motivation will make you find time.

criddell 3y ago
I'm tempted to do this but I also know that the extra hour of sleep is likely a more productive and healthy use of that time. I'd probably take the time from just about any other part of my day. Of course, YMMV.

mrits 3y ago

Morning is best for me as well. I'd also add that I'm not able to get very much more learning done with endless free time than when I worked full time. After a few weeks of a study plan and the motivation fades I find it really hard to "learn" for more than a few hours a day, which I was able to do while working full time. It probably depends on your financial state and other motivating factors as well. It was easier to be motivated when I was poor in college than as a 40 year old that could do whatever I wants whenever I want.

georgeburdell 3y ago

Just me personally, but I have significantly more trouble getting up early than staying up late. My family obligations end around 10pm (my toddlers are night owls too) I naturally arise at 8am, and I would spend 30-45 minutes trying to go to sleep 90 minutes earlier and wake up at 6:30 instead. It’s over an hour if I try and wake up at 5 and I am likely to sleep through my alarm. I tried this for weeks and it did not improve. By contrast, staying up to 12-1am is effortless and I get a solid 2-3 hours of independent time to catch up on work or learn

TeMPOraL 3y ago

I envy those who can wake up on schedule. In my natural state, I wake up randomly between 09:00 to 12:00; the only way I can wake up earlier, or at specific time, is if someone else forces me out of bed, and makes sure I don't fall back asleep within the next 15 minutes. I've been like this for as long as I remember. So even without kids and their adjustable schedules (ready to get up as early as 04:00, but waiting for us to wake up until ~06:30), to get in that morning hour of learning, I'd have to ask my wife to wake me that hour earlier - which already defeats the point of having alone time. And even if, my brain never really wakes up until ~12:00 - 13:00 anyway. Having your biological clock stuck in an opposite timezone to everyone else sucks, but you only learn how bad once you start a family.

yurishimo 3y ago
I want to say thank you for sharing your experience. As someone who also feels forced to function due to outside pressure, it's interesting to hear others talk about their experiences. One thing I've naively assumed, is that having kids will awaken some instinctual facet of my psyche to respond to the stimuli inherit in having young children. Maybe that is still _likely_ true, but your experience was that nothing about your internal clock fundamentally changed? Today is a perfect example. It's 10pm currently and I need to wake up in 9 hours and be walking out the door in 9.5 to make it to the office in time. On the 3 days I do not go to the office, I don't roll out of bed until maybe 15 minutes before our daily stand up at 9:30am. Even then, I might just get up with enough time to go to the bathroom and unlock my laptop. I should be getting into bed now, but I still need to take a shower and wind down. I'll be lucky if I'm asleep by midnight. One thing that has changed since I was a kid, is that I can fall asleep in just a few minutes if I make a conscious effort. Unfortunately, that doesn't translate into better sleep quality as a whole, but it certainly takes one piece off of the table that many struggle with. This ended up being ramble-y, but again, thank you!
- Sinnytk 3y ago
  And thank you for going on that ramble. Resonates with me so much
- 3y ago

pwpw 3y ago

Spot on advice. I am not a morning person whatsoever, but investing time in myself during the mornings before work is how I gradually switched from accounting into software engineering. When the 2020 lockdown happened, I of course no longer had to commute to work. Rather than using the time gained for more sleep, I took advantage of the opportunity and doubled my morning learning time. Now that I’m a software engineer, I use that time to continue refining my craft because there’s plenty more for me to learn!

tzhenghao 3y ago

Same. When I was at my first SWE job after college, I’d get up at 6am and try to beat Chicago traffic to be at my desk at 7am. That’s when I’d pull up HN or my list of technical topics I’d like to learn, then go for it until my teammates arrive. Rather shamelessly, I even had Leetcode open and went through exercises weeks before I left the job. Good reflex training having to force close it right around 8:30am though :)

mock-possum 3y ago

Oh wow. If I’m trying to learn something, doing it first thing in the morning after I wake up, especially if I have to wake up early to do it, basically guarantees I will retain nothing. Morning is a good time to be productive and creative, but to learn?? No way, not for me.