Night Crows

Staying up at night is something I enjoy. Actually, my best thinking is done at 10pm to 1am. I usually get done with work at the normal hour, eat dinner, watch a couple of prime-time TV shows and about 10pm I get my second wind. I start working and generally work a couple more hours, until about midnight. Then I get ready for bed and shut the lights off about 1am.

Since I do that, I generally like getting up at 8 or 9am. However, the world doesn't work that way. The world works on an 8 to 5 workday, which means you really need to get up at 6 or 6:30 depending on your commute. In fact, if you DO sleep past 7am, if someone calls you, generally you have to pretend you were awake to save the embarrassment.

In fact, growing up I had this uncle. He would always show up at our door at 7:30 or 8am on a Saturday morning for a visit. Of course, we all would still be in bed. After all, I think my parents are closet night owls, too, they would often stay up until midnight. But when my uncle showed up my parents would get dressed in a hurry and welcome him in like they had been up for hours. Then my uncle, being obvious that they haven't been up for hours, would inevitably say something obnoxious like "Are you going to sleep all day?" and make comments at how most business decisions are made before 9am. He would act like he was doing us a favor by waking us up. My dad would laugh and agree with him, and then they would go on with their visit.

What's funny is, if we went to visit this same uncle on a Saturday afternoon he inevitably was taking a NAP.

Why is it that "Night Owls" aren't treated like wise old owls at all? They're treated more like pesky pigeons or crows. If you sleep past 8am people lable you as "lazy". It doesn't matter if you stayed up until 2am writing your dissertation or finding a cure for cancer.

And as far as the "most business decisions are made before 9am", well, night owls make them before THAT. They make them at midnight, well before the 9am smart-business-decision deadline.