Life as a Night Owl: The challenges and bright future for those wired for the night

One of the first jobs I got when coming to Toronto was on the night desk at the head office of one of Canada’s large banks. It was 1992. I would start at 5:00 p.m. picking up from the person who was just going home for the day. I crunched numbers and wrote spreadsheet formulas for the bank’s mountains of financial reports. Whatever needed to be coded on a spreadsheet, I would do. I worked from 5:00 p.m. until three in the morning, at which point I would leave and grab one of the cabs that were lined up outside the main doors of the tower that sat square in the middle of the city’s financial district.

I was fascinated by the fact that so many cabs were there. Always more than 15, lined up along the curb in the dead of night, cabbies usually standing outside, talking to each other until someone like me stepped through the one unlocked concourse door and out into the cool night air. Except, no cab driver ever wanted to take me, once they talked to me and found out I lived just 20 blocks away. They were waiting for the overtired manager who lived out in the suburbs and had been pulling an all-nighter. None of these cabbies wanted to blow their multi-hour wait in line for was, back then, a ten-dollar ride.

So, to make life easier for myself, and to avoid the hassle, I learned to just go to the last cab in line – the one that had just most recently arrived, raising the ire of all the other cabbies, who, not recognizing me from the nights before thought I might be heading to the airport for an early flight.

I loved that lifestyle. It was a different world. The city streets were quiet, but still busy. I had a desk by the window, the 40th floor. I grew used to watching the rhythm of a city after hours. The crowds of people rushing to the train station would start to ebb by around seven. Then the nightlife hours started – the people going out for dinner, staying after work for a few drinks, some going to shows or the ball game.

Then, as the evening wore on, most of these people would emerge to find their way home. As midnight approached, the street cleaning trucks would appear, the overnight road repair and streetcar track crews would set up shop on deserted streets. The overly imbibed laggards would spill out on to the sidewalk and try to use the evening air to sober up, while bars and restaurants closed up and of course, sadly, the homeless would take their places on gratings for the rest of the night.

As midnight passed, the streets would stay quiet until about four, when the delivery drivers would bring their trucks, filled with fast food restaurant supplies or newspapers, to lay the groundwork for the new day to come. Then, by 5:00, just like the tide coming in, the working people would charge back up the street from the train station or subway station, and the city’s rhythm would repeat once again.

I loved this life. You feel you get to own something that few other people ever do. A city stripped of all its daytime busy-ness, showing the other side of itself. It’s a side that is stark and sparse, illuminated by an unchanging curtain of streetlighting, and devoid of the distracting motion of crowds, couriers, and cars. But the city after midnight is never entirely still. There are always some people somewhere. Road crews, police, and cab drivers patrol the streets, while inside every tower, security guards watch banks of monitors while the cleaning staff vacuum and empty out wastebaskets under bright fluorescent light. And then there’s people like me. Life at night is very different, Very special. Very intimate. It is the domain of the night owl.

I am not a night owl

The fact is, though, I am not a night owl. I am a morning person, just like most people. I am a member of a very large club. Studies show that everywhere in the world, regardless of nationality, culture or faith, eighty percent of any population has their metabolism oriented toward morning. We “morning people” are at our best between 9:00 and 10:30, fueled by sunlight, coffee, and meetings.?

So even back then I had to ask myself, “how am I able to do this?” and in the decades that followed I also sought to understand more about the real night owls – the ones who had to face daytime jobs that completely went against their biology and who had to struggle with the pressures of early morning meetings when their entire body yearned for a few more hours of sleep.

So why are some people night owls at all? As with any research into human metabolism, there is more than one theory. There is the sentinel hypothesis, for example, which suggests that it has been necessary for all the thousands of years that humans existed before artificial lighting and private houses, when tribes or small communities co-existed in groups, that the odds of survival were better if there was at least one member of the group who was predisposed to stay awake all night to watch for predators. Obviously, any group that had this arrangement were less likely to be attacked in the night and therefore more able to pass on their genes to the next generation.

Some attribute the characteristics of the night owl to delayed sleep phase disorder, in which a mutated “clock protein” in the body impacts the natural sleep cycle. But that sounds more like a description of sleep problems like insomnia or disrupted sleep than the chronologically opposite sleep pattern of the night owl.

Like other variants of the human self, such as skin pigmentation, left or right handedness, and the dominance of either logic or emotion in the personality, the cause of being a night owl could just come down to “internal wiring.” Some people are just born that way.

This is a simplified representation of the energy level of a night owl - it tends to be a mirror image of the morning person during daylight hours.

The propensity for being a night owl might even appear or diminish as a person ages. In the same way that we replace every single cell in our bodies every seven years – hence you become an actual completely different physical person on a cellular level every seven years – sleep habits, too, can change. Teens, for example, are often maligned as being excessively sleepy in the mornings, which is often incorrectly attributed to slovenly behavior or late night socializing on their phones, when much of the morning sluggishness is directly related to the amount of energy that a body must put into the act of physically growing. Teens eventually grow into adults, at which point the morning or evening orientation becomes more visible.

As described earlier, it is clear that the stimulation brought on by the presence of the sun helps regulate a morning person’s circadian rhythm, but seldom is it enough to bring night owls to life until they are fully ready. My own experiment with myself as a morning person working a night shift shows that it is possible to redirect the body clock to a different schedule, but it will not change the polarity of one’s time orientation permanently. That, if it is to happen, will happen naturally.

So what can night owls do to survive the 9-to-5 working world? Redesign it

Back in the nine to five world, it has always been easy to spot the night owls at an early morning team meeting. They will do their best to arrive on time, holding on tightly to their coffee and trying to focus on the annoyingly chipper morning banter of morning-oriented fellow participants. I have always found this to be rather unfair, but it has been, up until now a hard fact of workplace life: work starts at 9:00. Or worse, at 8:30. Or worse, earlier. When the majority of any workforce – 80 percent – is biologically aligned to this, the night owls tend to get outvoted, and the meetings are scheduled for first thing in the morning to capitalize on that sunrise energy.

But now, it seems that such inequities might have their best days behind them. It is becoming increasingly apparent that more work can be done asynchronously, with the growing interest in work-from-home and hybrid workplaces. As I mentioned in episode 40 about Dan Price, there is demonstrable value in shifting the workplace priority from one of face time, as in, being physically present and visible in the office, to one of output, in which, as Dan Price said, “so long as the work gets done, why should I care where you do it?

This mindset ties in well with the growing acceptance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which seeks to make a workplace much more accepting of people as they are, rather than making them conform to a single, uniform style.

Nick Selby is a cybersecurity specialist. He writes, “our company allows everyone to set their own hours, and we work entirely asynchronously. We have been remote first since long before the pandemic, and will continue this long after - in fact, always. We think that this is the place to be, and our truly decentralized, truly asynchronous workplace is far more productive than forcing people to conform to specific time expectations. I ask this: what’s the difference between me being a night owl in New York and our employees in Sweden working from 0500 to 1300 local time?”

David Spark is executive producer of the CISO Series, a media company with a selection of cybersecurity-related podcasts. He says, “I think everyone has a weird sleep/work schedule. I don't think I know one person in any field (security or not) that truly works a defined 9-5 schedule. So I think comparing a night owl schedule to that may be a desire to connect with an old form of working. While you can't expect others to work very late or early hours, you can expect people to work a little out of that 9-to-5 range.”

Increasingly companies in many industries are faced with the daunting prospect of redefining what work is. How much of what we have done in past decades was dictated by the demands of physical presence? Needing to arrive for a meeting; needing to be at work so the boss could see you at work; needing to attend a classroom training session in order to learn some new skills? It is becoming increasingly obvious, that this doesn’t need to be the only way. Humans in many lines of work can do some or all of their work from anywhere, and now we are seeing that much of it can also be done “any-when.”

To be fair, there have always been jobs perfectly suited for night owls. People in the arts, for example – working in live theatre, as actors or crew, need to be at their best between 6:00 p.m. and midnight. There are nightshifts in hospitals, road crews who do road construction and repair, bakers and overnight mechanics. Many truck drivers take advantage of quieter highways to make their runs overnight. There are financial types who are doing business with customers on the other side of the planet, and there are pilots flying planes through the night.

So much of the global economy is 24/7 so there is a lot of overnight busy-ness happening, and yes, it has always been possible for night owls to seek careers that fit their particular wiring. But that‘s not the same as making “work in general” compatible with the metabolic demands of each individual.

The ideal situation, for night owls in the new normal economy would be one in which the work is shifted to the times of day where a night owl’s talents truly shine. This would, again involve more asynchronous communication to replace meetings. Frankly to extend that point, I would suggest the same be offered to all employees. Most meetings would work much better as ongoing chats over Slack – something that can continue over a day or more and which I feel for many reasons will vastly outpace the effectiveness of the traditional meeting. Be sure to check out episode 43 for more on this.

So ideally, night owls have the chance now to modify their work schedules to best fit their metabolism. It is important when selling this type of idea to management who might not be so aware of these new possibilities to talk about in terms of quality. The reasons for modifying a schedule to fit a non-nine-to-five metabolism is to maximize a person’s productivity and skill, and this is something that can now be done in new and different ways. Senior management will always be interested in seeing how their company can do better in uncertain times, and asynchronous is it.

Saying goodbye to the Industrial Revolution

It is important to recognize also that so much of what we have been doing in terms of work over the past century was a result of techniques brought about as a result of the Industrial Revolutions, in which people were made to fit the machinery. Even the way we have been conditioned to sleep, to wake up and to have our meals was all intended to fit the shift structures of factories.

Perhaps that made sense economically at a time when most work had to now happen in factories, but the point is, that no longer has to be the case. The capacity to work anywhere at any time means that for a great many jobs that involve working with a computer , as opposed to driving an ambulance, for example, can be done just as well on a more flexible schedule – one that matches an individual’s metabolic needs.

The fact that this cannot be applied to all jobs equally should not neutralize the idea that it can be applied in whole to some, and in part to many others. But such an opportunity has had to wait for the moment at which technology became fully location independent.

This will take some time for the shift toward a metabolically-prioritized workplace penetrates many decades of 9-to-5 conditioning. But for night owls and morning people alike, this offers the potential for better productivity and progress.

This is the transcript of the CoolTimeLife podcast episode 41 entitled "The challenges and bright future for those wired for the night." If you would like to listen to it, you can check it out at our podcast site here. If you would like to review other podcasts in this series, visit my podcast page at steveprentice.com/podcast