Morningness, eveningness

Sun and moonThe finding is that “people whose performance peaks in the morning are better positioned for career success,” according to a recent Harvard Business Review article called The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm*. The authors refer to morningness and eveningness, which seems kind of, well, academic. Otoh, it IS Harvard University.

The ideas that follow are general tendencies found in studies of large groups of people. It doesn’t mean that every morning person is optimistic, nor that every evening person is extroverted.

In general, then, Evening People tend to:

  • be smarter
  • be more creative
  • have a good sense of humour
  • be more outgoing
  • like to sleep in whenever possible

Morning People tend to:

  • be more conscientious
  • anticipate problems and attempt to minimise them
  • get better grades in school, which leads to better universities, which lead to better business opportunities
  • be proactive, which is linked to better job performance, more career success, and higher wages

One obvious difference between a Morning Person and an Evening Person is that the Morning Person tends to get up at the same time on non-workdays as they do on workdays. They would rise at, say, 6am on Saturday and Sunday as well as on workdays. The Evening Person will tend to sleep in on non-workdays, usually by about 2 hours. If he usually rises at 6 on weekdays, he’ll sleep in until 8am (or later) on weekends.

Lots of people report they’d like to change themselves to be more of a Morning Person, maybe because it seems the the business world is set up to expect morning productivity. For example, how many full-time positions to you know of where you could work from, say, 12 noon to 9pm?

Much of the tendency toward morningness or eveningness is changeable, but only to a certain degree. It tends to be about 50% genetic, and it seems that the tendency is to become more of a Morning Person as one gets older. But the authors aren’t very encouraging about changing your tendency. They hold some hope that organisations will start to treat this morningness and eveningness as the next diversity element, and create work environments where both types will flourish.

*This article is in the July-August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, HBR reprint F1007E.

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