You Don’t Need More Discipline, You Need Better Timing: Mastering Your Chronotype for Real Results

Multitasking is not a thing.

This “skill” should be removed from your resume almost immediately and replaced with “task switcher,” because that’s what it actually is. Research from UC Irvine found that even a brief interruption, such as checking email mid-task, can require an average of 23 minutes before returning to the original task. This can result in about 40% less productivity throughout one’s workday.

Additionally, we live in a world that tells us that in order to be productive, we must do it within a 9-to-5 window, yet many of us will struggle to keep up. It doesn’t help that books, blogs, podcasts, and wellness influencers often insist that successful people wake up at 5 a.m. and finish their work before the rest of the world even gets out of bed.

While that is great for them, this advice leaves many of us wondering, “why can’t I do that?”

While this may not seem like a health concern on the surface, constantly working against our natural rhythms creates unnecessary stress. Over time, that stress can contribute to sleep disturbances, chronic fatigue, body pain, and other health concerns.

In practice, I’ve found that many high-performing individuals spend years trying to become morning people when the real issue isn’t discipline, it’s timing.

The 24-Hour Cycle vs. Your Daily Cycle

Most people are familiar with the circadian rhythm, the roughly 24-hour biological clock influenced by light exposure, sleep timing, activity levels, and meals. The chronotype, however, is more individual. It is the reason some of us wake before our alarms and find ourselves being more productive at times that might not be productive for others.

Being able to identify your individual chronotype helps to target the pockets of time that are going to be the most productive and least painful. Understandably, being able to adjust one’s work schedule may not seem possible.

Those who are employed by a bigger organization, consider this an opportunity to explore other avenues of productivity. And for those who are self-employed, consider this a qualifier to either make a new hire or adjust the work schedule accordingly.

Defining your chronotype to maximize productivity

For simplicity, most chronotypes fall into four categories: the lark, the bear, the wolf, and the owl.

You are likely a lark if you naturally rise (without an alarm) before or by 6AM and find yourself feeling the most productive in the 2-3 hours following waking. You may find yourself arriving at work only to realize your best ideas showed up hours ago.

On the flipside, you’re likely an owl if you find your creative flare sparks after dark, almost feeling like a “second wind.” You tend to stay up after the rest of the house goes to sleep, to which you have historically attributed as being the only time to accomplish work.

For all others, the bear and wolf fall somewhere between the two extremes. Bears tend to align closely with the traditional workday, while wolves often experience a later peak in energy and creativity. In fact, most people identify with one of these two middle-ground chronotypes.

Regardless of yours, your chronotype can’t defy physiology

After identifying your individual chronotype, it is time to make use of this information. Whether you’re a lark or an owl, the same rules apply, plan ahead.

1. If you don’t already, make a list of your daily tasks before bed. Not only will it help you organize the following day, but getting those thoughts out of your head may also improve sleep.
2. Use this list to categorize which ones require the most attention and which can be done almost mindlessly; if you’re a color-coded person, grab your highlighters!
3. The tasks that require the most attention to detail should be scheduled during your most productive time; for those larks, that would be earlier in the morning/day and for the owls, later in the evening/day.
4. Whether you’re self-employed or an employee, you can reserve the time during working hours to accomplish those tasks that don’t require as much attention, so you’ll spend less time fighting the resistance.

It is important to remember that your chronotype cannot override human physiology. For example, being most productive from midnight to 2 a.m. can still pose negative health impacts. Rather, being naturally productive at 7 p.m. is very different from trying to force productivity at 7 a.m.

Of course, when we’re in our late teens and early twenties, many of us find ourselves getting our best work done in the later hours. Before long, though, this created its own set of challenges.

We’re now sleeping later, missing proper melatonin production that helps to dictate how restorative our sleep is, and then pushing our waking time further into the morning. When this happens for years, we may conflate our chronotype with that of the evening type, when really, we’re just socially jetlagged and playing a game of catch-up.

The goal isn’t to force yourself into another person’s productivity framework, or even into a 9-5 that seems challenging, but rather identifying your unique rhythms. Once done, we are no longer fighting two battles: the one with ourselves trying to make a routine work that was never truly ours and the other, the actual work that must be done.