> This feels like an incredibly elaborate way to say that he's a morning person.
If you read the whole article there’s a section dedicated to evening people.
Regardless, the advice is about avoiding emotionally draining stimuli until you’ve accomplished what you want to do for the day.
You can wake up at noon and still do that. The root problem is that people are consuming large amounts of negative news and social media early in the day and draining their mental capacity before they even get started on what they want to do.
I see this all the time in, for example, junior hires. Some of them will tell me they’re exhausted or they have no time to do anything outside of their 40 hour workweek. When I ask some questions to figure out where their time is going every day, it always comes down to spending so much time on phones and watching Netflix that their time and energy are fully consumed before they have a chance at anything else.
The advice in the article is good and it’s not about being a morning person.
> If you read the whole article there’s a section dedicated to evening people.
It's a perfunctory mention of the exact kind morning people commonly throw out to superficially address an evening person's actual constraints.
The article's whole thesis is that after some point in the day your emotions will end up fried. An evening person can't simply flip the arrow of time to make it so that before that point in the day, their emotions have started off fried but then get unfried afterwards. Rather completely different approaches are needed.
The most important part of any meta thinking is to know thyself. I'm sure this article is thoroughly useful for a subset of people, but not me. It would be nice if authors were upfront about the constraints they are writing from, and especially if they didn't try to hand wave them away.
For myself, the news does not significantly affect my emotions more than a handful of times per year. I'm certainly not getting exposed to it or other goings-on through adversarial notifications. And my actual mobile pocket device generally lives by the door. Those are basic table stakes for my own existence.
I have small kids, so at the moment I'm a "whenever I have 5-10 quiet minutes" at a time person.
But I remember that I used to be an evening person. And what I remember is that in the evening things got quiet in my head. Yes, usually "emotional" things happened during the day, but after 8-9 PM I had a boost of clarity and could get some difficult tasks.
No matter what time you are getting up, I think this is suggesting that if there is something important for you to get done, it is better to get it done sooner than later. I am a complete night owl, but leaving the most important items to the end of the day has rarely been a winning plan for me.
> You can wake up at noon and still do that.
That's not necessarily true. If you're a morning person managing other people that are not morning people but insist on having daily meetings in the morning, you're an asshole. I find meetings early in the morning sadistic and way more draining than reading the news, but I'm not the type that gets emotional about the news while I will react negatively in an early meeting at the drop of a pin. It's not about needing coffee nor did I get up on the wrong side of the bed or whatever demeaning quip you want to offer. I'm not up to speed until later in the day, and forcing me to pretend I am is just rude. This is the biggest downside to WFH where everyone can live in whatever timezone so someone's afternoon meeting is my morning rather than just scheduling the meeting where everyone is on the same schedule. It's one of the few things about working in an office I can appreciate. Definitely not to be misread as a vote for RTO.
> If you're a morning person managing other people that are not morning people but insist on having daily meetings in the morning, you're an asshole.
This of course raises the question why forcing morning meetings on morning people is an asshole move, but forcing morning people to meet afternoon people in the afternoon is OK.
Can I suggest that maybe we all need to put on our big-boy/girl pants and accept that the world has more people than ourselves? And that this means we all need to compromise from time to time?
It is absolutely impossible to get any team efforts done in a world where everybody insists we all exclusively work in their own preferred style of work.
Because if you’re the manager, the time of your team is more important than your time is
If you're a morning person and you're scheduling meetings for the morning you're literally wasting your period of productivity.