Individual preferences will vary on this, and biological predispositions make this sort of schedule a cake-walk for some and a near-impossibility for others.

What nudged me in this direction after a lifetime of being more of a night owl was the undeniable realization that I’m most alert, cognizant, and capable in the early hours of each day. Now, I cherish my mornings and the simple little first-thing routines that are enjoyable unto themselves, but which also give me what I need for the balance of my day.

The main downside of this sort of sleep-wake rhythm is its impact on one’s social life.

The distortion of that old saying about being an early riser is right: early to rise, early to bed, makes a person healthy but socially dead.

Building and maintaining a social life when you adhere to this kind of schedule is tricky. A surprising number of social norms are night owl-oriented, so you miss out on a lot of what your local community has to offer if you slip into bed at 8pm each night.

I’ve found that focusing on day-time communities helps; I even started a reading group, in part because all the other reading groups in my area typically meet at night.

It can also help to make semi-regular exceptions, knowing that your next-day rhythm will be disrupted. My twice-monthly D&D group often goes until 9 or 10pm, for instance, but the enjoyment I glean from that group is worth the tradeoff.

Different people have different energetic and mental rhythms, and it’s likely your perfect setup will look different from mine. You might come alive beginning at 10pm, whereas I’m essentially a potato at that point. Likewise, you might not be a fully functioning human at 5am, while I’m up and energized at that hour, excited to greet the day.

The goal is to find a rhythm that lines up with your natural predisposition, and then (to the best of your ability, at least) orient the things you can control around that biological bias.

There’ll be immovable objects, of course, and this process is more difficult the more people you have in your life and living in your household. But tweaking what can be tweaked and leaning into the groove of how your body and brain behave tends to bear valuable fruit. And the first step of that process is allowing yourself to acknowledge that your current setup might not be ideal for who you are and how you operate.

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We perform many labors because someone has to (and the responsibility somehow fell on our shoulders), not because we want to, or because they help us learn or grow.

Thus, we do the laundry, we juggle that spreadsheet, we attend yet another cookie-cutter meeting and in countless other ways expend our time and energy on things that are perhaps necessary, but not in any other way valuable or fulfilling.

I would argue that once flagged and mapped (so they can be reliably and beneficially automated), most of these responsibilities should be. In an ideal world, we humans would be spending all day painting and writing and making movies, and our technology would be folding the underwear and politely nodding their way through yet another PowerPoint about KPIs.

As we foist these responsibilities onto our agentic software and increasingly dextrous robots, though, we have to be really, truly, meticulously careful about what we give up in the process.

Some tasks, some responsibilities, some cumbersome efforts, are (as it turns out) psychologically vital to our health or continued development.

Maybe doing the laundry actually was important because of the role it played in breaking up our day, or as a quick little jolt of accomplishment that helped us power through the rest of the day.

Writing is often difficult, and even people like me who happily do it for a living don’t always find it enjoyable. But the process of writing is fulfilling. And writing allows us to extract our thoughts into an external medium, where they can then be assessed, reworked, and weighed in a manner that’s impossible when our cognition is limited to our skull-based wetware.

I could do away with the difficulty of writing, then, and by some measures that would be a productivity victory. It would certainly save me a lot of time.

But in doing so I’d be denying myself a process that, while at times tedious and draining, also makes me better. Not better because of the final written product, but because I invested the time and energy to make it.

Automation can be a wonderful boon when applied thoughtfully, but it should also be approached with care, lest we accidentally unload the burdens that strengthen us, leaving only the low-effort, superficially enjoyable fluff.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.