Cult of the 8:59 a.m. Professional

I proudly wake up one minute before starting my remote work job. There are thousands like me, and we don’t care what you think.

- JANE THIER

ON DAYS I DON'T go into the office, my alarm goes off at 8:59 a.m. I'm up within 30 seconds and on Slack, albeit horizontally, opening emails and getting oriented for my workday, which formally starts at nine. A lull in the action comes maybe 30 minutes later, so I'll roll out of bed, brush my teeth, and begin resembling a civilized person.

Arguably it's an improvement. At my last job, my alarm went off nine minutes before a daily 9:30 a.m. on-camera brainstorm that required me to prepare notes. A friend recently balked at my tendency to sleep until minutes before the workday kicks off, shaken by the fact that the first things my brain registers each morning are an influx of business chatter and a cacophony of Slack pings.

“You don’t sit up first, or look out the window?” she asked, looking slightly afraid of me.

Nope! I want every last millisecond of sleep I can get, and there is no part of a blissful, sun-drenched morning routine that I’d put before an extra 40 minutes of my head on the pillow. It may sound unprofessional, but if youre not wired to bea morning person, there’s nothing to gain by trying to fight nature.

Our proclivities vary widely as humans, despite the fact that we all share a 24-hour sleep-wake cycle, says Chris Barnes, a management professor at the University of Washington who studies the relationship between sleep and work. Nonetheless, the world is made for the morning larks, leaving the night owls to play an endless game of catch-up.

“We think of being a night owl] as just a preference, but it’s biological, partly coded in our genetics,” Barnes says. You can work against it, but youre fighting uphill, and Mother Nature tends to win that.”