I HaveThisPattern. I am naturally a night person, and go to live music shows throughout the week, and so I usually come in later, though I try to make it before noon. This does not affect anyone else's work, and I always put in at least 8 hours, but I still get attitude. My old boss gave me a reprimand for coming in in the afternoon after working 14 hours the night before. My new boss is a great guy but still resorts to a sarcastic "good morning" whenever I roll in after 12.
- Take some responsibility for your own decisions. If you choose to come into work after 12:00, accept the consequences. The comment about your schedule not affecting other people is highly questionable. If you are not available for more than half the day, someone else is taking on tasks during that time that could be assigned to you. If your schedule does not affect other people's work, it is probably because your boss is only giving you tasks that require minimal contact with your coworkers. Yes, you can choose to come in whenever you please, but do not be surprised if the rest of the world is not too happy about adjusting to your personal schedule.
And here's what drives the tyranny: the hidden assumption that schedules preferring 9-to-5 type hours are normal, and schedules that focus later on in the day are
personal. I wonder if there really are a majority of morning people, and if there are, if that's naturally the case or only happens because some people insist on it.
- If your employer can accommodate your hours, great! If not, change your hours or ChangeYourOrganization. Many employers do accommodate reasonable work hours--lots of folks at my employer do come in around 11 or noon (and stay until 9:00 or later). OTOH, I suspect my employer would be far less willing to accommodate an employee who wished to do programming on the graveyard shift--too many activities require FaceTime? with CowOrkers. At any rate, nothing requires employers to accommodate each and everyone's schedule.
- There's no need to get so testy (or verbose) about it. The point is that it's unnecessary, besides a little unfair, to require everyone to conform to 9-to-5. Flexibility should be the watchword.
- There is no "hidden assumption that schedules preferring 9-to-5 type hours are normal." Preference has nothing to do with it. The reality is for any work place there will be a distribution of arrival times. One can easily plot them on a piece of graph paper and determine what is normal and what falls outside of normal. The original poster even acknowledges that his arrival time outside of normal ("I usually come in later"). Normality is neither assumed nor preferred; it is reality. The poster starts off denying responsibility for his arrival time, "I am naturally a night person" as if arriving to work midway through the day is some type of genetic handicap beyond his control. The logic is fairly simple. There are normal arrival times established by the working group. The poster is willfully rejecting these normal arrival times. The poster, however, seems to believe that although he can reject the values of the group, the group must accept his values. If one chooses to stand apart, expect to be excluded.
- I guess the "verbose" jab had no effect. Have you considered you could be mixing up cause and effect? The current distribution could be the result of the TyrannyOfTheMorningPeople. Anyway some people are naturally night people. It thought everyone knew that. To punish someone for that reason (schedule) and not a job-related reason is wrong.
The
TyrannyOfTheMorningPeople equals scheduling meetings (especially daily scrums) at 9 (or 8!). There's no way I'm going to make that. If you're having so many meetings you can't fit them into the overlap between MorningPeople
? and EveningPeople
?, you have bigger problems than my sleep schedule. (Related anecdote: a startup chose CoreHours
? of noon-4 (because if you *do* look at the news-posting-time spread, rather than arrival times which are traffic related, noon is when the engineers started getting things done anyway.) The secondary benefit of never having more than 4 hours/day of meetings (especially with non-engineers) was rather explicitly noted...)
My boss is^H^H^H was a morning person for reasons of appearance. He didn't want to be there any more than the rest of us, but two tiers of tyrants above him watched that sort of thing. He was also there into the evening. He'd arrive an hour before the rest of us, leave an hour after we did. It didn't help. He was laid off three weeks ago as part of a political^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H cost-cutting move. No work schedules suffered.
- What are the strings of '^H's being used for?
- ASCII joke. On some old terminals, a delete (or backspace) character comes out as ^H. It's often used on UseNet for HaHaOnlySerious dramatic effect, much as <strike> gets used in LiveJournal comments.
- Yes, overstrike is not a supported wiki mark up.
My
new boss is also a morning person, but for a very different reason. He arrives an hour ahead of the rest of us and
leaves an hour ahead of us. He beats the traffic both ways (30-mile commute -- he lives near me) and gets to have his personal/family time in the evening. He doesn't enjoy getting in early, he does it because it gets him out early.
I strive to follow his example, but it means getting up an entire hour earlier, and I just haven't been able to overcome the inertia. -- GarryHamilton
My mother is a morning person... who has the habit of calling us at 8am on weekends, when my wife and I are still in bed. "What? You mean you're still in bed? Tsk tsk tsk". LatherRinseRepeat.
But try calling her at 11 PM, after she's gone to bed and we're still up, and a TurdFanCollision occurs.... (Of course, my mother-in-law lives in Hong Kong, and frequently forgets about the 16-hour time difference, 15 hours when the US is in DaylightSavingsTime?)
There has long been a CulturalAssumption that morning people are industrious whereas evening people are lazy--even when both sets get the same amount of sleep in a 24-hour period. (It might be a fallout from the belief that daylight hours are "work" time and evening hours are "party" time, and a suspicion that the evening person must be avoiding work, but going out and partying until the wee hours of the morning.
Try being night-person parents of a morning-person two-year-old.
Get out of bed, look for two-year-old, clean up mess, wake up. LatherRinseRepeat.
See TyrannyOfTheNightPeople
Tyranny Of The Morning People