Side Projects: Mornings vs Evenings

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If you’re anything like me, you’re trying to cram as much as you possibly can into your days. When I was in work (or the last two years of it at least), I had to make a lot of tough decisions – cutting out all activity that wasn’t taking me towards my goals. That meant that I had to decide what parts of my days were most valuable to me. I’ve discussed what I did with my lunch breaks, but one of the hardest decisions was to figure out whether I was going to use my mornings or evenings to do the majority of my business tasks.

For reference, I’ve been into early mornings since I was a teen, so any time after 5am is seen as a valid time to get up. I had to leave for work about 7:30am. In the evenings, I was back by 6:30pm, so let’s say I had between 7pm (after eating) to 11pm to work (a time scale which massively diminished once I had a baby).

Here’s what I found:

Mornings

When I said I didn’t mind early mornings, once an alarm started waking me up to tell me it was 5am, I started to question whether I was truly about this life.

Initially I was doing a workout first thing in the morning, but it became unsustainable very quickly. It wasn’t long before I had to keep pushing back my wake-up time until 5:45pm became my zone.

Really and truly, that only gave me a single hour to get anything done for my business. However, I made use of it. I spent that time doing actual, full-blown tasks, not just admin, and it gave me motivation to kick the day off right. I found that it would get my mind right to want to do a writing task on my commute into work, so I would feel like I had got loads done by the time I got to work.

Often enough, I’d get to work for about 8:30am, giving me half an hour to continue whatever I’d been doing in the morning. As long as scary emails weren’t facing me once I got to my desk, I got into a great rhythm in the mornings. I usually wouldn’t write anything else on the commute back if I’d already done one in the morning, as I needed a bit of a break and I’d already feel quick accomplished. 

The downside? Evenings.

After feeling like I’d done a lot, I wouldn’t have energy for the part of the day where I had the most free time. Your brain can only handle a certain amount of decisions per day, before it starts shunning any dilemmas that come its way. I wouldn’t be able to do all of that, then a full day of work, to then find energy to do any tasks that required actual thought. I would only be able to do the kind of basic admin that I could do on autopilot.

Evenings

On times when I decided I wasn’t going to make an effort to get a few things done in the morning, I had to make a conscious effort to save up all of my energy for the latter part of the day. I wouldn’t usually sleep in any longer and I would still definitely do a bit of autopilot admin before work, but it was going to be the evening when the real things were getting done.

Guess what? It’s really difficult to break out of habits. I favoured the morning-heavy routine and when I didn’t have that feeling of accomplishment first thing in the morning, I felt like I didn’t have it in me to get anything done for the day whatsoever. Evenings would end up in me finding admin to do, rather than attempting to tackle the big things on my task list, because a full day’s worth of work had taken it out of me.

There’s not really much more to say on the matter. For me, mornings won out by far, because I had very left to give by about 8pm. Even with all of that extra time, there was no way to motivate me to get anything done; it was all shifted out to the weekend (so long as I wasn’t already planning to do anything). 

What’s My Advice?

My advice is that you shouldn’t be advised by anyone else. It’s very personal and based on what your day-to-day life is like. I don’t know what commitments you have. If you’re someone that wants to make the most out of your days, you really have to figure out what works for you. Cut out all of the distractions so you have as much time as possible to get things done (but obviously have your fun too) and experiment. Mornings worked a lot better for me, but I know that many people get into their flow by staying up late.

I feel like it really helps to get something done as early on in the day as possible, so your head’s in the right mode to get other things ticked off your list. Over the course of the day you can keep that momentum going, rather than having to find it a few hours before you’re go to bed.

Once you find your zone, you’ll be a new person.