The 5am Club isn’t about waking up early. It’s about doing your deep work at a time when no one is going to interrupt you.
Its thesis is that deep work changes your life in great ways, and that deep work needs to be done when you’re fresh. So far so good.
Then it assumes that the only way to be fresh when no one will barge in on you is to start working when everyone else in your time zone is still unconscious. That’s so 20th century.
The Internet and the exponentially burgeoning remote work culture offers a new menu of options for consecrating hours for uninterrupted deep work at whatever time of the day you damn well please. Maybe you work with a team 9 time zones away and you’re basically uninterrupted all day long. Maybe your team is local and you silence all your notifications from your home work station during your creative hours. Maybe you work with clients all over the world and no one really knows when anyone is online anyway.
We have an unprecedented and growing degree of control over our work environments, and everyone has a different daily peak creativity period. The early morning hours are not inherently magical, and there’s no reason for anyone to force themselves into that box for productivity’s sake.
Personally, I love working at home from my computer. I’ve consistently noticed that if I spend the evening at home as well, I simply don’t disconnect enough, and that results in poor sleep and a subpar next day. On the other hand, going salsa dancing, which begins at 10pm, puts me back into my body, reactivates my intuition, and virtually guarantees the best sleep of my life. I wake up fresh and ready to create somewhere around 10am. My team is about 8 time zones behind me, and they appreciate that I can answer burning questions between cha chas for the bulk of their work day. Late morning is my personal time for shopping, exercise, and getting a little sun, and early afternoon is my deep work time. Just as transformative as the 5am Club, but with sunshine and a social life.
As the norm continues to converge on work on our own terms, in our own space, alternatives will become increasingly available and people will move toward an optimized deep work time that aligns with rather than precludes their other priority activities. The 5am Club will be left with the folx that were enthusiastic members by choice long before the book was ever drafted.
It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.