HACKER Q&A
📣 mese848

What time of the day are you the most productive?


"Do the most important thing first thing in the morning and you'll never have an unproductive day," the advice goes.

But everyone has different prime hours (a great HN comment on why we all have an energy problem, not a time problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16074674).

What time of the day are you the most productive? Would love to hear your thoughts on how much you guys "actively" manage your prime times (and control your daily productivity). Working on a http://mailbrew.com feature that highlights managing "the ideal time of the day" people would "consciously" allow distractions but not sure whether enough people are aware of peak time management concept, never mind using it to receive daily digests. So hesitant whether to position such a concept a unique selling feature.


  👤 enonevets Accepted Answer ✓
Best time: late afternoon, early evening.

Second best time: late night.

I've tried for years to adjust to a morning schedule, waking up earlier, etc... It was never as productive and I'm always left feeling tired. Adjusting to sleeping earlier and getting up earlier worked for awhile but wasn't as productive as simply working at the above optimal times for me.


👤 KarimDaghari
This is the first time I hear of this, still I’ll try to answer. I can’t really give a specific time frame but it’s mostly during “quiet” hours (so, either early morning or late at night)

👤 topicseed
If I wake up early, at around 5am or 6am, then my morning is ultra productive.

If I wake up at 8am, my morning is subpar and I will perform best from mid-afternoon to late evening.


👤 frankdilo
Early morning, after a good night sleep, especially when I have an empty calendar.

In the afternoon I experience the usual energy slump.


👤 welder
My guess is morning like your quote, but let's use the WakaTime anonymous user data set to find out.