“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Was Benjamin Franklin really onto something when he penned those words? Or was he just spouting rhymey moralistic fluff?

“Morningness” and “Eveningness” are real phenomena that scientists have documented. Some people tend toward one, some toward the other. But that’s about all that most people can agree on. It’s become a surprisingly angsty topic.

Here’s a quick experiment:

Head to Google and type in “Morning person.” Immediately you’ll get a pile of links with titles on “how to become a morning person.”

Now try the same exercise with “Night person.”  Instead, you’ll get a bunch of results talking about the differences between morning people and night people. Maybe you’ll get one article titled something like, “Is it okay to be a night owl?”

The implication is clear:

Our culture believes that it’s better to be a morning person.

Why?

Conventional wisdom insists that morning people rule the world. Supposedly, they get more done and are better at becoming wealthy and successful while night people are stereotyped as disorganized free spirits who stay up late with their video games.

Consider too the fact that most jobs require their employees to show up to work in the early morning – making it easier for those who naturally do so. You could argue it’s turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy that’s left plenty of owls with their feathers ruffled.

So what’s actually going on here?

What the Science Says

Many, many scientists and scholars have researched and written articles about “owls” (night people) and “larks” (morning people). None that I’ve found have any definitive proof that it’s better in all cases to be a lark (morning person) – the conclusion across the board is that larks and owls are just different.

Here’s what experts feel pretty comfortable saying:

• Morningness and Eveningness are genetic to some point
• About half of people are either owls or larks, and the other half are on a spectrum in between
• Younger adults tend to be owls and older adults tend to be larks (hormones)
• Owls tend to be more creative, humorous and novelty-seeking
• Larks tend to be more focused, self-directed, and conscientious
• Owls tend towards melancholy; larks tend to be more positive and cheerful

You may be wondering at this point:

“But how much is causation and how much is correlation? And if genetics are involved, is there any point in trying to change ourselves?”

Scientists, for now, aren’t sure (about the first point, that is).

Is Sir Richard Branson a billionaire because he wakes up every morning at 5:45 like clockwork, even when he’s vacationing on his private island? Or does he wake up early because he’s a driven, motivated person, manifested by the fact that he’s a billionaire?

You see how this can quickly become an existential discussion:

“If I force myself to wake up every day at 5:45 and drink green smoothies, will I morph into a more energetic, wealthier, happier person? Or do my genes and my past behaviors forever doom me to mediocrity?”

I think there’s a more practical way to look at it.

Routine Matters Most

There’s a good argument to be made that Morningness and Eveningness is a red herring.

Yes, there is research that shows a correlation (not causation) between being an early riser and getting more done in your day. There’s a reason we hear aphorisms about the early bird getting the worm instead of the night owl catching the mouse.

What matters more than what time you wake up is having a predictable time every day (or night) when you can be productive.

On the other hand, so-called successful people have sleep schedules that are all over the place. Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s cofounder, used to sleep in till 10 a.m. (now that he’s a dad he wakes up much earlier). Plenty of A-list actors wake up early on weekdays but spend the weekends snoozing. Winston Churchill woke up around 7:30 a.m. but didn’t get out of bed till noon.

What matters more than what time you wake up is having a predictable time every day (or night) when you can be productive.

And unlike research on larks versus owls, there is plenty of evidence that a predictable routine leads to success at whatever it is you care most about in life.

Here’s a fun fact about (actual) owls: the reason they hunt at night is because there’s less competition from other birds. Just as early mornings are a quiet time of day that allows some people to focus and get things done, quiet evenings are a great time for other people to do their best work.

It comes down to this:

1)      What time of day (or night) are you best able to think and focus?

2)      What time of day (or night) is it easiest for you to work on something without being interrupted or distracted?

Whichever area of that Venn Diagram you find overlaps, consider making that your sacred time to work on the things that matter most in life to you. Forget the supposed fact that 64% of CEOs in the US wake up at 6 a.m. or earlier and focus on what works for you.

It’s easy to fixate on a simple correlation without looking closer at the context. It’s also easy to cherry-pick when we make billionaires and other extreme achievers our standard.

Too often, we make assumptions about what we want (money, power, approval) without thinking about context. Before we think about Morningness and Eveningness, we might first consider what kind of person we are, and what we actually want out of life.

Get Consistent Sleep

On April 6, 2007, during the wee hours of the morning, Arianna Huffington (founder of HuffPo) fell asleep in her office. When she woke up, she was so disoriented she hit her head on the corner of her desk.

Huffington had been running on fumes for years. She had assumed she could get more done by staying up late but also waking up early. The result was a broken cheekbone, a cut on her face, a nasty black eye, and blood on her desk. You could say it was, quite literally, her wake-up call.

Today, Huffington is a huge sleep advocate (she’s even written a book called The Sleep Revolution). She goes to bed every night by 11ish and wakes up around 7ish – she’s definitely not a night owl, but neither is she the poster child for a hyper-vigilant “morning person.”

Some people have the rare gift (or curse) of overachievers like Elon Musk and do okay-ish with five hours of sleep. Supposedly. For the rest of us, though, anything less than 7 or 8 over an extended period will probably destroy our immune systems and make us useless for doing anything meaningful.

It’s not profound.

It’s not sexy.

But sleep matters. Ultimately, we’ll probably feel our best and do our best work if we go to bed around the same time every night and wake up at around the same time every morning.

This is true whether we are larks or owls. Whether we are the steady, focused type or the whimsical creative type. ¹

The inner child in me hates this incontrovertible truth, but I’ve learned to accept it.

For years I felt doomed to failure because I wasn’t a “morning person.” I was all but blinded to the real problem: inconsistency. I’d wake up early on days I had morning obligations (work, school, or social), and slept in late on days that I didn’t. There was no routine, no predictability, and my energy levels and moods varied from one day to the next. Talk about a recipe for getting nowhere.

These days, I have a (mostly) consistent schedule. I wake up at around 6:30 a.m. because that’s when my dog wakes up. We go outside on a short walk and then we come home and I start my day. I try to go to bed by 10:30 p.m. because I don’t want to feel like death warmed over the next day.

And really, that’s all there is to it.

I’m technically a morning person now, not by choice, but by circumstance – it works for me because there’s consistency.

What matters most in the end is not how early or late you got up, or even how long you stayed in bed, but what you were able to accomplish. I doubt even Ben Franklin would argue with the soundness of that.

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1. A cursory study of some of the most famous artists and writers suggests this is true. While many of them lived eccentric lives, for the most part, they followed a schedule and woke up at the same time every day.